Paysail: Revolutionizing Cross-Border Payments with Crypto

Paysail: Revolutionizing Cross-Border Payments with Crypto

Cross-border payments, essential for handling business costs like materials and contract services, often face delays and high fees due to reliance on traditional banking systems. These transactions, which account for a global market of $130 trillion, typically take two to five days to complete.

Enter Paysail, a startup that promises to transform this process.

Using stablecoins—cryptocurrencies pegged to commodities or fiat currencies to maintain price stability—Paysail offers a platform that completes cross-border payments in under five seconds. The company also significantly reduces transaction fees by eliminating intermediaries.

“While payments between countries like the U.S. and Canada have become faster and cheaper, transactions to other regions, such as parts of Africa, remain slow and expensive,” explained co-founder Nicole Alonso.

Paysail leverages the CUSD stablecoin, which is pegged to the U.S. dollar, for its current operations and plans to include stablecoins tied to other currencies in the future. Unlike traditional systems that charge high fees for currency exchanges and third-party processing, Paysail’s blockchain-based transactions require only a minimal “gas fee,” typically less than one-tenth of a cent.To monetize, Paysail is considering a transaction fee of around 0.9%, a rate that co-founders Nicole Alonso and Liam Brennan-Burke believe will be more competitive than traditional payment providers.

Backing and Vision

Paysail recently raised $4 million in seed funding, led by Uncork Capital and supported by Tribe Capital, Pear VC, Mischief Capital, and notable angel investors. The funding will enable the company to grow its engineering team, hire legal experts, and eventually build a sales team.Initially targeting crypto-native businesses, Paysail aims to expand its offerings to non-crypto users. For those unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies, the platform generates non-custodial wallets through third-party providers, with plans to integrate this capability in-house in the future.Paysail also envisions offering additional features, such as earning yields on stablecoin holdings. This could be particularly useful in countries like Nigeria, where local currencies often face devaluation, providing businesses with a more stable option to store and transfer value.“Our goal is to make cryptocurrency payments accessible and intuitive for businesses, regardless of their prior experience with crypto,” said Brennan-Burke.

With its innovative approach to simplifying and expediting payments, Paysail is poised to address critical financial challenges for businesses globally, opening up new opportunities in cross-border commerce.

 

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