Hi Everyone,
Happy Tuesday! I’m back with another update for Connect the World and I admit it has certainly been a while since my last post. Over the last month, I have been traveling to Boston for a research trip and to New York for Mainnet and Climate Week! Nevertheless, I am back home and in full gear for Connect the World!
As always, we appreciate any questions and feedback that you have on the program.
The summary:
We are excited to have two partners going live using FiatConnect in the coming months allowing on/off ramping for Mento stablecoins in 11 countries (see Pipeline Status for the specific list).
Complementary Initiatives:
- KYC Vendor Selection - we are coming close to completing the screening and vetting of KYC vendors. We will soon have a short list of high-quality KYC vendors and a repository of resources that partners can request to review. The goal of this is to help partners scale and decrease user drop-off rates by offering the best user experience in terms of KYC.
- V1 of our usability review and 3-month trial scorecard can be viewed here. This will be used to assess our partners when they go live with FiatConnect - we will be further refining this document in the coming weeks, especially as we are geared to launch our two partners very soon!
- Our Developer Relations Engineer has been providing last-mile support to ensure that our partners who are very close to completing the integration will be able to go live without any hiccups.
- Creation of a dedicated FiatConnect Discord Server and Twitter account, originally interested partners were directed to Valora’s discord and then to the Fiatconnect subchannel. This is an effort to streamline communication and reduce confusion.
Pipeline Status
In the past month seven new partners joined at the top of the funnel, totaling 51 partners in the pipeline.
Of the partners engaged (32), I would like to highlight that we now have three large partners that can offer global presence and locally relevant payment methods for on/off ramping. We are actively engaging with their respective teams every week and hope to announce the signing of at least one MOU/completion of due diligence by the next forum post.
There are no notable movements in the partners that have completed due diligence; most feedback is that they are queuing FiatConnect integration later in their product roadmap. However, we are exploring partnerships with dev shops to minimize the integration lift for these partners and hopefully get FiatConnect integrations prioritized.
As for the partners actively integrating, most notably Bitmama and Bitssa will be going live offering on/off ramping for Mento stablecoins through FiatConnect in the coming months.
Markets that will be unlocked: Benin, Cote D’Ivoire, Ghana, India, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Philippines, Senegal, Togo and Uganda.
Questions for the community
- What information would you like to know for future updates?
- Are you an interested CICO provider who would like to participate in the CTW program, or do you know of a CICO provider who would be? Please email me at Michael.Kwan@celo.org or book a 1:1 meeting with me.
- We want to be intentional about prioritizing country ramps. Are there countries we should focus on first? Please let us know below.
Thanks,
Michael