What does this mean for Meld customers?

You can accelerate your next generation of use cases to any market, convert fiat currencies and digital assets seamlessly across multiple applications, in a fully compliant manner, all with a single Meld integration and contract. 

Meld was born with a vision to make it easy for developers to build apps that required multiple fintech integrations. The early building blocks of integrating multiple payment and bank linking APIs gave us a front row seat into the developer experience and exacting customer requirements. 

Listening to hundreds of customers along the journey, we learned important lessons that are driving Meld’s growth.

Lesson 1: Crypto rails as the de facto medium for global access to money

Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been

- Wayne Gretzky, 1999 Hockey Hall of Fame 

Our customers needed better on and offramps into digital assets such Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and increasingly, stablecoins. The marginal new fintech experience is being built to include crypto rails as the medium of global access to money and financial services.

Blockchain rails are an important evolution of financial rails. We see orders of magnitude improvements to how money is accessed and transmitted to a much larger segment of the world’s population. This is the story of the internet and exactly what broadband did to dial-up, email did to faxes, and what WhatsApp did to SMS. The perfect segue into our second lesson.

Lesson 2: Blockchain rails will democratize Financial Services

[SMS] stinks. It’s a dead technology, like a fax machine left over from the Seventies, sitting there as a cash cow for carriers

- Jan Koum, co-founder of WhatsApp

Because digital assets settle on public blockchains, they are globally accessible, move across borders in seconds instead of hours or days, operate 24/7, and dramatically reduce dependence on intermediaries who add cost, complexity, overhead, and time.

Early examples of the benefits of blockchain rails deserve attention: 

Accessing and moving money more efficiently

Stablecoins have grown from a niche experiment to handling trillions of dollars in on-chain volume each year as businesses and individuals look for faster and more predictable ways to move money. They also unlock programmability directly into applications, reducing manual reconciliation and errors. 

A leading global remittance platform is using Meld to transmit millions of dollars a month in cross border transfers: funds originate from a local currency, are transferred into stablecoins, sent globally, and converted to the destination currency at the last mile. Our customer benefits from increased speed, lower costs, and greater visibility into their transactions.

Store of value and investment use cases

Bitcoin has emerged as the premier digital asset, akin to 'digital gold',  a self-sovereign long term store of value. Ethereum, Solana, and other emerging blockchains are used not just to power stablecoins, but also as ecosystems for applications to drive investment, yield, and trading.

We’re working with a global wallet to help millions of users convert fiat into native digital assets and stablecoins with the lowest prices and highest transaction success rates in the industry, thanks to Meld’s Ramp Intelligence features.

Meld is investing in moving assets, transactions, and the financial world from old fiat rails to new blockchain rails.

Lesson 3: Build the future

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

-Peter Drucker, Father of Modern Management Theory

Developers, merchants, and users will benefit enormously as trillions of dollars of fiat currencies and financial assets move from centralized systems to open blockchains. However, the path from traditional currencies to digital assets such as stablecoins remains fragmented, complex, and frustrating to access. The Meld Network is a decisive step forward to address these challenges.

Working with Meld, you can:

• Access global liquidity and on/offramp rails in 190+ countries

• Build apps to power emerging retail use cases like trading, investment, and yield generation.

• Enable better alternatives to traditional rails for use cases such as remittances, global trade, and global payroll.

Explore how we can help you move from fax machine era financial services into the future!

Head over to our developer docs or contact us to get going!