ChapSmart’s Mission and Objective

ChapSmart is a remittance service making it easier and faster to send money to Tanzania. By using bitcoin and the lightning network, ChapSmart allows users to send payments instantly, with low fees and no middlemen. You pay in bitcoin, and the recipient receives Tanzanian Shillings directly to their M-Pesa account often within seconds. It’s a simple, efficient way to move money across borders using bitcoin and lightning's modern, open payment infrastructure.

Challenge

For many people sending money across borders with traditional remittance services creates a range of inconvenience and risk. For example, in some regions, recipients must travel long distances or wait in line at agents to collect their funds. On top of that, a lack of transparency and limited access to banking infrastructure often makes the process even more difficult. Leveraging M-Pesa as a local payment network is one part of the solution offered by ChapSmart. 

But challenges remain: 

1. Sending Cost: Depending on the transfer method and the countries involved, remittance fees typically range from 5% to 7%, and can be significantly higher in some corridors (World Bank, 2024).
2. Settlement Time: Traditional remittance services can take several hours to a few business days to settle, depending on the provider, destination country, and payout method. Delays are common, especially for cross-border transfers involving banks or rural cash pickups (Stripe, 2024) . 

For remittance providers, integrating a reliable wallet solution into their existing software stack is often a significant challenge.

3. Limited control over wallet infrastructure reduces flexibility to customize payment flows or adapt to specific business needs.
4. Cumbersome integration harms operational efficiency and scalability

Solution

Leveraging Alby’s self-custodial bitcoin lightning wallet, Alby Hub, ChapSmart created an innovative remittance service that excels in terms of sending cost and settlement time:

1. Sending Cost: Bitcoin's lightning network enables near-zero transaction fees making it significantly cheaper than traditional remittance services (source).  
2. Settlement Time: Payments on the lightning network settle instantly, typically within a few seconds globally, regardless of the recipient’s location (source).

ChapSmart can now offer these benefits while ensuring flexibility to adjust to different user segments and scale across countries.

3. Full Control: Alby Hub provides a self-custodial wallet, enabling operators to interact directly with the bitcoin lightning network without relying on third-party custodians. This setup reduces the risk of locked funds and ensures continuous operations, all within an intuitive management interface.
4. Ease of integration: Alby offers powerful APIs, webhooks, and access tokens for seamless programmatic interaction with Alby Hubs. ChapSmart utilized these tools to automate platform flows from receiving bitcoin payments to sending Tanzanian Shillings (TZS) via M-Pesa.

Brian Mosha, founder of Chapsmart, has this to say about Alby Hub “We chose Alby Hub for ChapSmart because it provides a seamless, self-custodial Bitcoin Lightning wallet with a one-click node setup, making it incredibly easy to manage and integrate into our platform. Alby’s cloud hosting ensures our node is always online with reliable performance”

Outcome and Outlook

Just six weeks after launch, ChapSmart saw rapid adoption, processing over 120 transactions from more than 50 users and delivering significant fee savings. A user, Amina, shared: “ChapSmart’s instant M-Pesa transfers saved me travel costs and gave me more for my children’s school supplies.”

ChapSmart plans working on expanding the platform to include the ability to pay electricity and water bills to further empower their users with convenient financial solutions.

 Alby Hub’s scalability supports these ambitions.

Ready to transform remittances? Visit chapsmart.com to start sending money today. Explore Alby Hub at getalby.com