Elementpay
Pay for anything as simple as saying cheese
Created on 15th May 2025
•
Elementpay
Pay for anything as simple as saying cheese
The problem Elementpay solves
ElementPay solves a critical pain point in African markets: the difficulty of spending crypto directly for everyday needs.
Right now, users who hold USDC or ETH often face friction when trying to convert or spend it they must use centralized exchanges, endure long wait times, or depend on intermediaries to cash out. That introduces delays, hidden fees, and complexity.
ElementPay addresses this by allowing users to pay directly from their crypto wallets to mobile money platforms like M-Pesa or banks without needing to manually convert their crypto. Behind the scenes, ElementPay performs fast, seamless on-chain conversions and transfers, so the recipient receives local currency instantly.
In short: it removes the friction between holding crypto and using it in daily life bridging the gap between Web3 and real-world finance in Africa. This improves financial inclusion and gives users more power over their money.
Challenges I ran into
One of the biggest challenges we faced was abstracting the complexity of crypto transactions for everyday users. Most of our users are familiar with mobile money not wallets, gas, or USDC so we needed a way to let them interact with crypto without knowing they were using it. To solve this, we implemented account abstraction, allowing users to pay directly with USDC or ETH without ever seeing seed phrases or MetaMask popups.
We also had to solve for both onramp and offramp. On the onramp side, enabling users to fund their wallets using local mobile money or bank rails required stitching together multiple APIs and working around local payment provider limitations. On the offramp, we had to ensure that funds could be delivered to users instantly, even with Base being an L2. We used event listeners and webhooks to confirm on-chain settlement and trigger automated fiat payouts to M-Pesa or bank accounts.
Another major challenge was ensuring reliability in low-connectivity environments. We optimized RPC interactions and caching layers to keep the app responsive, even on 3G or flaky WiFi.
Tracks Applied (1)
Stablecoins
Technologies used
Cheer Project
Cheering for a project means supporting a project you like with as little as 0.0025 ETH. Right now, you can Cheer using ETH on Arbitrum, Optimism and Base.