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Welcome to Humanitarian Frontiers on the Edge. This is a place to learn about
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the art of the possible.
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Using technology in some of the most difficult environments in the world, assisting people
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in their most vulnerable time.
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Want to learn more?
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Let's dive in. Foreign.
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Hi everyone and welcome back. This is Humanitarian Frontiers on the Edge. I'm your host Chris Hoffman and today we've got an amazing group of friends here to discuss what somehow feels like an intangible topic. But I think we're going to make it tangible today for everyone. I think it's starting to become so mainstream that the opportunity to make cross border payments using a number of different rails. The opportunities continue to grow and the systems are starting to avail themselves for private transfers of cash all around the world. And that's really important for the humanitarian sector. We talk about all the time having to drive a truck down to a group of people and be able to distribute cash, physical cash to them, et cetera. And today I think, I think we've got a lot of solutions that can start to put that away and not have to worry about that so much. We know that it's still going to have to happen in some cases and that's totally fair. But I think that there's some great opportunities in the future that we're going to touch on today. And I'm joined today by Abby Kumar from Thunes and John Reynolds from Alio. Abby and John, welcome. Great to have you both here.
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B
Thanks Chris.
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C
Thanks Chris.
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B
Happy to be here.
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A
Yeah, super fun this is going to be. It's an exciting conversation for me because I worked with both of you in capacities on completely different systems doing the same thing in some way but different. And so I think it's same same but different if you want to put it that way. But I love the fact of having both of you here to discuss this and maybe we'll just start with you. Abby, go ahead and just give the short snippet on who you are and what you're up to.
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B
Yeah, thanks Chris. Thanks for having me. I'm ABHI based in Barcelona working for Kiwis. We are a Singapore based API, forward payments, rail and infrastructure company and amongst many other offerings we are also a big on USDC and USDT payouts for direct to wallets and interesting use case here today with Chris. So excited to be here.
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A
Awesome, thanks so much Abby. It's great having you here. John, over to you.
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C
Yeah, thanks Chris for having me. John Reynolds, Head of product at Aleo. ALEO is a layer 1 blockchain that is providing programmable privacy to the world. We've recently launched usdcx, a circle backed stablecoin and we're working on just trying to enable more privacy opportunities for users using blockchains and crypto.
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A
That's amazing. I can't wait to get into both of what you both are doing and we talk about this. Let's just start with this because I think we just heard some terms here that I don't know that many of the listeners have ever heard before. We heard usdc, usdt, you know, usdcx, you know, I mean all these, these different terms. I mean so we're talking about stablecoins here and if we're talking about stablecoins, the first thing that everybody comes up is is it crypto, is it not crypto? Right? And, and what is it, is it going to be like bitcoin and is it unstable and moving all over the place right now? I don't know if we'll get into the bitcoin conversation today on those things but, but maybe, you know, over to you John. You, you, you guys just launched a new coin at, at, at, at Alo. Tell us a little bit about that, what that means for you and what that means for, for your users.
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C
Yeah, absolutely. So I, I think you touched on it honestly really nicely there referencing bitcoin and, and some of the volatility things people have maybe heard about in the media or on the news. You know there, there is crypto, there are tokens. Right. And then there is also stablecoins and st beautiful because if they're backed by the US dollar and they have the same benefits of like not being stable and non volatile users can use these derivatives of the US dollar to, to interact with folks and payment systems and make, make money move like data as opposed to having to move money, you know, in, in briefcases or deliver cash to people get a lot of the same benefits of the cash system but instead of having a cash system you can have it become a data system. With that there are trade offs. Obviously the traditional blockchains that people use today are based on transparency which creates risks of surveillance and PII getting exposed. And so what ALEO is trying to do is create the opportunity for users to leverage these systems and to get stability in the currency that they're using, but at the same time actually have the ability to selectively disclose what information is exposed to avoid things like surveillance.
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Yeah, right on. And from the thunes perspective because you're doing global payments with the stablecoins and abhi, what are you seeing right now? Because it is a hot topic. People are talking about it. J.P. morgan, all these other banks are starting to do a lot of stuff with them. But what are you seeing on the international payments related to this right now?
