How Coala Pay uses USDC to deliver aid in minutes to the hardest corridors

When Melyn McKay worked in South Sudan, there was not a functioning ATM in the entire country. To move humanitarian funds, she would fly to Dubai, withdraw cash from her own bank account, and carry it back across the border in her trousers, hoping no one would stop her at a checkpoint manned by armed soldiers. For 15 years, across South Sudan, Lebanon, and Myanmar, she watched the same pattern repeat. The places where help is often the most needed are the places the global financial system has quietly abandoned.

“We’ve built financial infrastructure the same way the British built railroads,” Melyn said. “They were designed to extract wealth out of the country, not to connect the people inside it.” Growing up in the US, she said, she never had to think about how money worked, because money was designed to work for her. Most of the world does not have that luxury.

Melyn is the founder of Coala Pay, a payment platform built specifically for aid delivery and a member of the Circle Alliance Program. Coala Pay moves institutional funds into high-friction corridors in minutes, using USDC as the settlement rail so that more of every donor dollar reaches the frontlines.

Built by humanitarians for the toughest corridors

Coala Pay’s team is made up of aid-sector natives. Its leadership and program staff average more than 15 years in humanitarian work, have led billions of dollars in donor-funded programming, and built systems that deployed hundreds of millions for institutions including UNICEF and the World Bank.

Melyn started Coala Pay in response to a problem she kept hitting in the field. After the 2021 military coup in Myanmar, she said traditional banking channels became dangerous overnight. According to Melyn, the junta was monitoring transactions to track and control the flow of humanitarian funds. Aid is meant to reach people in need regardless of which government is in power, and through the banks on the ground that was suddenly impossible. Coala Pay was an attempt to solve for this.

And while the junta and the banking crackdown that followed is what sparked the creation of Coala Pay, the platform itself is designed to solve for a broad range of aid-related friction. Aid organizations move money to as many as 130 countries a year, across volatile exchange rates, while working to stay accountable for every dollar of public money. It can be challenging. Melyn pointed to a recent Ebola response, when she said a large UN agency’s transfer to West Africa was routed through an intermediary bank in East Africa. That bank held the money for months, earning interest for themselves while delaying the delivery of lifesaving aid.

One interface, settlement in minutes

Coala Pay replaces the fragmented chain of correspondent banks with a single settlement layer. An organization connects its treasury and funds the Coala Pay platform with a standard fiat transfer. Coala Pay works with licensed partners who handle the conversion into USDC, routes the payment through a network of vetted local offramp providers, and settles to recipients in minutes, including in corridors where conventional rails stall for weeks.

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The design reflects how aid teams actually operate. Multi-signature approvals mirror the real reporting lines of a humanitarian agency, requiring sign-off from both headquarters and country offices before any capital moves. Every step is recorded onchain. Foreign exchange (FX) rates, timestamps, and payout confirmations are captured automatically, so donor reports are generated as the money moves rather than reconstructed from spreadsheets weeks later.

The platform also adds a layer of programmability that traditional rails lack. Using an onchain oracle, Coala Pay can tie disbursements to external data, releasing funds automatically when thresholds like drought or flood levels are met. 

“Rather than waiting two weeks for funds to arrive in a community after an earthquake or a flood, we’re able to get those funds on the ground in less than 72 hours,” Melyn said. “In the aid sector, time saved is lives saved.”

Why Coala Pay chose USDC for aid delivery

For Coala Pay, the choice of which stablecoin to use was a question of trust as much as technology. “We’re not in an industry where ‘move fast and break things’ works,” Melyn said. “We need to come to our clients with something that feels more secure than what they’re currently using, not less.”

In Melyn’s eyes, that ruled out most of the stablecoin market. “I can’t ask a UN agency to take a bet on a small token no one has ever heard of,” Melyn said. “They can’t act like VCs, deciding who is going to be around in the future.” 

Working with Circle and USDC, a regulated¹ internet-native dollar, gives the treasurers she works with something they can verify rather than something they have to believe in. 

“Working with a public company that has been around a long time, that is MiCA compliant, those are the things that help a UN or INGO treasurer get comfortable with a new technology rather than taking a leap of faith,” Melyn said.

Every USDC is backed by cash and cash-equivalent reserves, with monthly attestations from a Big Four accounting firm, and it is the world’s largest regulated stablecoin¹. For a treasurer moving public money into a fragile corridor to reach vulnerable populations, that combination of stability, transparency, regulatory standing, and 24/7 settlement is what makes the technology adoptable at all.

What changes on the ground when aid settles faster

In late 2025, months ahead of the drought season, the Norwegian Refugee Council in Somalia committed $6,270 to each of its three local partners, writing the release conditions into smart contracts that drew on satellite drought data and ran against a wallet NRC controlled directly. Once the thresholds were crossed, each partner’s account was funded in about two minutes — not the minimum eight days for the quickest emergency channel NRC otherwise relies on. The early action reached 2,955 people across three districts with water trucking, hygiene kits, and cash assistance.

In Malawi, Save the Children's SHIFT initiative used Coala Pay to send a $2,000 milestone-based grant straight to a Lilongwe-based, youth-run climate group. That is exactly the kind of small, local organization that conventional grant pipelines turn away: vetting a $1,000 grant can cost more than the grant is worth. Because the funds sat in USDC until the moment of payout, the money reached the group with more of its value intact, even as the Malawian kwacha rapidly lost ground. The grant trained 160 students directly and reached more than 4,000 through peer cascade.

“In aid work, more money on the ground means more people helped,” Melyn said.

And in Kenya, the peacebuilding NGO Search for Common Ground paid 943 young survey respondents across all 47 counties with a 99.7% success rate, the slowest US payment still arriving in under two hours, and its finance team never entering a single transfer by hand. 

From last resort to first choice

Coala Pay built its reputation in corridors others shied away from — where conventional rails can stall for weeks and lifesaving money can sit in an intermediary bank earning interest while a community waits. Having proven that USDC can move value into those places in minutes instead of weeks, Melyn now sees the same rail reshaping the parts of aid finance everyone has simply accepted: the monthly FX rates and intermediary spreads that quietly erode every donor dollar long before it reaches the field.

That is the larger shift underway. The settlement layer that made early action possible in a drought — funds released automatically the moment satellite data crossed a threshold — is the same layer that can make ordinary disbursements faster, cheaper, and fully accountable across the as many as 130 countries aid flows to each year. With a regulated¹, internet-native dollar as the foundation, programmability becomes the default: money that arrives in minutes, reports itself onchain as it moves, and holds its value relative to local currencies.

“For the first time, I’m coming to agencies I've worked with my whole career and saying, ‘here is a solution that will make your life easier,’” Melyn said. “If we can handle the really hard corridors, imagine how easy we can make the easy ones.”

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

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