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Around the Block: An Overview of the Stellar Disbursement Platform
Recorded: April 2, 2025 Duration: 0:43:43Space Recording
Short Summary
The Stellar ecosystem is experiencing significant developments, including the launch of the Sorbon smart contracts platform, innovations in digital wallets for basic phones, and the introduction of privacy solutions. The ecosystem is also expanding its global reach with initiatives like the Stellar Disbursement Platform and the upcoming Meridian conference in Rio. Additionally, trends such as the tokenization of real-world assets and increased community engagement are shaping the future of Stellar.
Full Transcription
Hello, everyone. I'm Aaron Cottrell, Senior Product Manager at Validation Cloud.
You're watching Around the Block. What is Validation Cloud? What is Around the Block?
If you haven't joined us before, so Validation Cloud, we're a Web3 data and AI company.
We do lots of things involving nodes and staking and validators and data.
And Around the Block specifically is a series, a podcast series, where we showcase
builders in the space, building real products that are used in the real world, and things that are
about to be released. And in that vein, in the real world usage vein, I'm delighted to be joined
by Tori Samples from the Stellar Development Foundation. Hello, Tori. Hi, everyone.
Hi, Aaron.
Thanks so much for having me here today.
And you're very welcome.
So just to sort of talk about the outline of our conversation so everyone can follow along,
we're going to get to know Tori a little bit and understand her journey into Web3 and what
she does at Stellar.
And then we're going to deep dive into Stella and then something called the Stella
Disbursement Platform and we'll have a little demo in there somewhere if we light a candle to the
demo gods that that all goes well and then we'll sort of have a few questions and a bit of back
and forth so Tori we'd love to hear a little bit about you what you've done with your life and how it's led you to where you are.
I know you've got a very interesting background. So over to you.
Yeah, thanks. So I am a director of product at the Stellar Development Foundation.
And as you said, my journey is not necessarily what I was expecting for my own career, but it has been wonderful in every way.
So I've had the privilege of being in the stellar ecosystem for about seven years now.
I came from a technical background. I built products that went into hospitals and then
decided to get out of tech completely, went back and got my MBA and then got sucked right back
into it. So I actually- Oh, boomerang. Dangerous, dangerous.
But I started a company,
I was a co-founder and CTO
of a company called Leaf Global FinTech at the time.
And we were a digital wallet built on Stellar.
And I originally designed it
for refugees and migrants in East Africa.
I had seen this problem a million times
in my personal life
where people got displaced out of their
homes. They brought their life savings with them in cash, super dangerous, and they lost most of
it along the way, either because of security or theft reasons, but also just because of
foreign exchange fees and things that happen when you're carrying cash. So we designed a way for
people to bring their money with them across borders in Africa,
because most people end up going to a few different countries before they get resettled and did that on Stellar. Now, the funny thing is this was 2018. So the terms digital wallet and
stable coins didn't exist. We were total Wild West. But we knew that Stellar was a good technical fit for doing fast, cheap cross-border
transactions. And it was great for asset issuance. So we actually had local stable coins represented
for the countries that we were live in. And we started with a non-smartphone version. So we
were actually the first blockchain-based digital wallet for basic phones. I accessed it with a
little short code. Great.
So, you know, fast forward, we scaled it across Africa to about 10 countries, added in a smartphone version and then sold it.
We were acquired by a publicly traded U.S. company and the company was the product line
at that point was rebranded to Boss Money.
Nice.
I mean, you used that experience to then, I guess, join Stellar and use the things you learned, right?
Yeah. So after the acquisition, I transitioned everything over to the team at IDT, which was the acquiring company, and then came over to the Stellar Development Foundation to build out what became the stellar disbursement platform. At the time, they were working on a stealth refugee project.
And so, of course, I was interested in helping.
That had been my whole life for the past few years.
And and I was I was very keen on seeing it become a product that could be used
for lots of different things around the world.
The initial interest was from the UNHCR, which is the UN Refugee Agency, to send cash disbursements, cash assistance to displace people in Ukraine.
This was right after the full scale invasion in 2022. And people needed a way to receive money on their phones safely that they could take with them.
