SatoshiPay partners with MoonPay to provide instant XLM purchases in Solar wallet

SatoshiPay
4 min readJan 28, 2020

The next release of SatoshiPay’s Solar wallet will allow users to purchase Stellar Lumens (XLM) using their credit/debit card or Apple Pay directly within the app via EU-based payment processor MoonPay. This integration improves the on-boarding experience for people new to Stellar and makes it considerably easier to use Solar for instant international payments. Partnering with MoonPay is a big step in fulfilling our vision of making crypto more accessible for everyone by offering an open-source, user-friendly wallet across all platforms.

Purchase, transfer and trade digital assets on the Stellar network using credit/debit cards and Apple Pay

Fiat on-ramps are a game changer

We often speak about the advantages of the Stellar blockchain for international money transfers. With Solar wallet we are bringing these benefits to our users and making them easily accessible. Using Solar, users can send any digital asset across the globe within seconds. However, until now, there was one major challenge: users needed to purchase these assets on a cryptocurrency exchange and then transfer them into Solar to capitalize on these blockchain advantages.

Navigating crypto exchanges outside users’ wallets can be confusing and time-consuming. That’s why we partnered with MoonPay, a seamless fiat on-ramp for crypto purchases. The MoonPay integration into our Solar wallet enables users to purchase Stellar Lumens within 15 seconds using their debit, credit, or Apple Pay. In Europe, users also have the option to purchase Lumens by EUR or GBP bank transfer. The need to go through a crypto exchange is avoided, meaning funds are more easily managed as they remain in a non-custodial wallet at all times.

This is a momentous milestone in revolutionizing the cryptocurrency wallet ecosystem. A balance between functionality and user-friendliness will be key for mass adoption. Since Solar’s original release, our open-source wallet seeks to embody these usability aspects, as we strive to continue to bring together the best from both worlds, fiat and crypto.

Victor Faramond, co-founder and CTO of MoonPay states:

“SatoshiPay is a lighthouse company in the Stellar ecosystem. We love their vision around open-source standards and are committed to develop solutions for the whole ecosystem together with SatoshiPay.”

Meinhard Benn, CEO at SatoshiPay explains:

“When first launching Solar, we focused on supplying an easy-to-use, free and open-source wallet for the Stellar network to our clients, the community and last but not least for our own internal use. Solar is now available on all major mobile and desktop platforms and features advanced support for all the great features that the Stellar protocols offers, such as multi-signature accounts, decentralised asset exchange and withdrawals to the fiat world.

We always had plans to monetise Solar by offering services around it, for example crypto on and off-ramps. We’re very glad to announce the first Solar collaboration in this space with an exceptional partner like MoonPay, allowing us to execute on that vision.”

How MoonPay works

Purchasing Lumens in the Solar wallet is no more than a few simple steps with MoonPay

After choosing the cryptocurrency and amount users want to purchase, users sign up with their email address and only need to verify their identity if purchases are in excess of 150 EUR. The user then simply enters the preferred card details or pays with one step using Apple Pay, and the purchased Lumens will arrive to Solar in less than ten minutes. Lumen purchases by bank transfer take a little longer, with an average of one to two days. MoonPay is available in over 40 countries globally.

Supporting the Stellar ecosystem

In collaboration with MoonPay we are improving the Stellar Ecosystem Proposal (SEP) standard specification for assets deposits and withdrawals (SEP-24) to cover native Lumens as well. This means that wallets will only need to implement one standard to add deposit or withdrawal support for all Stellar assets, be it Lumens, stablecoins or other Stellar tokens. Are you a developer? Why not become a part of a community that revolutionizes global payment and join the technical discussion or contribute changes on GitHub!

Meinhard Benn, CEO at SatoshiPay adds:

“We are living the open-source spirit. While the technical integration of Solar and MoonPay is based on proprietary specifications for now, we are collaborating with MoonPay and the community on an open standard for Stellar on-ramping via a Stellar Ecosystem Proposal (SEP). In the future this will allow us to switch Solar’s MoonPay integration to the new standard and to add other on-ramp services that follow the same standard more easily.”

Solar is ever-evolving

The pursuit of our open-source, user-friendly vision is perpetual, meaning our Solar infrastructure is under constant development. In addition to the MoonPay integration, this Solar wallet release introduces improvements in user interface and performance, as well as enhanced fingerprint authentication and error handling. Look out for more exciting developments in the next weeks as we are preparing the groundwork to internationalize Solar and make the translation work a true community effort.

Download Solar on solarwallet.io and follow us on Twitter @solar_wallet to receive the latest updates on Solar.

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