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B
Yeah, so obviously we do more than just stablecoin. We also have over 7 billion bank and card payout endpoints as well as mobile wallets which is a big sort of for the past five or six years. I think we're now seeing an inflection point between where significant volumes. I believe last year the global money moved on stablecoins was more than what Visa moved. So just to give you some sort of perspective on order of magnitude, so we are right now seeing we are offering USDT. USDT across 133 markets. We made this announcement at Model 2020 Vegas. So it's relatively recent but already we are seeing a lot of interest from regions where hard currency, currency is hard to access or areas. I think we talked about humanitarian but I'll extend that to places with extreme inflation. Argentina sort of comes top of mind, 61% stablecoin usage and these are places where local currencies are devaluing rapidly. So where we deal is not just the humanitarian aid which we've talked about a number of times, but we also help preserve the recipients and the beneficial purchasing power in places where currencies are hard or payments are not near instant. So these are some of the trends we are seeing. There's a lot of demand still early days at least from a tunes perspective. About three or four months since our announcement. But we are seeing a lot of promise and risk.
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A
No, that's awesome. That's great to hear. And I mean there is a lot of talk across the humanitarian organizations around this but most of the talk is really at the treasury level, not so much at the beneficiary level. And there's something to be said about that.
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Right.
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Because a lot of people might not grasp how it's working. And I guess the question I wanted to ask is well, what are the low hanging fruits around this that humanitarian organizations should really be able to understand from a beneficiary standpoint? I want to stay a little bit out of the treasury conversation because I think that that that's really hard for a lot of people to, to, to grasp. But, but if we talk about beneficiaries and, and the ease of use. Avi, you're talking about being able to off ramp into a mobile wallet or, or anything else being able to get people, you know, all kinds of different wallets and endpoints that you guys have. And, and with you, John, it's a little bit different, right? It, there, there's, there's different ways to off ramp it. And so currently, what, what are, what are you hearing from customers that they find to be, they find to be the best kind of option for them when it comes to. And Avi, maybe I'll start with you and then move to John. But what are you hearing from the customers around the use?
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B
Yeah, I think so far again, as I mentioned earlier, so just kind of caveat that because this might, you know, we have this conversation in six months, Chris, it might be an early adjustment, but in addition to what John mentioned around physically, so this reduced risk around tracking, monitoring in some of the areas, we have to sort of have a humanitarian perspective. These areas are not safe in all aspects of that world. So physical cash is a real hard thing to guarantee security and recoverability. Right. So if it's gone, it's gone. And digital assets, anyone's got a cell phone, anyone's got a device with secret phrases can always retain that. So that's sort of one component of I guess digital assets in general includes mobile wallets. But particularly with stablecoin here. I think the other piece here, Chris, worth mentioning is financial idle independence. So a lot of this place people again sticking with the use case here, they lack formal identification like passport or utility bills or bank account, nonverbal whatever. I think stablecoin payouts, what we're hearing is a lot of anyone again with a smartphone and digital wallet can bypass a lot of the unbanked barriers of your traditional financial institution. Service lends itself to portability and folks particularly who are getting displaced or don't have access to banking infrastructure in every transit country. I think you're seeing a lot of that for humanitarian aid.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. John, what, what makes you excited about using stablecoin in humanitarian context? Obviously knowing that we're working together on a project to see how this is going to work and to test it out. But what makes you excited? Because every time I talk to you, you've always got a big smile. Maybe that's just your personality as well. But it also is something to me that I feel like you're excited about it.
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C
Yeah, I mean, I think crypto and blockchains, they've been around for over a decade now and we've had a hard time seeing product market fit. And finally with stablecoins, we've started to see this, we've started to see this technology. The Stablecoin volumes and the interest has started to grow dramatically. And it's a good signal that we're starting to find a good product market fit. And what excites me about it is a lot of these different beneficiaries, depending on the country that they're in, they may not have currencies that they feel comfortable backing into. They may not have access to currencies that they can trust. And so with technology and switching money into a digital form, we can give access to people, we can give stability to people financially who may not have seen that before. And this is, this is really exciting, right? Like folks who have, you know, they, they've earned their money, they've spent, they spend their days working hard, and now they have something that they can back into that feels more safe, that feels more stable, and it gives them more flexibility in how they can save and use it going forward.
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And you mentioned something at the beginning that I think is really important for the listeners to start to grasp. Right. You first said typical traditional blockchain transparency, right? You can see every transaction, everything that's happening there. And that's kind of how it works. But with zero knowledge proof, what, you know, and alio being, I think probably the largest current, you know, ZKP provider out there, what, what is zero knowledge proof? Or why is it even more important for humanitarian organizations?