And so, again, Stellar is great for that. But at the time, we didn't have a bulk payments tool.
stellar is great for that but at the time we didn't have a bulk payments tool and so we very
quickly built an mvp for them and then built out a real robust version for enterprises uh which is
now the stellar disbursement platform and and under the hood it's just bulk payments so we know that
scale has always been an issue on blockchain and so this solves those issues uh and it allows for
organizations to send very efficiently up to 10,000 transactions in a single batch
to people all over the world in traditionally very hard to reach places. People get that usually in
stable coins on their phone, and they can access that at any cash out point, which is another
strength of Stellar's ecosystem. With the MoneyGram cash out option alone, we have about 380,000
retail locations where people can actually get their money in fiat.
Yeah. Wow. I mean, people like to talk about impactful work, maybe if you could give us like a little bit of a description
and then we can like walk down
into the Stellar disbursement platform.
Yeah, absolutely.
So Stellar is a very old blockchain
in all the best possible ways.
We've been around since 2014, so just celebrated 11 years.
And it was originally built for payments.
Yes, we're still standing and have had, I think, less than 60 minutes of downtime across the entire 11 years.
So very, very proven.
We like to be the adult in the room.
So we'll say that.
But yeah, originally built for payments.
But yeah, originally built for payments.
And because of the Stellar Consensus Protocol, the mechanism for submitting transactions and having them approved by all the validator nodes, there's no mining component.
There never was.
And so from the beginning, we had this differentiator with Bitcoin and Ethereum that we weren't proof of work.
We weren't proof of stake.
We like to say we're proof of agreement.
And in that it was inherently extremely fast, extremely cheap.
So from the beginning, we've had an average block time of about 5.6 seconds.
And you can process about 10,000 transactions on the network for one US cent in fees.
So extremely efficient and great for cross-border transactions
from the beginning.
So I think that's kind of what we've always been known for.
If you've heard of Stellar, you've usually
heard cross-border payments.
You might have heard comparisons to Ripple.
We don't really, we don't compare ourselves to Ripple.
But one of our founders was part of the Ripple team at some point. Some, some people here like, well, XLM XRP, um, but not the same.
Uh, and, and then if you've heard about stellar recently, you might've heard
about some newer developments.
Uh, just last year, we released a smart contracts platform called Sorbon that
allowed us to get into the defy space.
This wasn't originally part of the protocol itself.
And so we've been able to basically get the latest and greatest learnings from 10 years
of watching other chains do this and then deploy them in this incredibly, I would say,
easy and fun to build upon smart contracts platform.
Awesome.
Yeah, I know we, Validation Cloud, support Soroban.
So yeah, kind of seeing that usage grow.
If we sort of shift into the Stellar Disbursement platform,
so I guess you were there kind of at the inception of it
and through to where it is now.
So it'd be great to understand if anything huge has changed or the things you thought
were going to be true were actually true and that led to version one.
And then maybe then we can step into a bit of a demo and talk about the type of use cases.
Yeah, absolutely.
So it's a good question because you I mean, you know, you design something and you think you talk to enough users, you think you know what they need, and then you get surprised all along the way. So it's definitely been an iterative process. But we have at this point, I would say feature complete, mature version for bulk payments. Now, I'm going to put a caveat on that. We'll come back to it
because there's some exciting stuff happening beyond just that payments path. But for bulk
payments, it works really well. This is the use case where you have an organization that needs
to send out to multiple individuals at once. Now, that could be for cash assistance to aid
recipients around the world, but that can also just as easily be for
payroll. So for example, we have many different companies that use this to pay contractors around
the world that would rather receive in a digital dollar than their local currency. They might not
necessarily be banked. And so this is another way for them to get paid securely and efficiently
without having to wait months, in some cases, to get a fiat payment. Some of the things that
we've added over the years, I mean, we started with a very streamlined version because it was
built in response to a war. So again, real life impact, you know, you build it. That will rush
the roadmap, won't it? It will. And so I'm glad that, you know, that will rush the roadmap, won't it?
