N.B. For the contracts, see the yapbay-contracts repo.
Yap Bay is a project borne of years of ground work research in Latin America in search of an answer to this question:
How can we create sustainable inflows of cryptocurrency into the hands of new, repeat users, in particular in the developing world?
Currently, few people have crypto, and those who do mostly see it as an investment.
With constant inflows of cryptocurrency, people can start to see it as a currency that they benefit from actually using.
It's not enough to offer people high-fee buy-in options. In fact, those options mean people have to hold their crypto and cheer for number-go-up. Otherwise, they are just losing money by entering crypto.
With regular inflows of crypto, people can be incentivized to stay in crypto and to spend crypto for everyday needs. To save in crypto. To do business in crypto.
This is how we get the next billion crypto users, and how we get them to see crypto as more than a game of betting to get the number to go up.
Remittances are a $700 billion industry where money must cross borders to be useful. This is precisely where cryptocurrency can be most useful right now, because fiat currency is meant to keep people pent up inside nation-state borders.
Crypto sets them free.
Furthermore, remittance fees and paperwork are prohibitively expensive across much of the globe. By building up liquidity and options, remittances can be cheaper and faster. We can use crypto first as a transport layer.
Later, we can provide incentives for users to keep their remittances in crypto, and then spend it at merchants.
This is the beginning of a viable crypto-only economy.
TradFi works worst of all in the developing world. Payment networks don't talk to each other. Regulations are high. Identification is unreliable. Capital formation is compromised.
A great book on this topic is Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital.
All of this adds up to an enormous opportunity make assets liquid, release pent-up desire to form new capital and a unique opportunity to assist the 2 billion working people of the informal economy in creating amazing new prosperity for themselves, and for the rest of the world.
Yap Bay is a kind of LocalBitcoins 2.0. Sure, it will have the same kind of P2P exchange functionality as LocalBitcoins, LocalCryptos, Paxful, etc.
Yap Bay is building ramps, sure. Ramps that don't include protocol-level KYC or AML. Ramps that are open to everyone, everywhere. Ramps that let individual traders decide whom they want to trade with and under what terms. Ramps that are censorship-resistant, decentralized and multi-lingual.
But it's much more than that.
Yap Bay aims to create P2P fiat and crypto liquidity so that remittance senders can make remittances with fiat currency that trace a path through complex and fragmented TradFi payment networks, to get the money where it needs to go, using crypto as the transport layer.
By integrating fiat, we facilitate the entrance of crypto newbies who can use the currencies they are comfortable with.
By using crypto, we bridge disconnected fiat payment networks to get the funds where they need to go, faster and cheaper than current TradFi remittance options.
In this way, we will disrupt TradFi remittances, and give birth to sustainable crypto inflows which can shower thousands of local economies with crypto inflows, giving a needed boost to vibrant crypto economies.
Yap Bay is on a mission to facilitate access to cryptocurrency for people across the globe, without having to endure onerous KYC or the arbitrary limits and opaque reserves status of centralized exchanges (CEXs).
We are building the Yap Bay P2P crypto exchange so anyone, anywhere can have uncensorable, KYC-free, transparent and open-source fiat on- and off-ramps.
We see this as making a meaningful contribution towards the goal of facilitating access to prosperity for people across the globe who have been denied access to the full benefits of an accountable monetary system.
Towards that end, we seek to work with individuals, teams, chains and anyone who is also excited about this mission.
We envision a world of universal prosperity, where every human being has the opportunity to realize their potential.
We envision a world where everyone, everywhere enjoys monetary freedom; and may use and create money as they see fit, trading it on a voluntary basis across borders, from anywhere to anywhere, from anyone to anyone.
We envision a world of crypto mass adoption, where everyone has access to prosperity, where no one is cut out of the system or left behind.
We envision a world free from large-scale oppressive forces such as nation-states and rent-seeking intermediaries such as banks, so that individuals can develop as they see fit, entering into voluntary relationships with each other by mutual agreement, without interference from those who would unjustly tilt the playing field in their own favor using aggressive institutions or unfair restrictions on our liberty.
We encourage you to join us in the process of protocol design via our litepaper GitHub repo, as there is still much to discuss, decide and define. We want and value your input.
If the Yap Bay mission is exciting to you, please join us and contribute to the level that is convenient for you. We welcome the interest of coders, writers, marketers, idea people, thoughtful critics, salespeople, community leaders, prospective partners and more. We want to work with you.
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent