Wapu Pay’s Mission and Objective

Wapu was founded with the mission to provide a faster, safer, and more convenient payment experience for digital nomads, foreign students, and expats, leveraging the existing payment network in the region. Particularly for foreigners without a local ID, trying to pay like a local often becomes a frustrating hurdle.

Wapu Pay empowers users to pay anyone, anywhere in Argentina, at any time. It lets you use bitcoin and stablecoins to make payments in Argentine pesos, effortlessly, via QR codes or bank transfers to the country’s most popular local payment apps.

Challenge

Wapu aims to make it especially easy for foreigners to top up their Wapu Pay accounts and seamlessly pay with Argentine pesos anywhere in the country. However, users still face challenges when trying to deposit funds stored in traditional bank accounts:

1. Transaction fees: Depending on the transfer method and the countries involved, fees for cross-boarder payments to top up a Wapu Pay account typically range from 5% to 7%, and can be significantly higher in some corridors (World Bank, 2024).
2. Settlement Time: Traditional cross border payments can take several hours to a few business days to settle, depending on the provider, destination country, and payout method (Stripe, 2024). This makes spontaneous topups nearly impossible which often happens right when you actually need to make a payment.

For fintechs focused on cross-border payments, enabling bitcoin deposits, the world’s most widely adopted cryptocurrency (Blackrock, 2025), is a logical and increasingly necessary step. However, integrating a reliable and secure wallet solution into existing software infrastructure remains a significant technical 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, Wapu Pay enabled topups that excel in terms of sending cost and settlement time:

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

Wapu Pay can now offer these benefits to their users while ensuring:

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 SDKs, APIs and additional tools for seamless programmatic interaction with Alby Hubs. For instance, Wapu utilizes Alby’s lightning address service without any additional integration effort to accept bitcoin payments from their users. 

Andres Chapo, founder of Wapu, has this to say about Alby Hub:

“Our users had been asking us for months to integrate Bitcoin into Wapu Pay for top-ups. We finally chose Alby Hub because it was super easy to integrate with our services. Since Alby follows the LNURL standard, we were able to add this feature in less than a week.”

Outcome and Outlook

Andres shares more insights: “According to our users, especially expats, Wapu Pay is the only practical way for them to make local transfers in Argentina. Additionally, merchants can now accept bitcoin payments and easily offramp through Wapu Pay in just minutes. In the future, we plan to give each user their own lightning address, for example, andy@wapu.app, so they can receive payments directly.”

Alby Hub’s scalability and value added services support these ambitions.

Ready for your next trip to Argentina? Visit Wapu Pay to start sending money and enjoy your stay as a local.