And so I'm glad that, you know, we've been able to step back a little bit and add a lot of just I wouldn't say fun features, but customers that had never used a blockchain before, probably not even a smartphone app or email. And now on the enterprise
side, most of the organizations that use the stellar disbursement platform, this is their
first use of blockchain. So it's actually really fun to onboard people into the digital assets ecosystem, into the blockchain ecosystem and dispel some of these misplaced preconceptions about what that looks like.
Yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot out there when you're just searching blockchain Web3 about things that can go wrong or scams or like all of this stuff so i
imagine there's a little bit of a sort of a trust like this actually works that come that sort of
comes out of that and um i i guess maybe this varies depending on whether you're talking about
retail users or enterprises but and we can talk about this as we go through the demo as well. Like how much blockchain or Web3 technology do the users need to perceive
and understand when they sort of use something like this stellar
disbursement platform?
Very little. And that's obviously intentional.
So there's two different users for the stellar disbursement platform,
user types.
There's the financial administrator, the sender of payments, who's sitting there logging into a dashboard.
And they probably have an accounting background or some sort of financial background, but not necessarily a technical background.
And so for them, they do need to understand, you know, we never hide information from them.
So they should understand that this is happening on a blockchain.
Good.
And that they're using digital assets.
So the organizations are responsible for acquiring the digital assets that they want to send.
Could be USDC issued by Circle.
It could be any other stable coin on the network.
Stellar has quite a few.
And so in that process, they generally learn a bit because they're curious.
They're financial people, right?
They want to know, how secure is this?
And how are my users actually going to be able to use this in the real world?
So generally, they learn a little bit in that process.
But the actual process of sending out a payment, point and click, requires zero blockchain knowledge.
So we'll see that when we do the demo.
And then on the end user side, again, the goal there is not to burden them. and click requires zero blockchain knowledge so we'll see that when we do the demo uh and then
on the end user side again the goal there is not to burden them with having to learn a new system
a new currency anything like that at a time when they're receiving money because it doesn't matter
if it's a salary payment or aid or a government social program they're in a position where they need that money
and they need to be able to use it in their day-to-day life.
And so we process as easy as possible.
And I should say too,
that that's not just us as the Stellar Development Foundation.
That's our ecosystem.
So that's the wallets that build upon Stellar.
That's the ramps on and off ramps.
Everyone, I think in the Stellar ecosystem
has this commitment to making it
very easy to use in the real world, to bringing this best in class technology to people who don't
usually receive it. And I think a strength and a differentiator with Stellar.
Nice. Awesome. It sounds like we should get into the demo because I'm sure there'll be questions
that come out of that. So correct me if I'm wrong wrong i think how we're going to set this up is you're going to
play the role of the uh financial person who's sending things out and i'm going to play the role
of someone sort of receiving um receiving it so i'll let you maybe lead off and then you you sort
of guide me as a as a user or recipient of what i would experience all right let's do it
pray that god's here so i lit a candle earlier so it's fine okay great well and i should say too
like i you know i'm the i'm the technical person i'm the product person and so it doesn't matter
how many hundreds of times thousands of times i I've done this successfully. I'm still going to think about worst case scenario.
So, all right, we're going to sign in here.
This is me as the financial administrator at an organization signing in.
It's important to note that this is completely contained within the organization.
So Stellar Development Foundation does not have any access to this tool.
It's open source, so people can deploy it in their own environments.
And then there are third-party hosts that offer it as a service.
But we as SDF don't have any access to the data or the funds, anything like that.
So you can see in here, I come into my dashboard, super simple.
This is an instance that I use for my own testing.
testing. So that's why you see some intentional funny looking numbers in here. And it's laid out
So that's why you see some intentional, funny-looking numbers in here.
by disbursements, which is the batch of payments, the receivers, which I'm not going to display
because that has actually some people's emails in there, but we'll see some examples in a moment.
And then the payments themselves. So it kind of goes from top of funnel and more granular and
more granular. You start with the batch and you, top of funnel and more granular and more granular.
You start with the batch and you've got the individuals and you've got the individual
payments themselves. And if we click into a payment, you can see this is where it starts to
look a little bit technical. But this is what allows the organization to benefit from the
transparency and the traceability that comes with the Stellar blockchain.
