Building Financial Freedom

Expensive Fees: Sub-$200 remittances face high fixed fees, disproportionately affecting smaller transfers to regions like Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Some corridors even face exorbitant fees.

Economic Barriers: These fees hinder families from accessing basic needs, stifling economic growth and participation in their home countries.

Opportunity Limitation: High fees block billions of potential capital flow, preventing economic empowerment, effective capital formation and innovation in developing regions.

ID Exclusion: Over 1 billion lack formal IDs, locking them out of secure global finance and forcing reliance on costly informal channels.

Crisis Fragility: Power outages and unreliable networks cripple remittance access during emergencies, leaving families stranded or at the mercy of predatory providers.

Global Inequality: At 6.2%, remittance costs in 2023 remain far above the World Bank’s 3% target, highlighting a pressing need for change.

Trapped Capital: TradFi systems block $3.3B+ in potential annual capital flow to Africa alone, stifling entrepreneurship and poverty reduction efforts.

YapBay is a LocalBitcoins where remittance senders chain together 2 peer-to-peer trade offers into 1 fiat-in, fiat-out remittance transaction. Behind the scenes, P2P traders use stablecoins as a fast, hassle-free and low-cost transport layer. Remittance senders and receivers use their preferred fiat currencies and avoid any need for immediate onboarding, technical knowledge or exposure to volatility.

Remittance senders can also buy basic necessities, such as groceries and medicines, from merchants that are local to their remittance recipients. Often, merchants can deliver these products to the recipients' homes. We call these "combo remittances".

YapBay has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of remittances for millions of people in developing countries, enabling them to send and receive more money to support their families and communities. By driving the adoption of cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange, the project also contributes to the broader goal of financial inclusion and economic empowerment.

YapBay addresses the clear need for more accessible, affordable and efficient remittance services in the global financial ecosystem. By leveraging open-source technologies and decentralized infrastructure, YapBay aims to fill the gap in serving the world's unbanked and underbanked population, who are currently underserved by traditional remittance providers due to high fees, limited access and slow transactions.

YapBay's impact can extend beyond the direct remittance market. By driving the adoption of cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange and empowering individuals to participate in the global economy on their own terms, YapBay can help unlock trillions of dollars in pent-up capital and stimulate economic growth in underserved regions.

YapBay is at a pre-seed stage and the development of an MVP should be complete before the end of Q2 2025. We're currently building on EVM, Solana and Sui.

From 2018 to 2021, I and my teams performed extensive fieldwork in Latin America educating new crypto users and learning what they want. We did a remittances pilot between Madrid and Caracas in 2019, which was quite popular among Venezuelans in Spain. The project benefits from the contact information of about 10,000 people onboarded to crypto during our fieldwork.

We're currently building new communities, with a particular focus on Nigeria and Venezuela.

YapBay ideally aims to sustain itself as a public good in order to better serve our vision. Towards that end, we participate in public goods funding programs and the accountability that naturally accompanies them.

• Giveth
• Gitcoin Builder
• Karma GAP

All of our code is, and will remain, open-source. Further, we aim to be community-led and community-governed in order to be fully responsive to the needs of our userbase. Here is a list of code repositories.

• yapbay (primary repo)
• yapbay-contracts-sui
• yapbay-www (this website)
• yapbay-contracts (gen1 Solidity, re-dev in progress)
• yapbay-litepaper (update coming soon)