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Case Study

Delivering dollars to global workers with Airtm & USDC

The opportunity

High cross-border payment costs and unstable local currencies make it expensive and difficult for businesses to hire workers in emerging markets.

The solution

Airtm uses USDC to allow businesses to deliver low-cost, dollar-denominated payouts, and enables recipients to easily convert to local currency.

35%

Average savings on cross-border payouts that businesses achieve using Airtm and USDC

$900m

Annual transaction volume on Airtm

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Airtm is a digital wallet app that allows users in 190 countries to send, receive, and save digital dollars. It is a registered Money Service Business incorporated in the US.

Products

Circle Mint

Regions

Latin America

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High dollar demand

In many emerging markets, demand for US dollars is high, but access is limited. Cross-border payments from businesses to contractors or employees can take up to six days to arrive, and fees average more than 6% per transaction. Payments made in local currency can lose value quickly due to inflation.

Workers in these emerging markets want stable earning opportunities, and businesses in developed countries like the US want to hire them. Airtm saw the opportunity to solve this problem by building a fast, low-cost way for businesses to pay workers digital dollars.

 
Video story

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Venezuela, traditional banking solutions couldn’t deliver payments to front-line workers like doctors and nurses when they needed them most. Airtm made it possible to get stable dollar value into the hands of these essential community members and made it easy to convert into local currency using fast, low-cost transactions with USDC.

Paying global employees with USDC

Airtm enables businesses to pay workers all over the world using USDC, a digital dollar built on Web3 infrastructure that can quickly and efficiently be sent, spent, or saved with nothing but an internet-connected smartphone. Workers love Airtm and USDC because they can store earnings in a stable, digital dollar until they need to spend their money.

When a worker needs to spend their money, they can easily convert it to local currency from their phone and have it transferred to their bank account or a prepaid debit card. Airtm manages these conversions through a network of corner stores and other local businesses that act as cashiers.

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The results

Using Airtm and USDC, businesses saved an average of 35% on the cost of sending cross-border payments compared to existing remittance providers. Workers saw payments land in their accounts in USDC in minutes, and could convert it to local fiat for general spending the same day.

USDC is the right stablecoin for Airtm because Circle maintains world-class standards for transparency and responsibility in managing the reserves that back USDC. Circle publishes monthly attestations reflecting that USDC is backed 100% by highly liquid cash and cash-equivalent assets and is always redeemable 1:1 for US dollars.

By leveraging USDC and Web3 infrastructure, Airtm is empowering businesses to hire the right people no matter where they are in the world. When receiving and holding USDC through Airtm, workers can be confident the value of their savings will reflect the stability of the US dollar and can quickly and easily be converted to local currency as needed.

By the numbers
35%

Average savings on cross-border payouts that businesses achieve using Airtm and USDC

160k

Monthly active USDC users in the Airtm app and growing daily

$900m

Annual transaction volume on Airtm

We chose USDC because it has become the standard for the biggest and best companies in the financial technology space; you can take it outside of Airtm to any of the thousands of companies that redeem USDC in exchange for dollars or local currency.”
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Ruben Galindo, CEO, Airtm

*Circle Ventures, an affiliate of Circle Internet Financial, LLC, has invested in Airtm.

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