So you can see every aspect.
If you wanna go into literally the seconds here
to see exactly what happened on the network
within those five seconds, you can do that.
That's great.
And then this is to one of our staff members.
So that's why I'm sharing it here.
You can see that this is what connects it
to the real world information down at the bottom we've got a receiver here by email their wallet address
this one went to the decaf wallet we have several wallets i'll show in a minute that are set up to
receive disbursements through the sdp and then some information about this particular payment
and their history so then let's go into the wallets. We'll just click through these tabs. Sorry, very secure here.
Sometimes we'll get kicked out.
This has been audited by an external security company several times as well.
We feel very good about that. So if anything, I'd say it's a little too secure.
It makes it a little annoying to you sometimes,
like sometimes you get kicked
out. All right. So we've got different wallet providers in here and you can toggle them on and
off. These are the receiver wallets. So today we're going to use Beans. That's what you're
going to receive in. We've got options for Decaf, a user managed wallet, which is just if the user
happens to have their own existing stellar account you can send
directly to that address you don't need to go through a third-party wallet provider uh vibrant
assist which is the aid and humanitarian app offered by so would a user managed wallet be if
you had someone sophisticated with a ledger or something like that who wanted to receive like yeah yeah or for example uh let's say that a a wallet like beans actually
wanted to pay rewards to their users they already know all they already know all of the stellar
addresses associated with those users and so it doesn't make sense for them to invite them
to receive through beans app they just want to send directly into an existing wallet
okay got it yeah uh and then finally i'll come over here the distribution account this is the
source of funds for the stellar distribution platform so this is the account that gets
funded you can see in here i i have usdc uh that's what i primarily send through this instance but again it works with any stellar asset
um and so very very simple to fund and use uh while you're on that i guess in that common
um assets that are used by sort of people in the real world does it tend to be stable coins or
does it just vary yep yeah i would say almost exclusively stable coins except for that um like rewards use
case where a a crypto native organization that is sending out true crypto um yeah to to their users
um but for most organizations enterprises that are this, they're not interested in anything that includes volatility.
And so they they want stable coins, whether it's dollar based, euro based or a local currency.
Got it. Cool. Yeah. All right. So let's go. Let's send you some money.
All right. And you can you see my drop down box? Sometimes the screen sharing.
All right. And you can you see my drop down box sometimes the screen sharing?
Yeah. I can see new disbursement, disbursement details, email, email phone number.
I can just see you've got email selected.
Okay. Yeah. So when I, when I click on this, there's a drop down box that allows me to select
either email phone number or that known wallet address. And so we're going to do email today,
but this is basically how the person, how the receiver is going to be invited to receive their
funds. So it can work with email or phone number. This is nice for people around the world who,
I mean, some of them may or may not have an email address. I would say in the aid use case,
most of that is by phone number. And in the aid use case, most of that is by phone number.
And in the payroll use case,
most of that is by email because people are used to receiving
salary payments by email.
Yeah.
I guess before,
let me just stop you to make sure I follow you.
So in this example,
I guess I already have a beans wallet,
but someone might just have a phone number
and never have had a wallet before, right? So that would
work similarly? Yeah. So we know, I mean, 99% of the world does not have a crypto wallet. And
our thesis is that they shouldn't have to in order to receive digital assets. They should be able to
be invited to do that in a seamless way that gets them set up without them needing to understand blockchain or crypto.
So we call this wallets on the fly.
The SDP actually facilitates creating a new wallet for someone when they're invited to receive funds if they don't already have one.
So we're going to skip that part of it today because we already have a Beans account, but it's very similar.
The same link routes you to the App store if you don't already have the wallet
downloaded and then you just create an account and it goes right into the process that we'll do today.
Got it. And is the finance person, if you're playing the finance person role,
are they deciding which wallet or are they getting a little bit of education and just being like,
I'll just pick that one? So this is where SDF usually works with them.
If they're truly, totally new to blockchain,
they have no idea what they're doing.
We usually advise on what might work best for their use case.
