Building Financial Freedom
YapBay is a Web3 P2P remittances network that enables remittance senders to chain together P2P crypto trades over stablecoin rails, bypassing TradFi limits, to disrupt the legacy remittances industry. Censorship-resistant and KYC-free, YapBay fosters financial inclusion for the world's 2 billion unbanked and underbanked.
Our Mission
Our mission is to facilitate access to cryptocurrency for people across the globe, without the need for onerous KYC procedures or the arbitrary limits and opaque reserve status of centralized exchanges.
We are building a peer-to-peer crypto exchange that provides anyone, anywhere with uncensorable, KYC-free, transparent and open-source fiat on-ramps and off-ramps.
- Financial Inclusion
- Affordable Remittances
- Censorship Resistance
- Crisis Resilience
- Economic Empowerment
The Problem
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.
Our Solution
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".
Our Impact
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.
Unique Value
YapBay has a few characteristics that set it apart from other remittance solutions in the market.
- Focus on sub-$200 remittances
- Smart-contract-based
- Innovative, trustless sequential escrow
- No protocol-level KYC/AML
- Lower fees and faster than TradFi
- Acceptance of users who lack sufficient formal identification
- Combo remittances
- Based on 4 years of Latam fieldwork
- We see the developing world as a business opportunity, not a charity
Our Progress
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 primarily on Celo L2. We also have an unfinished MVP in Rust on Solana devnet. For now, we've shelved plans to deploy on Sui. Ideally, we will identify the single optimal chain for YapBay and focus exclusively on that.
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, particular with the combo remittances network we set up across Venezuela. This 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.
Our Accountability
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.
All of our code is, and will remain, open-source under the MIT license. 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.
Our Vision
We envision a world of universal prosperity, where every human being has the opportunity to realize their potential. A world where everyone, everywhere, enjoys monetary freedom and can use and create money as they see fit, trading it on a voluntary basis across borders, from anywhere to anywhere and from anyone to anyone. We strive for a world of crypto mass adoption, where everyone has access to prosperity and no one is cut out of the system or left behind.
Our Fees
Currently, we charge zero YapBay fees. All trades are free of YapBay fees. Your costs are determined by Celo L2 chain transaction/gas fees and whatever exchange rate the offer creator has set.
There is a 5% bond that both parties must post to create or contest a dispute. And the losing party forfeits this bond. However, this is not a fee per se, but rather a security deposit to ensure both parties are committed to the dispute.
With that said, we may add a YapBay fee of up to 1% on trades and remittances in the future in order to grow more quickly. Any fee on combo remittances would likely be higher as more work is involved in combo remittances.
Why Fees Matter
YapBay is a public good built for the global south, but keeping it running takes resources. Fees may be needed in the future to fund ongoing development, scaling and new features. We may also find it helpful to fund the development of partners or self-developed dapps that build use cases on top of YapBay.
Fees Done Right: A Public Good Precedent
Fees don’t mean we’re less open or accessible—they’re a proven way to sustain decentralized systems. Look at Uniswap: it charges trading fees to support its platform while remaining a cornerstone of DeFi.
YapBay’s fees would work the same way—sustaining us so we can keep remittances fast, low-cost and KYC-free for all.
How YapBay Fees Break Down
If/when we implement a YapBay fee, we will split the proceeds evenly:
- 50% to the Referral Program: Rewards users who grow our community by bringing in new remittance senders and traders.
- 50% to the Community Treasury: Funds projects that level up YapBay, chosen by token holders.
Community Treasury: Token Holders Call the Shots
Token holders would vote on how treasury funds are spent.
- New features for cheaper, faster, more accessible remittances.
- Tools and programs to onboard more users in places like Nigeria and Venezuela.
- Seed funding for partners or self-developed dapps that build use cases on top of YapBay.
- Support for YapBay’s growth and development.
More tokens, more say—simple as that. And it's likely that, if we do a token, that tokens will be rewarded based on your trade and referral activity.
There would likely be a token allocation for the core team. We will endeavor NOT to hold a token sale but to distribute tokens based solely on merit. However, a token sale is a possibility if public goods funding, grants, fee revenue, etc. proves insufficient to fund growth.
Fees Build Impact, Not Profits
We’re not here to cash out. Every fee gets reinvested to cut remittance costs, boost crisis resilience and unlock capital for the global south. It’s about empowering you—senders, receivers, traders, onboarders, educators and builders—with a system that’s affordable, transparent, scalable and unstoppable.
Our Team
YapBay is built by these awesome individuals. Seeking visionary builders to join us! Please reach out, share your skillset, your ideas and interests. Let's see if we can find a fit.
George Donnelly
CTO | Founder
Our Acknowledgments
- Gitcoin Grants 20 (GG20)
- Backdrop Build Hackathon v3
- The BCH community, most notably Mike Komaransky & Georg Engelmann
- The Dash DAO
- Photo by Paulo Felipe Assis on Unsplash