Shasnani

Hey! We're adding countries as we hear from users that have demand there — are you from Tunisia / would you like to see it supported? If so, please reach out at shahryar@gokarsa.com and I'd love to chat

Hey -- thank you for this feedback. Honestly, a huge (and obvious) oversight on our part. Gonna fix this shortly.

Hey Rafay -- this is super thoughtful advice. Will reach out, would love to talk more about this.

Thanks!

Frankly, the order matching will be pretty simple at the beginning: Match buyer/seller payment methods, make sure buyer order ≥ seller's available amount, then pick lowest price option. We just have to query the escrow contract on chain to make sure the seller amount is available.

We're fully pursuing all KYC/AML/Sanctions restrictions. Couldn't operate as a US fintech company without doing this.

We're planning on enabling passkeys! Agreed that phone 2FA is not ideal, just the current setup.

Absolutely following all US Sanctions and AML policies (setting up more rigorous KYC, transaction screening, MTLs etc. as we speak). We're a US company and intend on doing this the right way.

Correct! There's certainly a lot of regulations to navigate, but we are strict about NEVER touching the fiat in any country; just connecting buyers and sellers.

User B is sending a peer-to-peer transaction, akin to a Zelle or Venmo. In most other countries, these peer-to-peer payments (PIX, UPI, etc.) do billions of transactions per month. And since you're sending your own funds, you're not a money transmitter. If we do work with any larger entities (e.g., an OTC desk, liquidity provider), we'd certainly be cognizant of the relevant licensing.

Thank you, we hope it does help a lot of people.

We use privy, one of the best-in-class wallet providers that basically creates a self-custody wallet, but uses email/phone/social auth (and encrypts/shards the actual keys). So you wouldn't be at risk of losing them like you would with a vanilla wallet (you can of course export the keys if you're more crypto-savvy)

We're doing a pretty slow and steady rollout to catch where users are running into issues, but it's a pretty controlled environment re: messing up. You could accidentally send money to the wrong address if you wanted to transfer to another wallet, but that's not a core functionality (located on a side page) and certainly not one that the average person is using. Outside of that, there isn't really anything else you could severely mess up.

Hahaha we've had this conversation internally a couple of times.

Definitely a few places that we'd probably avoid. But also plenty of others (e.g., Kenya, LatAm, Turkey, etc.) that have been quite friendly and would be fine to visit.

Hey, I'm going to add support for this immediately! I'd love to chat a bit more and hear about the situation there; do you mind reaching out with your contact to shahryar@gokarsa.com?

You'd use our platform!

User A sends local currency to User B's fiat account.

User B sends stablecoins (earned via salary, trading, mining, etc.) to User A's digital wallet (that we've created for them).

I see this take a lot, and there's some truths to it, but I'd like to take the other side of the argument.

These stablecoin issuers are enormous buyers of US treasuries: "Tether Holdings owned $97.6 billion worth of US Treasuries in June 2024, a new high. Hence, Tether now owns more US Treasuries than the governments of Germany, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Australia. Hence, Tether is now the 18th largest holder of US Treasury bonds" (https://medium.com/coinmonks/tether-usdt-is-the-third-larges...)

Dollars are also more dominant as a reserve currency in stablecoins (~97%) than they are in real-world trade (https://digitalchamber.org/stablecoinreport/).

I.e., we see stablecoins as extending dollar dominance, not reducing it.

So the entire premise is that you really can't just 'buy dollars' in the majority. of these countries, hence the need for stablecoins.

And I don't think I would characterize this as a high-risk currency; it's essentially a digital receipt for a dollar, backed by US treasuries (https://www.circle.com/transparency).

Thanks!

While we want to have constructive conversations with some of these governments (I actually believe it's possible), ultimately we can't stop hostility / regulations against crypto. What we can do is offer our service and be transparent about what it is — and then users in those countries can make decisions for themselves about whether they can/should engage.

I'm hopeful, however, seeing countries like Turkey and a couple in LatAm that have significant crypto adoption without overt government hostility — when adoption reaches a critical mass, I expect to see more governments relax restrictions.

Yeah, there's definitely edge cases that make this difficult — though these are the same problems that users may already face on existing P2P exchanges — now we're just getting more involved in the customer service and support :D.

The best risk mitigation here is having trusted, verified sellers that we've met + a robust support functionality that allows users to indicate any issues. To be honest though, in some of these countries, the domestic payment systems (e.g., UPI in India) are quite reliable.

Re AML -- we do KYC, and we discourage / don't present cash as an option. That way the payments happen through more transparent channels.

We're serving customers in Africa, LatAm, & South Asia at the moment — but yes, nonetheless, we'll be pursuing an MSB and are planning on using infrastructure providers with MTLs to make sure we're fully licensed to handle this activity.

I can totally see where you're coming from on this, but I think the way users on these countries see it is entirely different—-a couple notes in response:

- Users in these countries already use exchanges like Binance almost like a dollar checking account — this, as you probably know, is far more risky (past AML violations, entirely centralized point of failure, etc.). There's no better or safer alternative at the moment, and these people aren't typically huge fans of the current banks they're using, nor the regulation that they have to deal with.

- We don't have any intention to hide how the product works, or claim that it's a real bank.'Abstraction' in this case means minimizing wallet, key, and asset management during the user flow.

- The stablecoins we're offering (USDC & USDT) are more widely used and known in these countries than in the US. I actually don't even have to explain it to half the folks because they already understand the value prop and are comfortable with them (FWIW, USDC is a fully audited and soon-to-be-public US company).

Would love to hear more from you on this — why do you feel self-custody is a concern? For context, we're using Privy (https://docs.privy.io/guide/security/), which encrypts (and never stores) the private keys, and users simply log in with email/phone etc. auth (so no need for key management).