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C
Yeah, I, I think AVI touched on this a little bit. Like there, there are real risks for these beneficiaries to physically touch money and the exchange of giving money to them can create risks and real dangers for them. And so the beauty of zero knowledge proofs and of aleo is the privacy element. So users, instead of having to expose all of their information or having to go and, you know, have the ability for their funds and their transactions to be tracked or surveilled, they can leverage a system like Aleo that uses zero knowledge proofs to prove that someone has properly executed some transaction or some action on chain. And so, for example, you can send money to merchants without being exposed. No one sees the amount of balance that you have currently. So no one knows what kind of potentially humanitarian aid has been distributed to you. And we start to shift away from this model of, hey, if you want to get aid, you have to accept real risks and shift towards a model of, hey, if you want to receive aid, you can do it in a private and compliant capacity that can avoid exposing you and your family and friends to potential risks in these areas.
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Yeah, right on. Great explanation, abhi. On the side of thunes because this isn't for everyone. Right.
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Yet.
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Right. We still know that a lot of organizations are not ready to take this jump. Some are just learning about it. You know, I think unfortunately what happened was blockchain in and of itself rose about six or seven years ago and everybody was like, there was the hype. And then as you said John, there was no product market fit. So then everybody was kind of like, okay, well we're done with that. It's never going to work in our use case. But Abby, there are those traditionalists out there still that are looking at sending cash to certain areas to a mobile wallet and doing things like that. And, and it's important for organizations to understand the complexity, I think, of how these transfers work and where the costs come and the expense associated with it and all that. And I wonder if you could just touch on it for the donors to understand and for organizations to understand what is the real cost. Because one of the biggest issues that we face, to be honest, is a lot of the people doing cash programming in humanitarian organizations weren't bankers to start off with. They don't understand what the Rails are, they don't understand what it's required, the fx, you know, cross border versus in country, all of those different things. But if you, you know, but could you, could you break it down a little bit for them so that they, they, they get it.
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B
Yeah, happy to. So perhaps maybe I take a step back. Right. FUS offers stablecoin wallets and you'll see but we also have a number of digital wallet frams and I think probably the closest comparison and you have a non bank, non card traditional finance payout. So brands such as GCash and M Pesa which are quite now well known, we've got about 120 different brands. And I think it's important in the context of that because obviously there is some of the things that we talked about on this call between parts, balancing, collection, interoperability, but on the same thing, I think there are, there are certain advantages that traditional banking has specifically from an infrastructure perspective. If primary organizations are connected with traditional banking and they don't have, then yeah, you don't have access to these wallets or stablecoin endpoints for payouts. So there is that. There's an education and literacy portion of that which is meant this is all still a lot of people are getting used to it. So I think in their mind this still feels like new technology. We've had instant payments for over 20 years now. As far as I've been doing this for 20 years. And I think I've always had some way or shape of this. And so it's not really that groundbreaking, but it just is in the hype cycle. I think for us, as you mentioned earlier, I think the second piece of it from a traditional banking perspective is the finality of something we play out on stablecoin. There is no undo. You can't reverse. Everything you pay out on the blockchain is final and you cannot reverse it. So this is. Obviously people have to, you know, from an audit perspective, donors have to understand this. They will recognize digital assets as, as such and, and ensure that the accounting frameworks that they have to reference Stable coins as cash equivalents have to, have to be in place. I think these are sort of some pieces that I would, for donors who are interested in. I would get involved with that.
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A
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I guess when I think about it, what's going on right now is there's a huge change in the humanitarian sector, right? We know that 2025 was a traumatic year. 2026 for the UN at the very least looks like it's going to be a very, another traumatic year for them. I don't think it's going to get any better. It doesn't seem so. And so they're looking for efficiencies, right? They're looking for not just cost savings, but efficiencies, right? We call it force multiplier effect, right? So how do you create force multipliers so that you can do more with less? Now, one of the unfortunate things I heard from some colleagues the other day was like, we've been told to do less with less. And I'm like, well, okay, but you can't, you can't do less with less, right? There's really not, there's no such thing as doing less with less. You're, you know, you're just, you're gonna, you're, you're just doing what you can. And so how do we get above the doing what you can to, to actually doing more with less? And, and with that, I, I guess I wanted to ask you guys a question about kyc. So what, what I'm. One of my big worries is so know your customer, right? Which is, which is a requirement for money transactions. Organizations can tend to start to cut corners, right? When you have less staff, you're out in the field and doing things. So what for, for you guys in the regulatory world know your customer is, is, you have to follow certain rules, right? And how, how can we, how can we communicate this to organizations so that they know it better? I mean John, from, from your side obviously on zero knowledge proof, how does Know youw Customer fit in with your product? And then maybe Abby, you can talk about it too. But, but John, from your side, because that's, that's a big question.
