The problem Splash | Account Network solves

Cross-border payments in Southeast Asia are still slow, expensive, fragmented, and difficult to reconcile. Businesses and financial institutions often depend on multiple intermediaries, local payment partners, FX providers, and manual compliance processes just to move money across borders.

Splash is building the settlement infrastructure for cross-border payments — designed for banks, businesses, and institutions, not for users to interact with crypto.

• Lower-cost settlement: Stablecoin-based settlement can reduce intermediary costs. In Phase 1, Splash targets free settlement, with a long-term model starting from as low as 0.80% depending on the corridor and off-ramp.
• Faster cross-border payments: USD/stablecoin settlement can move in near real time, while recipients can receive funds in their local currency within minutes, subject to the local payment rail.
• SEA e-Invoicing & reconciliation: Splash connects payment activity with invoice and transaction records, creating an audit anchor for cross-border business payments.
• Non-speculative institutional treasury: Instead of exposing businesses to DeFi yield or market speculation, Splash treats stablecoins as a settlement asset and provides an institutional treasury/omnibus layer focused on real-world payment flows.
• Agentic Finance with human control: AI can analyse transactions, learn business payment behaviour, and propose actions — but execution remains controlled by authorised users and institutional policies.
• Built-in auditability: Transaction and payment records can be anchored using Walrus, with Seal supporting encrypted data access and privacy.
• Private, faster onboarding: zkLogin enables a smoother onboarding experience without forcing users to manage traditional blockchain credentials.
• Blockchain invisible to the user: Blockchain operates as the settlement layer underneath the infrastructure. Businesses do not need to understand wallets, tokens, gas, or blockchain interactions.

The goal is simple: make blockchain-powered settlement feel like normal financial infrastructure.

Challenges we ran into

Building cross-border payment infrastructure is not only a technical challenge — it is also a regulatory, operational, and corridor-specific challenge.

• Different corridor requirements: Every country has different payment rails, FX requirements, settlement processes, and compliance expectations. A solution that works in one SEA corridor does not automatically work in another.
• Regulatory complexity: Cross-border payments involve licensing, KYC/AML, sanctions screening, stablecoin regulations, and local financial regulations. Designing Splash to work within regulated financial environments required us to separate the technology layer from the regulated execution layer.
• Local remittance & off-ramp partners: Stablecoin settlement is only one side of the transaction. The recipient still needs reliable access to local currency. Finding suitable, compliant remittance and off-ramp partners across Southeast Asia became a key challenge.
• Balancing speed with compliance: Our goal is near-instant settlement, but financial institutions cannot sacrifice compliance and auditability for speed. We had to design Splash so that faster settlement does not mean weaker controls.
• Making blockchain invisible: One of our biggest product challenges was hiding blockchain complexity from the end user. Businesses should experience Splash as a normal payment infrastructure layer — not as a crypto application.
• Privacy vs. auditability: Institutions need transaction records for reconciliation and compliance, while sensitive business information must remain private. This drove our exploration of Walrus + Seal for auditable yet encrypted data storage.