And that depends on where they're sending funds.
Certain wallets are geared for certain geographies.
So for example, if you've got someone sending to Latin America,
then we might recommend Vibrant because they're very strong across Central and South America.
And they have a robust support team available to support people in those countries that know
how people typically use products, FinTech products in those countries. And I'll say from
working in Africa,
it's so interesting to see people click things differently around the world.
So it really matters to have local expertise.
Yeah, okay.
But there are some organizations
that need to send globally.
And so EANS is a great example of a wallet
that does that very well.
I would say they're probably the generic global wallet for us.
If you want to send to 100 countries, great, use Beans.
Okay, cool.
All right, so we're going to do...
What is today?
All right. We're queuing up this disbursement now. I've selected beans. You're going to receive in USDC. And then the verification type, this is an extra security measure to make sure that the organizations feel confident that they are sending to the right person.
So the person is going to get invited to receive these funds.
They're going to verify their email or their phone number, whatever is being used.
Fine.
But many organizations have expressed this concern that, you know, how do I know that
this is the right person?
It should be something you have, something you know.
And so we ask the receivers to verify with one additional piece of information to prove
they're the right person to prevent the case of somebody stealing the phone and getting
the money. Options here, we're going to use pen today because
it's super easy. I've set one for you. We've discussed this. It's stellar. But the other
options are date of birth or national ID number. And this is something that the person will be told
separately before the payment arrives.
Yes. So this is to ensure that there is a real life relationship between the
organization that is paying this person and the person. Now with pen,
like if you want to use,
if I had a thousand receivers in this batch instead of just you,
I could use the same pen for all of them if I wanted to.
So if an organization was registering people, let's say after a flood, and they want to use the same pen for everybody, that's totally
fine. But if you, let's say that you're in a more sensitive environment and you want to make sure
that, again, this is something that is easy enough for the actual receiver to know and verify,
that is easy enough for the actual receiver to know and verify, don't want anyone else to be able
to do that, then another data point might be a better fit. It just depends on what the organization
wants. Okay, cool. Yeah. All right. So this is, we have the option here to customize the invitation
that you're going to receive by email. We're not going to do this today, but you can put any message you want in there.
So this allows people if they're sending to different countries across the world
and need to put the invitation message in different languages or real life example,
you know, people are sending to victims of domestic violence.
You do not want to mention you have a payment waiting for you in something like that so yeah this is as generic or specific as you'd like and then the last step here we're going
to upload a csv of the receivers and i'll zoom in so you can see this i'm now on the review stage
and this is you hopefully hopefully it's all right here i'm just playing your email
Hopefully it's all right here.
I'm just playing your email.
Congrats.
That's fine.
And now reach out to Aaron.
And then the file is really simple.
So it's just the email address or the phone number,
depending on what you're sending by, a unique person ID.
So I've assigned one to you.
This is what allows me as the sender to track you back to my internal systems.
So I file this with my source data.
Might be your payroll number or something like that.
Yeah, so this is your Aaron ID and then the amount that you're being paid in that asset
that we selected above and then the verification. So in this case, the stellar pin. If this was
date of birth, this is where you would have date of birth. There are some optional fields that I have not included here for a payment, unique payment ID.
So if I'm paying you every month, you know, your VC01 ID would be the same, but maybe I've got January payment, February payment, March payment, etc.
And then there's one additional field for a memo. So for those of you that might be familiar with the Stellar blockchain, you can send just account to account by address.
And that works perfectly fine.
But some custodians, exchanges use omnibus accounts.
And so they actually have multiple organizations or people attached to one address.
And in that case, they use what we call memos to distinguish basically the idea
of sub accounts supports that as well.
If we had an exchange like you're sending to a Coinbase account,
then you would put you would use the known address feature and you would include
the address in the memo to make sure that it gets to that right sub account.
Yep. All right.
So we don't need that in this case. We're going to that right sub account. Yep. All right. So we don't need that in
this case. We're going to confirm. Ta-da. Great. We're going to go view this. This has gone out.