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Right?
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C
Yeah, I, you know, I think, I think one thing to call out is there, there is definitely technical solutions right now that can help to improve the exposure that users face. Good users, you know, cooperating users, users who don't necessarily bring, you know, malicious or concerning behaviors or activity to the payment system or to the blockchain. There are technical solutions that can help reduce those users exposure and also the overhead that a lot of these users are facing to begin operating or interacting with, with a blockchain. Zero knowledge proofs is, is a primary route to help support some of this and for example maybe to give everyone just a better, deeper, simpler understanding of what zero knowledge proofs are. So when, typically when you're interacting with a system, you provide the data. So if we're talking about kyc, I provide my personal information to the system, first name, social, sometimes my location, date of birth. And all of that data is sent to some back end system and compared against different information that they have like OFAC sanctions lists, different, you know, databases of risk. Right. So that they can understand what you as a user are bringing into their system. The unfortunate part of this is that means all of your data is getting transmitted to some backend system and is likely getting cataloged. The beauty of zero knowledge proofs is you can create a program that says you want to check for specific attributes against risk vectors. So like I mentioned, I want to check that this person's name isn't on an OFAC sanction list. I want to check that this person is over a particular age. I want to check that this person is not interacting with us from a sanctioned country. And all of these checks can be done. And in the process of these checks being done either on a local machine or on some sort of local device, a zero knowledge proof gets created. And a zero knowledge proof says this person's information was checked against these different verifications and it either passed or it failed. And so in this instance none of the personal identifiable information is sent to some backend system. Instead of a proof is attesting to the fact that these checks occurred on the user's local device and mathematically proving that they met the requirements. And then just that proof can then be used to allow this person to interact Right. It reduces the risk vectors because the checks occurred and you can verify mathematically that they happened. But it also ensures that there's compliance, you know, verifications that are occurring and that the user's attributes are, are checked against the things that these different systems want to know. Now that is a technical solution. Right. That doesn't necessarily equate to what regulators and compliance entities are willing to accept. Generally these entities need to get the PII because of the way that the compliance structure is built right now. So I think before we can even really entertain what some of these technical solutions can bring to the table, we have to get regulators and compliance folks on board with the technology that can support these benefits and can reduce the risks for the users.
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A
So Abby, how does that translate for tunes?
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B
Yes, I think have a. So we're going to play roles here because John's given a very product forward answer and I really do respect that. I think I'm going to come at it a little bit more commercially. So I think there's a general rule of thumb when it comes to KYC that typically the cost of doing KYC is about $15. It's called the compliance tax. Right. So if it takes $15 to process, do compliance and KYC on every transaction, then a $5 transaction just is you lose money. All parties in there. Right. And so just sort of. I'll start from there and then I'll talk about how TUNES approaches this. There's a few different things in the traditional, in the most simplest manner, TUNES relies on partners. And we talked about this model a lot, Chris, where the KYC is sort of pre done. Right. So there's a tiered KYC here where we have our partners who we work with while sending these funds, the donors where they have access to these. There's a level of KYC that's done that. This includes aml. Thanks for screening. That's already done. So there's a significant amount of risk scoring and risk rating for each party that's involved both the beneficiaries as well as well. Usually a lot of the beneficiaries of the traditional method are on a banking platform, so they're already KYC there. But on a stablecoin, we operate in a very similar manner. We rely on a lot of our partners to do the KYC lift. And then when what we do is at tunes, we do transaction monitoring. We have our own AI in house system. We do a level of all the lists that John mentioned. We do a lot of that. We do a lot of dynamic risk scoring for each of the different 500 endpoints. This is true including the stablecoin wallets. So I think this helps us because from a KYC perspective I can we share some of that costs if you will. So it's not now just taken up by one platform and it's sort of distributed in this multi layered approach from a traditional correspondent banking model. Where this differs is now we don't have all the different hops. So if you have your. Again Chris, you asked this question a little while ago about how we explained this to donors or used to a traditional correspondent banking setup and we're sending these through two or three different banks. By the time it gets to the beneficiary it's probably going to two or three different hops each with their own set of privacy and checks and screenings and what have you. So I think we cut that out by having a fairly direct urban scope model and our fees are transparent. We surface this Chris, as you probably are aware at the very top of the quotation flow. So I think we allow for that level of transparency and you know, it overall helps with it from a cost of KYC perspective. So I think between what John mentioned and between the cost shared in the in the mana, I think it makes for a much more efficient. I mean we're not even talking about liquidity lost in Nostro Vostro accounts and we're not even getting into that level. Right, like where your liquidity is, you know, idle cash shall we call it? Right. So pre funded local currency that sits in a bank and a lot of these banks, correspondent banks have minimum limits. So we're not even getting into that level purely from a KYC and AML perspective. I think it's a much more streamlined experience for donors and sounds reach the cost savings while doing an equity.
