Arnold Lee

I predict there will be 100s of stablecoin APIs this time next year — “on/off-ramp to X countries, Y currencies, Z chains, we’ll handle the compliance, better cross-border payments, one API etc.”

Now that @Stablecoin has paved the way, temptation of memetic desire too strong.

🇰🇿 Kazakhstan is a hidden giant.

Excited to publicly announce our partnership with one of the few, if not only, publicly listed Korean companies, (Aroot) that is simultaneously licensed in Korea as a payment gateway (PG) & in Kazakhstan as a stablecoin issuer partnered with custodian Alatau City Bank to support various cross-border trade use-cases.

Central Asia is the original Silk Road that connected East Asia with the Mediterranean, and supported the heart of ancient and medieval cross-border trade. Given the prominence of ethnic Koreans who still reside in the corridor (Koryoin) and the increasing criticality of minerals, data centers, and other key AI supply chains constraints that Kazakhstan is uniquely posed to service, we are thrilled to be supporting Aroot as a locally licensed partner in the next generation of Central-East Asian trade finance.

Ever since our first trip to Astana last year (shoutouts to @MohitBhalodkar @crypturco @calilyliu @yelennyy @akshaybd @farhaj @cryptolgi), the latent opportunity to accelerate the future was self-evident just by looking around at the vast expanses of land and the tangible tenacity and intelligence of its people. We @sphere_labs couldn't be more proud to hopefully play a small part.

Sphere volume ATH last month btw

TIL there’s a multi-million dollar budget anime about a college girl who trades high-leverage FX to win it all back for her liquidated late-mother 😭

🇲🇽🇺🇸 Stoked to publicly share an important route that we've been iteratively building for a while (MXN -> USD).

The coolest and most differentiated component to this release is that it's in-housed on both sides of the MXN/USD [collection->on-ramp (FX)->transfer->off-ramp->payout] — so that there are no extra 3rd party dependencies that will create random lag or unexpected RFIs in the cross-border payment.

We've always been frustrated by the nested dependencies that unexpectedly get created when stitching various 3rd party vendors together — as sometimes it works for your customers, and sometimes it doesn't. And, ironically, just like traditional correspondent banking, no one really seems to know what happened at any given moment.

There was a lot of unexpected work in getting the backend of this — especially on normalizing local compliance/risk operations — correct, but it's proven to be worth it for us and our users.

So we're excited to release this to the broader developer/integrator community, so that way you can have support for what is arguably the #1 cross-border trade route, globally, too. From Day 1.