So in a second or two, you should be receiving an email. And then while you queue that up,
I'll just run through this. So this now this disbursement has been created. It's important
to note the money does not leave the account until the receiver claims those funds so this is another another thing that like if we're
talking about accountability efficiency traceability transparency uh this is one way to ensure that
you're never sending money into a black box or um a potentially dead account it can be sent once the receiver has participated in that process,
at least for the first time. This process that you're about to do only happens the first time
that someone receives money from an organization because they have to link, they have to create the
new wallet and then link it to the SDP. Once the SDP knows where to send those funds, then you can
just send into it. Nothing is required on behalf of the receiver.
But this first time we have to link the wallet.
So you'll see down here that we've got your information going into beans,
but the completed at and the blockchain ID are blank
because this payment has not been processed.
So you are sitting here in ready status.
And then now we can go over to you and claim these funds.
Yeah.
I do have an email.
So there is that.
Okay.
Here's my phone.
Let's all pretend that I have an empty inbox all the time.
But like I've got this email here.
So I'm going to tap into it.
So I have a payment waiting for me from Stellar Development Foundation.
So I'm going to on, tap to register.
And that's gonna take me somewhere.
Okay, so this is, I've got Beans already installed.
So if I didn't have it installed,
it goes to the App Store, right?
I'm gonna tap open.
Oh, okay, claim your payment.
Thank you for reaching the step. it's like i'm learning as
as we're all learning here okay so thank you for reaching you have not done this before
so okay so i'm going to tap proceed so tap proceed and then i guess i'm going to have to put my email
in to verify is that right right? Email, continue.
So this is making sure that the person is still in control of that email or phone number.
Prevent the case of sending into a number that no longer exists.
Yeah. Okay. Let's do this.
Because I'll say you're doing this right now but sometimes you might have
like an aid organization that is sending out after an emergency and those people are on the move maybe
they've left the country their phone number has changed something like that so that's why we
we have that otp and you'll get that in your email you get the otp okay let's do that let's go back
okay here we go good uh nine five two three two eight uh nine five two two three eight and then
my super secret pin that you told me before and displayed so let's do this uh Again, I'm not a robot, but I will look at the motorcycle.
This is one of those post-security audit.
You've got to prove several times that you're not a robot.
But for organizations, I actually think, check your passcode.
I think it might have been 328.
Oh, okay. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, user error. Can't account for that. Three, two, eight. Okay.
Oh, it's good. I've seen every combination of, you know, I promise that's my email. No, it's not.
no it's not yeah yeah you know okay cool there we go uh i've been verified so i go back home
Yeah. Okay, cool. There we go.
so i did have 10 i think usdc in there before so do i refresh my balance or give it we'll give
it about 10 seconds okay then we will see so i i sent you five so So you're good. There we go. Ta-da. Okay. Wow.
Congratulations.
Yeah.
I'll have to send that back to you afterwards.
Cool.
Well, that was the experience.
It was, apart from me trying to remember rather copy pasting the passcode,
I think that was like fairly seamless.
So I guess, is there more you wanted to show on like your side of it,
like now that I've claimed it or
is that pretty much the experience? We'll just go back and refresh the page just so everybody can
see what this looks like now. Okay so am I, let me zoom back out here, there we go. All right so now
you see that the blockchain ID has been filled in and the payment status is now set to success. That actually went through a pending status as well for about five seconds before it reached success. And if you wanted to verify this information, you can actually go see that. Well, it's not showing, but you can actually go see that on a block explorer and check it on the stellar network to make sure that it happened. Now again, the enterprises using this don't really tend to do that, but knowing that it can be
verified and all traced on the blockchain. Now just for fun, we did not discuss doing this,
but I'm going to do it. We're going to send you another one just to show just to show how easy it is afterwards okay
oh because i've gone through my initial um verification so i'm actually just going to use
the same sheet so again if i'm paying you on a monthly basis paying you five dollars every
month congratulations uh now i actually just created
that disbursement i mean you saw that took 10 seconds if i was a financial administrator i
would review it more thoroughly uh but you can see now it goes straight to pending status because it
already knows your wallet address you've already linked it you've gone through that process we're
confident that's the right person that's the right place to send funds and so it goes straight into pending uh and then when i refresh the page here
again tada congratulations so now you've actually just received another five dollars five usd oh
okay go into your receiver account here um i can show that you've received ten dollars total from
me yeah you have the uh the id that lets me trace you back to my source systems and then you've received $10 total from me. You have the ID that lets me trace you back to my source systems.