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A
So yeah, that's great explanation abhi, thank you so much for that and I think that that should be clear. It's the question I always have to ask the question why? Because I usually say being one of them for many, many years, humanitarians are some of the world's greatest cynics, right? We always say we're your dad. We always say no first and think about it later and then we figure out the way to fix it. Right. We say oh that can't be done. Oh okay, well let me think about okay, this and so right now I still feel like I've seen this in the last two quarters of last year. Abhi, you know we worked together, there were a ton of cash programming Calls for organizations out there, right. And there are very few players in the space in the humanitarian sector. Right. You count them kind of on one hand. And the question is. And the traditional way that they do it still to this day most. Because the way that humanitarian organizations are set up is that the country office gets the money then the country office then distributes to the people that are in the country. And that then that kind of. That's difficult for, for aggregators like yourself, et cetera because of the cross border payments and why they have to be that way from a regulatory standpoint, et cetera. But, but the first question is, is I guess, I mean this is to you because I think this needs to be clarified everybody. Why does it have to be cross border? What's. What, what, what limits you. I, I know the answer, but I think it's good to call it out. Why, why does it have to be a cross border payment?
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B
Well, it doesn't, right? The whole point of this is we are using the whole point of. I mean we all know this, but I'm just saying this out loud like steeling coins are agnostic of country. That is actually one of the first things I mentioned when someone's displaced and is in a transit country or you're in a country where you have no access to the banking infrastructure you, you don't need. So stablecoin as a technology built on blockchain is not cross borders. It is, it's a use case that we are doing quite successfully together and we hope to scale this because stable currency, liquid bank reserves, access to currency, all of these things that we've just sort of been spending the last 30 odd minutes talking about really is circumvented and, and a lot of people actually have no other way if it's. And Chris, you kind of said it nicely, right? It's either this or you rely on the two or three players for cash disbursements at some point. Cash disbursements do not scale. We've talked about why it's not safe, why there is a lot of loopholes and gaps and expenses and KYC concerns and things of that nature. We circumvent that using technology in a very specific use case. So stablecoin as a technology is not and I know hopefully this dance keep that in mind but it's not that stablecoin needs to be. It's actually agnostic and you get to hold wherever you are a USD backed asset like you've got liquidity that is valuable to everyone in the same manner So I think it's incredibly important for people who have been displaced and who don't have access to.
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A
And so just quickly to follow up on that. So juxtapose that against fiat. Right. So fiat, unless you're integrating with the local bank, it has to be a cross border payment because it's not like thunes has a license in country X. You're not a bank in country X.
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B
Right.
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A
You're sending money across the border to the bank that's in, under your license in another country.
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B
Right.
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A
And so just for people to understand that I think is really important because when, when they hear about payment aggregators like, like, like tunes, they're thinking, well, why can't you just, why can't we just deposit the money from the Kenya office into the Kenyan account and then send it over? Well, that's, we're not a Kenyan bank.
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B
Right.
