Splice, one of the 4 solutions that won the 2023 Btrust Builders ‘Build for Africa’ Bitcoin Hackathon has announced the launch of its business product Splice Africa.
Splice Africa is an API that enables financial institutions on the continent to make cross-border payments for their customers. Through it, institutions, which include fintechs, crypto services, and legacy services, can create accounts and begin to enable transactions for their customers with other financial institutions without borders.
You can try out the demo for the service here.
“We are currently onboarding institutions to our pilot program. If you are a fintech, crypto startup or traditional financial institution, reach out to join the pilot. If you have a friend running any of these organizations, share this tweet with them,” the team of 4 said on X.
We are thrilled to finally announce the launch of Splice Africa 🎉 Splice is an API that enables financial institutions on the continent to make cross border payments for their customers. Learn more here: https://t.co/WaFPmBjwut
— Splice Africa (@SpliceAfrica) May 22, 2024
At the 2023 hackathon, Splice’s solution centered around connecting African nations using Bitcoin as a liquidity network but are now leveraging stablecoins.
LIST | Meet the 4 Winners of the 2023 Btrust Builders ‘Build for Africa’ #Bitcoin Hackathon
The four participants were selected from 8 finalists who had been voted in by the Btrust Builders community.https://t.co/PsikfZEa0o @btrust_builders @jack @AfroBitcoinOrg pic.twitter.com/OZZfS3YxJ0
— BitKE (@BitcoinKE) December 5, 2023
“The settlements on the Splice platform are done in stablecoins. Some institutions are already dealing with stablecoins and feel comfortable holding it in their treasury. In the future, we will add a bitcoin rail for organizations that are willing to pay each other in bitcoin.”
Moreover, the team originally wanted to offer a fintech mobile app as the product, but pivoted to building infrastructure they say makes them able to control the cost and experience of the whole payment flow.
“We started out by building yet another end-user application for cross-border payments. Then quickly realized it would be a better user experience if we could just do these transactions from our M-PESA wallet or mobile banking app. This realization drew us towards focusing on building infrastructure rather than another fintech app.”
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