And then you've got the payments history in here. So I can see this is pulled straight from the
Stellar blockchain itself. I can see the balance that you currently have. And then this is just
on-chain public history. And then the payments down here that I've made to you. And again,
if I want to go into any of those payments,
oh, there we go, I'm kicked out again.
But if we want to go into any of those payments,
we would see the very granular details of that.
Yeah.
I just confirming I got the extra five,
so that just happened while you were talking.
So that's cool.
Awesome.
Well, thank you for it makes it more real when you sort of show it like that. I guess
let's talk. I know a lot of this is sort of covered on various parts of the Scala website.
People want to learn more, but like some of the use cases where people are like using this sort
of right now and like various level of scale. Can you can you sort of paint a picture of that? Yeah. So we have small organizations that use this primarily for payroll.
And that's for organizations that maybe they have like one or two engineers.
They're usually tech companies that have the ability to set this up internally, run it
themselves. Awesome.
And they're working with people around the world who are comfortable receiving
salary payments or gig work payments on their phones.
That's that's the small end of the spectrum.
Then you've got the total opposite end
of the spectrum where we actually work with
the largest aid organization in the world,
the largest development organization in the world,
and the largest government funding organization
in the world in the humanitarian space.
And so I like to highlight that,
even though it's all geared towards the humanitarian side,
I mean, these are organizations that process billions
and billions of billions of dollars per year.
And so you can imagine their standards are incredibly high and they've been able to implement
this. And that's for both cash assistance and payroll. We also are really excited about
government social programs. So again, domestic governments are usually one of the largest
payers in an account. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And so I think about tax refunds
in the US. This is a huge thing every year. And for people who've linked their bank account,
it works well. But if you don't have a bank account or you can't receive in that way,
I mean, we're still going through mailing paper checks or sending prepaid cards. And it's bad
for both the sender and the receiver of funds.
Yeah.
So this is a much more efficient option that, again,
has that built in accountability and traceability.
So that's all kind of just on the Stellar Disbursement
platform as it is today.
But I do understand where we're going with it because-
Go for it, yeah.
Yeah, it's gonna unlock a lot more.
We, as I mentioned, we started with this particular use case for enterprises because we had a concrete real world need.
We also know that both payments are not the only kind of payments that organizations do.
And so this year we are expanding the stellar disbursement platform and you didn't hear it from me, probably rebranding it so that it can support enterprises
across the board. So whether they are accepting payments in, whether they're sending one off
payments to individuals, not both payments or B2B payments or even payments out to a bank account
instead of a crypto wallet, yes, support all of that. Yeah. So we're really making this the one-stop shop for organizations that want to do any sort
of transactions on Stellar.
So that's really cool.
So that finance person suddenly has a lot more tools, right?
They can receive in, they can pay to bank out.
Nice.
Nice.
Nice.
Cool.
I'm conscious of time.
We've got, I guess, a few minutes left. So I would be curious, like, what you want to share that's also going on in the stellar world. And I've heard the Meridian location, your annual conference has been announced. So if you want to tell us a little bit about that, that would be great.
everyone is welcome please come it's i think this the social highlight of my year each year
uh it is going to be in rio this year so we just announced the location we're doing this uh drip
tease announcement style so we've announced the location we have not announced the dates yet but
they will be coming soon so please stay tuned uh find us on x that's stellar org that's probably
the best place to keep in touch
or keep up to date on those announcements. So yes, come to Meridian. It's a lot of fun.
But there's a lot going on between now and then. It'll be sometime in the fall.
So some of the interesting things, I think, there's a lot obviously happening in the DeFi
space because of Sorbonne. Hot Wallet just launched on Stellar
weeks ago as a Telegram wallet. We've got lots going on in the tokenization of real world assets
space because that's something that, again, we were built for 11 years ago and now the rest of
the industry has caught up. Awesome. So there's a lot going on there, but also a lot on the enterprise side, which is where I focus.
