How Kura Is Using USDC to Reach Haiti's Last Mile

In Port-au-Prince, five neighborhood pharmacies needed to restock critical medicines fast. Through a bulk aid disbursement tied to the Hope for Haiti initiative, they did it in hours — a turnaround that previously could take more than a month. The payment was settled using USDC.

Those pharmacies are part of a network built by Kura, a digital cross-border payments platform and Circle Alliance Program (CAP) member. Across Haiti and the wider Caribbean, aid, remittances, and cross-border payments already move into local economies every day. But that value does not always reach the small businesses that anchor daily life: pharmacies, grocery stores, health care providers, schools, and family-run shops. For many merchants, digital payment infrastructure still stops before checkout.

Kura is building for that last mile. The company offers a mobile merchant payment network that helps businesses in frontier markets accept dollar-denominated payments at the point of sale, with USDC¹ as the settlement layer. Merchants can join with a legally registered business and a mobile device. No hardware point-of-sale system, website, or advanced technical integration is required.

From payment gap to merchant network

For Kura co-founder Clifford Nau, the mission began with a local infrastructure gap. Born and raised in Haiti, Clifford spent years working across government and financial services before launching Alpha Haiti, an accelerator for Caribbean startups. The startups had promising products, Nau said, but they struggled to move money digitally. “The payment infrastructure was not there,” Clifford said.

Kura’s answer is not to route around local merchants, but to make them the endpoint. Its network is designed around the people already involved in essential payments: the sponsor sending support, the organization distributing aid, the beneficiary receiving help, and the merchant providing goods or services.

How Kura works

Kura connects sponsors, support organizations, beneficiaries, and approved local merchants. A sponsor or organization can fund essential goods and services; a beneficiary receives a QR code and security code to redeem value with Kura merchants for categories such as health care, groceries, education, rent, wellness, and bill payments. No bank account, app, or cash pickup is required for the beneficiary to access the funds.

That merchant-centered model is what makes the impact tangible. A family member abroad can help cover school fees or groceries. A humanitarian organization can route aid toward a specific category of goods and services. A local merchant can receive payment directly, serve the customer, and keep more value moving inside the community.

Why Kura chose USDC

For Kura, USDC provides a dollar-denominated settlement layer that operates 24/7. That matters in markets where traditional banking hours can delay urgent payments, and where access to dollar-denominated payments can help merchants manage cross-border trade, supplier payments, and local cash flow.

The use of USDC also helps Kura explain its model to institutions — central banks, ministries of finance, financial institutions, and humanitarian organizations — that may already be familiar with Circle and USDC. “That de-risks our go-to-market strategy working with Circle from day 1,” Clifford said. “We were very intentional about it.”

From global payments to local goods

Kura is onboarding more than 700 merchants across Haiti, with plans to scale to thousands more across the region. The Hope for Haiti pharmacies are one example of what the network can do when payments are urgent — and Kura is building toward more, with the same pattern: a sponsor, a beneficiary, a merchant, and value that arrives the same day it is needed.

For Kura, the larger goal is simple: help global flows become usable at the local point of sale. As Clifford put it, “What the merchant wants is to get paid.”

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^{1. USDC is issued by regulated affiliates of Circle. A list of Circle’s regulatory authorizations can be found here. ‍}

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