We are looking to take this from being a project to a full-time venture. Participating in Based Africa Hackathon is an opportunity for us to get the needed support to scale. With the intention to refine the project post-hackathon and add new exciting features, we would like to push this commercially and this is a good platform for us to launch the beta version and get early users ahead of the main launch.

Due to the sporadic rise in inflation and devaluation of the local currency (Naira), the bargaining power of Nigerians using the currency has in turn declined and the safe haven is to save in U.S Dollars. However, due to the hassles that come with owning a domicilairy account, opting for the use of stablecoins as a hedge against inflation has been the best option as a result of the ease to use and decentralisation.
With a vast number of Nigerian youths adopting the use of stablecoins on a daily basis, there comes another problem as listed below:

• Delays in converting stablecoins to fiat transaction time takes an average of 40mins on centralized exchanges.
• Mandatory request of sensitive details as criteria to complete transactions by merchants on centralized exchanges.
• Fear of accidentally transacting with government spies in the course of a P2P transaction.

Beyond these, the conventional cross-border payments system comes with its own problems such as hassles in sending and receiving payments, high transaction fees, and delay in settlements which a lot of times poses operational issues for businesses.

The purpose of Zend is not just about empowering individuals and businesses with on-chain to off-chain payments, our goal is to drive the adoption of blockchain and stablecoins for local payments just as it is internationally. Our solution is built to enable individuals carry out payments seamlessly, cheaply without compromising on self-custody. Additionally, our solution can enable businesses to accept payments from anybody globally with settlements in less than 2 minutes as this would help them to further expand their ventures into the international markets. Here are other features of Zend:

• Fast Transactions: Send money from stablecoins to bank in 120 seconds.
• Reduced Risk: Decentralized approach as signup isn’t needed.
• Privacy and Decentralized: Keeps user anonymous to boost privacy during transactions.
• Facilitation of swift and seamless cross-border payments.

We initially had issues getting the thirdweb library to run as it gave issues when we try to connect to the blockchain. However, we realized the issue stemmed from a missing package which we installed to get it to run.