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A
As the example. Right. So that's grasping that sometimes I think is really tough for them. And I think you explained it quite well. The, the benefits of stablecoin. I mean, John, from, from the perspective of scalability and scalability, meaning, not that your solution isn't scalable, but uptake. Right. I think that's, that's one of our biggest concerns that we've talked about, you know, and, and it's not just the uptake of the beneficiaries, but it's the uptake of the NGOs. Right. And so from, from your perspective, if you were me and I was going to an NGO and saying, this is the solution for you, this is going to be a great solution for you. And they say, well, why, what we've talked about, privacy, we talked about all these things, but how do you sell it to somebody that still doesn't understand it?
- [31:40]
C
Yeah, I think a lot of it is, you know, sometimes like the tough thing is people can touch and feel cash. Right. People can't touch and feel stable coins in the technology sometimes. But, but I think trust is the big element to play here and understanding the different entities that are involved. You know, Aleo is a blockchain, so we're the infrastructure layer and we're trying to help enable folks like yourselves to be able to build on top of this infrastructure layer. And we're trying to integrate partners that people trust, like Circle, for example, like Paxos Labs, so that people have access to the tools and the pieces of the puzzle to build out the value for their use cases. So I think from our side, what we really try to focus on is how can we make it Easier for people who have great ideas and are solving big problems to actually build and leverage the beauty of our technology in the most effective way. And even if we think about some of the challenges in the blockchain space and with stablecoins, right, when settlement is final, for example, your risk starts to shift upstream. When you send a payment and you can't reverse it, the risk starts to shift upstream. So you have to have integrators and partners who are thinking hard about these problems from the onboarding side, from the monitoring side, from the recovery flow side. So that when people with great ideas who are solving challenging problems come to you and come to the network, they have access to different utilities and tools that make it easy for them to solve their problem in the right way.
- [33:29]
A
Absolutely. And we use two terms here, on ramping and off ramping. And I think sometimes it's important for organizations and users to understand what that means. So when we're saying on ramping, first of all, you've got your money, so you've got a dollar, right? And first you need to get that into stablecoin, so that's the first piece. Now it's a stable coin. And then you've got to put it, you've got to seed somebody else's wallet, right? So then you've got to put it into their wallet so that they have the money. And then that person can either do transactions with the stablecoin back and forth or they can off ramp, right? Which is potential. And that means turning it back into the physical dollar. And that can be in a number of different ways into their mobile wallet. It can be fiat, through a merchant, or in different potential ways. But just to understand, for everybody, I think the listeners, it's important to understand how that flow works because there's a couple different points. You have to have the money first. So you've got a $10,000 program, you've got $10,000, you deposit it into an account that is converted to stablecoin, that stablecoin is. Then you push it to the wallets of the beneficiaries and then they're able to interact with it. So I think that that's very important. And abiy, I mean, for you guys, obviously, being the global company that you are at tunes, how easy is it for organizations to get to be part of thunes and to actually join in to also use your system?
- [35:02]
B
Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that really quickly. I just want to kind of touch upon one thing from our last thread, right? I think it occurred to me that we haven't really talked a lot about regulation. Right. And it's important to just talk about it in the context of donors who may be listening to you, Chris, on this podcast about why this is. Why is 2026 a big year? Why are we having this conversation now? This technology has existed for a while and why is this sort of the year that we are really shifting the conversation from regular payouts or regular traditional payouts to stablecoin usdc usdt. Right. I two pieces. The US Genius act and Use NICA have really moved stablecoins into financial mainstream. So I think it's just important to kind of call that out because it's relatively recent and I think it legitimizes some of this for a lot of people who still think of this as an experiment or who think of this as things that could go away. There's a lot of misconceptions. I'm sure John knows a almost all of them, I know a few of them. But there is usually this shrouded with mystery and because of its obscurity, it's a vehicle for money laundering and things like that. But what's happened with these regulations is becomes first of all it's stablecoin, so by definition it's not volatile and B it's regulated. So it's the same as money. And I think how we will also just. We recently announced also a partnership with MasterCard and I bring that up because it has given us a lot of institutional credibility in conversations. And I think that's your second part of the question, right? How can we get people involved? How do people join this? So we do offer both the on ramp and off ramp capabilities with usgc. Today we have a partnership with, with Circle and we would effectively do a level of onboarding and we would effectively create a wallet for USDC for donors in this example who would want to send money. There's a level of transparency. So tunes what we do, we pride ourselves on is having 100% transparency at all aspects. So whether it's communication, whether there's quotation, whether it's fees, it's, it's incredibly transparent. And because we don't have an app, you can customize it into any flow. If it's a bank, you have a platform for donations, you have a platform such as yours at Humanity Link. We can use seamless amounts of detail. We offer bulk layouts which is quite relevant to this use case. There's a lot of times when you're trying to send out to 200 300, 500, 1000 beneficiaries at the same time as part of a single payout. And we have provisions for that as well. So I think these are some methods. Obviously on a case by case basis, we right now support payouts to over 130 countries. So we can, depending on the corridors, depending on the method of payments, we've got about 550M points, including the ones I mentioned earlier from stablecoin. So it really depends on the use case. We believe we've got a lot of coverage. So yeah, that's how we would get involved.
