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Welcome to Paycrest

Paycrest is a decentralized payment routing protocol for stablecoin-fiat payments in emerging markets. It routes bidirectional conversion orders between stablecoins and local currencies through a distributed network of liquidity providers, with onchain escrow ensuring trustless, automatic completion in under 30 seconds, without custodying user funds. Paycrest is built for wallets, fintechs, exchanges, DeFi protocols, and platforms that need to move stablecoins into and out of local fiat accounts in high-friction markets. If you’re building a product that touches cross-border payments, remittances, payroll, or stablecoin on/offramps — Paycrest is the routing layer.

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Traction

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The Problem

Cross-border payments, especially in Africa and other emerging markets, remain globally expensive, slow, and fragmented. Sending money from the US to Nigeria costs an average of 6–8% in fees and takes 1–3 business days. For the $54 billion in annual remittances flowing into Sub-Saharan Africa, that translates to billions lost to intermediaries every year. Stablecoins have emerged as the most viable alternative: they move in minutes, cost fractions of a cent on modern L2 chains, and are already seeing massive organic adoption. But there is a critical gap: the last mile. Converting between stablecoins and local currency remains fragmented and increasingly contested by platform-specific networks tied to individual stablecoin issuers — each building a walled garden around their own token. There is no neutral, open, protocol-level routing layer for stablecoin-fiat conversion. Paycrest is building that layer — issuer-agnostic by design, with no preference for one stablecoin or issuer over another.

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How It Works

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What is Paycrest?

Paycrest is not a payment app. It is infrastructure: an open payment routing protocol that any application can integrate to offer stablecoin on- and offramps to its users. It is also not a P2P consumer product, not a card-issuing solution, and not suitable for anonymous flows — all senders and providers are KYB-verified. The protocol handles the full stack:

• Order routing — matching senders with the right provider for each corridor and rate
• Encrypted message passing — recipient bank/wallet details transmitted securely
• Onchain escrow — neither party needs to trust the other; the contract enforces completion
• Compliance coordination — providers own local regulatory obligations, senders own theirs

The key properties:

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Key Participants

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Get Started

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Supported Corridors

Paycrest is live across 6 active corridors with real provider liquidity. New corridors launch only when committed providers are onboarded and tested.

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Supported Stablecoins

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Security & Compliance

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Where We’re Headed

Paycrest is focused on one thing right now: making payment routing in emerging markets reliable enough to be trusted infrastructure. Q1 2026 delivered on that in the NGN corridor: sub-30 second completion for the majority of orders, a growing provider network with multiple independent PSPs, and onramp live in production. The next phase is hardening what works and replicating it across new corridors. LATAM comes first, starting with Argentina, and each corridor launches only when committed providers are onboarded and tested. Expansion is replication of a working model, not experimentation in production. Over time, the goal is for Paycrest to become the default routing path for stablecoin-fiat payments, not because senders are locked in, but because it’s the most reliable, most liquid, and most composable path available. The open architecture is what makes that outcome possible: every integration creates a compounding demand channel, and every new provider makes every existing corridor more robust.

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Decentralization Path

Paycrest currently operates as a federated protocol: one aggregator (run by Paycrest), KYC-gated participation, webhook-based payout verification. This is an intentional design choice, not a shortcut. Reliable decentralized mechanisms require operational data and trust that can only be built by running the system in production first. Here’s how the protocol moves from federated today to credibly neutral infrastructure over time.