Solar integrates SEP-6, linking traditional payment infrastructures with Stellar.
Stellar’s mission is to make global payments fast and inexpensive. Today, the payment landscape is fragmented. Every region has its own payment scheme and they’re not interoperable. Stellar is a global network that aims at connecting these different local payment methods. In order to do so, Stellar has made digital asset issuance a central feature of its design. So called anchors (regulated financial institutions) can issue any real world asset and represent it on the network. These anchors help users depositing money into Stellar and vice versa by withdrawing it from their Stellar wallet into their bank account when needed.
SEP-6, The Golden Standard for off-ramps
Stellar implemented a technical standard called SEP-6 to make it easier for wallets to integrate a variety of anchors. In short, SEP-6 is just a standard defining how wallets interact with anchors. It improves user experience by allowing wallets and other clients to interact with anchors directly without the user needing to leave the wallet to go to the anchor’s site. Moreover, it’s compatible with the anchor’s KYC/AML processes.
An example
For instance, if a user in Europe had to send US dollars to someone in the US, the user could purchase Anchor USD (anchorusd.com) and send it to the recipient. By using the Stellar network payment rails, the transfer takes 5 seconds and costs less than a penny. The recipient can then choose to withdraw these tokenised dollars from their wallet to their bank account using the AnchorUSD offramp.
Solar leads by example
Our vision for Solar was always to facilitate global payments and for people to use it in their everyday life. Adding full support for off-ramps brings us one step closer to that vision and we hope that many wallets and anchors will follow. Competition between anchors forces the costs of withdrawing assets down for the user. These low costs make the Stellar network more attractive than traditional payment infrastructures, a feature critical for defining its success in the payments industry.
In the first release, we have a client interface for the following off-ramps:
- AnchorUSD (anchorusd.com) to withdraw US dollar to any US bank account.
Fees: 2% min. $5 - Stellarport (stellarport.io) to withdraw BTC, ETH and LTC tokens to crypto wallets.
Fees: vary by asset but generally very low - Tempo (tempo.eu.com) to withdraw Euros to any bank account via SEPA or Swift
Fees: €1.98 flat fee
What we’ve planned for Solar in the near future
Development is going ahead full steam and we never fall short of ideas for future use cases. Our short term goals include:
- Improving asset management by showing complete anchor metadata (Logo, Contact info etc.)
- Implementing an onramp client (for depositing assets on Stellar e.g via bank transfer)
- Adding support for more anchors
- Inflation management: setting/changing inflation address
- Hardware wallet support
We also have an interesting collaboration in the pipeline that we will announce soon, stay posted and get Solar here!