So PayFi, payments financing, working towards T plus zero settlement, supply chain financing,
expanding the liquidity and financing options for small to medium sized enterprises around the world
that can't get access to capital in their countries through their banking system.
can't get access to capital in their countries through their banking system. A lot on that side.
A lot on that side.
We've got privacy solutions coming to Stellar just like everywhere else. So there's a lot.
Please come hang out with us. Build on Stellar. It's a great experience.
Awesome. Cool. The one thing I forgot to ask about the Stellar disbursement platform is like
if let's assume that I was receiving those funds and i was in
a country where i like didn't have a bank account or something like i could off ramp right i could
go somewhere and like actually get physical currency somewhere yeah so it depends on the
off ramps that are available within that wallet um but we that's where again we try to advise to
make it as as seamless as possible.
MoneyGram is usually the default option because it's global.
Everyone knows about it.
And they have 380,000 cash out points around the world.
That's in 180 countries and territories.
But all the wallets have additional off-ramps that are usually country or region specific. So, for example, if I'm using Vibrant in Argentina or Brazil or Mexico,
I can cash out to my bank account digitally.
That's actually what a lot of people in Ukraine do as well
because they're, I think, over 80% banked.
And so there are interactions there.
But also in a place like Rwanda, where I used to live,
you can cash out to mobile money
because that's the domestic payment system that people are using.
They know, they trust. And so that's where we try to make sure that we're integrated with.
Cool. Yes, that's very cool. I guess like as we sort of close out here,
are there any like broader like Web3 trends that you, Stella, are like paying attention to?
to? I know there's a lot going on within SDF, but then more broadly things happening.
I know there's a lot going on within SDF, but then more broadly things happening.
Yeah. I mean, I think we, if we've been guilty of anything over the years, it's that we've always
been a good place to build. We've always had very mature technology, but we haven't shown up and
communicated that very well. So I want to say yes. I mean, the same trends that you're seeing across the industry are happening on Stellar, whether that is privacy or compression or real world assets.
Like, yes, all of that is happening on Stellar.
But I think what we have started to do better is show up and talk about it and show builders how they can get involved in the ecosystem.
and show builders how they can get involved in the ecosystem.
So for example, like today, literally today,
we have an event going on in New York called Stellar House
that Paxos and Citibank and MoneyGram are there
talking about what they're doing in Web3,
as well as just fintech builders that have started their own thing.
They saw a need in the world.
They're the expert on their local context
and they're building on Stellar to fix that problem.
So we've got that. We were in D.C. last week, Istanbul last week, Paris next week.
So I think we're doing a better job of making ourselves accessible and showing people how they can tap into the technology that has always been solid.
Nice. Yeah. I guess it's you've constantly got to be out there banging the drum, haven't you, to make sure that people know you're there
and like they can start.
We're trying.
We have not always done the best job of that.
But I think we see that people deserve
to be able to build on this open permissionless technology.
And unless you tell them, they're not going to know.
And people still, even in the web
three world they want a relationship that's something that we can do as the foundation
as a relatively small group we have that personal touch we can do that and so we should
awesome uh cool so i just wanted to say thank you tori like you've run us through um the sdp
i've been a recipient.
It's worked, which is great.
I never had any doubts.
Are there any sort of closing remarks you want to share with everyone
or like where they can find out more?
Yeah, X is probably the best place.
Also, Stellar.org.
We do quarterly updates
if you're interested in following
what's on the network at a more formal level and then engage with us on social media at Stellar org in the meantime.
Awesome. Cool. All right. Well, this has been Around the Block. You've learned about Stellar. You've learned about the Stellar Disbursement Platform.
the video to YouTube
if anyone wants to re-watch
or catch up. You can
connect with us at
validationcloud.io
if you want to build on Zoraban.
And yeah, thank you
very much for your time. We'll let you go, Tori.
Have a good rest of your Wednesday and
thank you to everyone out there.
Thanks so much, Aaron. Bye-bye.