- [38:28]
A
No, that's great. And John, I loved the description that you gave. I mean you're the one providing the tools and there are folks out there that then are developing on the things that you've built to really for their use case. And just to touch on a little bit about what we're doing together, I mean, currently using zero knowledge proof to help migrants who are moving across borders that might not have that come from countries where the currency isn't very stable. And so this offers them an opportunity to be able to conduct work, get paid the correct amount for that work, and then be able to use that money. And I really want to thank Alio and Mercy Corp Ventures for going on this journey with us for it. Because I think, I mean this will be, I believe this is the first use case in the humanitarian sector for doing zero knowledge proofs for this. So I think that, I mean it's groundbreaking in many ways and to partner with you on it, I think it's super awesome. You know, we're coming down towards the end and as I close out the podcast, I usually ask the last question is what's your low hanging fruit? If you could make one wish that humanitarian organizations, humanitarian operators would do or should know, what do you think that is? And I'll do it alphabetically today. So I'll start with you, Avi, and what's your low hanging fruit? What's your wish when you speak to the humanitarian sector?
- [40:04]
B
I am a salesperson at heart. So I will say that in demonstrating how actually we talked about every aspect technically regulatory, I think cost is a huge part of what we do. We'll do this well. So it's demonstrating that it is, you know, about 17% overheads for traditional banks or cash, 8 versus about 5% for siebelfoin aid. Just in a way that is palatable for an audience that is willing to listen, I think is important. You don't want 10 to 20% of your, you're aim to be lost if you use in leakage in inflation and things like that. So we really do a good job with ensuring that the maximum amount reaches the beneficiaries wallet instantly. So I think that to me, if we can somehow crystallize that in all convolutions and lead with that if all else fails, I think usually that one works.
- [40:56]
A
Yeah. I love it. I love it. Okay, John, I gave you some time to think. You got the lucky seat.
- [41:02]
C
Yeah. No, I think the, the story isn't it like crypto will replace banks. I think that the story is can we make money move faster with less leakage, better controls and less unnecessary data collection? And if we can do that, can we do it in a way that risk teams that regulators and that beneficiaries are happy with. And the beauty of Aleo is I think we are the blockchain that is providing the infrastructure that can do that. And that's the hope.
- [41:39]
A
Yeah, I love it. That's great. Well, I also hope that maybe the tunes alio will have a conversation after this as well for on ramping and off ramping. Maybe there's a space there.
- [41:50]
B
Absolutely. I'd love to. Yeah. John, expect an email from me.
- [41:56]
A
That's great. Well, thank you both for joining today. It's been a great episode. It's not the easiest episode, let's be fair. Right. There's a lot of complexity to this. We try to make it simple because we're just used to taking money from one pocket and putting it into somebody else's pocket. And so this does need some knowledge growth in the sector around how this works, why it works, what it does, and how it can really impact people's lives. And so I really appreciate both of you today for coming on and crystallizing a lot of these things so that people can understand it better. And I can't wait to hear what they think about the episode because it's going to be a special one. So, ABHI and John, thanks so much for joining.
- [42:38]
C
Thank you, Chris. Thank you, abhi.
- [42:40]
B
Thanks, John.
- [42:41]
A
Thanks, guys. Thanks for joining us on humanitarian Frontiers on the Edge. If today's conversation sparked new ideas, new questions, or new ways of thinking about what's possible, then we've done our job. This podcast is brought to you by HumanityLink. Working at the intersection of technology and humanity to help deliver aid faster, smarter and with greater accountability. Until next time, stay curious, stay grounded,
- [43:10]
B
and keep pushing the frontier. Sam.