Emigro
Pay without borders
About
The problem it solves There are more than 100 million digital nomads traveling internationally, typically ~30 year old American and European high-income professional men, that are staying beyond the normal one to two weeks, but not as long as becoming official residents. They have to adapt to new currencies as they cross borders by exchanging cash, which is expensive and unsafe. Credit cards are useful in many circumstances, but acceptance is lower away from tourist areas and often the local payment method is preferred due to the lower fees paid by the vendor. This problem is growing as more countries kill cash and introduce real-time payment systems that require the payer to have a local tax ID, while this group of nomads also grows and spends more time internationally. Emigro is the borderless finance app for nomads - instant, card-less cross-border retail payments using stablecoins on Base, currently with USDC / EURC / BRZ supported. No need to get foreign currency or worry about credit card acceptance. Pay at the point-of-sale directly from the wallet with the best local payment systems, such as Pix in Brazil and Mercado Pago in Argentina, without requiring a local tax ID. Emigro uses fiat-pegged stablecoins for 24/7/365 access to major currencies, and instant local fiat payouts for travel expenses to any person or business, without the payee requiring to use Emigro. We're riding the trends of cashless payments, digital wallets, stablecoin payments (especially for cross-border), instant local payment methods, and the explosion of digital nomads. The introduction of Pix and other instant payment systems has shown that consumers and businesses will change their behavior very quickly for a better option. However, the last-mile payment problem is still not solved for international nomads, even by the big incumbents. Revolut and Wise have multi-currency apps and also Visa or Mastercard offerings. PayPal is more focused on the cross-border payment app, but has also issued a stablecoin that Emigro will be able to support. None of them are yet connected to local instant payment methods such as Pix. Pix is growing so fast and is taking market share away from card payments that other countries are copying this model, such as the upcoming Bre-B in Colombia. Peer-to-peer crypto payment apps such as Sling, Blaze, and FlipCash all have great UX but don’t have the ability to make local fiat retail payments directly. They rely on both parties having the app and an account. Emigro solves this through local BaaS partnerships that enable the payment recipient to use their own bank app or point-of-sale system. They don’t need any knowledge of blockchain or even that the payer is using a crypto app such as Emigro. Actually, our payouts also preserve the privacy of the users as the payee doesn't receive any wallet details. This is more similar to credit card payments, but with universal acceptance. Beyond nomads, there are several markets that the product can be quickly adapted to, although there is more competition. Adding a credit card that draws from the stablecoin balance can enable digital payments for all travelers in all situations - we'd like to get a Rain partnership soon. Emigro uses Coinbase onramp for accesses 150+ countries and 60+ currencies, covering all the popular remittance pathways. With real bank accounts in popular remote work countries, workers can get paid directly into an overseas bank account and control sending the funds home with Emigro. In Brazil, we also support cash withdrawals for those that still like to use cash in some some circumstances. Emigro is choosing the best parts of the Coinbase Developer Platform and Circle Wallets to build a robust cross-border payment solution for the EVM ecosystem. Smart Contract Address(es) Onchain Agents Emigro Smartcontracts [Base] Smartcontract (Main): 0x9f96D5fD50D2c2118328DB91e06A01C2bbC68296 Smartcontract Implementation: 0x24f861DE1eEF726F0D31fB03EB004b5042dAc2e9 Intermediary wallet (Adm swaps): 0xfE5260CF247144F566bBD895bf3010AD0898ffC9 Receiver (Walllet Transfero): 0x2ae1c2322344a8240B472147c831B5329486492A smartcontract admin wallet: 0xbce06AB810b97f03957B77Bbf840908e9D6F97af Swap Protocol [Base] Swap Main Contract: 0x6b0e33f464dD297cf997DfA96D694aFC153e7F6F Swap Proxy Implementation: 0xbFdbBf79411DB89e2872DE82F6a8B2E0674A9125 UniswapV2Adapter: 0x1b9042f6e862E20bb653f5C1EAd8AB679eE73FAB UniswapV3Adapter: 0x4fBAA929d8eB386fABd1144c88F2Fd63A39379EA AerodromeAdapter: 0x1a9b2b13e4d70c78406C55A6aa27c6bd9B962470 AerodromeSlipstreamAdapter: 0xf536887fD203fD9780d95EaAA66B742aaA94f1ae Other Onchain Proof We're launching right at this moment and are on-boarding our first customers. Demo video here: https://youtube.com/shorts/FdpqBFFnTfA?feature=share
How it's made
Challenges we ran into To build the swap protocol and adapt it to smart wallets was difficult because the majority of aggregators are made for non-custodial wallets and handle they the signatures differently. So a smart wallet flow is used, rather than using an offchain server and the swap process is done onchain without a middle agent. With the CDP onramp incorporated in-app it's obvious that this flow is optimized for US customers to buy USDC. A difficulty is encountered when the buyer doesn't have USD as their currency and the onramp throws a currency mismatch error that breaks the ramp flow. The desired amount of USDC to buy must be entered again to generate the quote in the local currency and continue with the purchase.