Proposal description
PROPOSAL UPDATE (July 26RD)
Thanks to the 377 MNs who voted to support growth of Dash in Unalivio!
Even though we fell 48 votes short for this cycle, I believe it is possible that we can get those votes and pass for the next cycle, so we will continue building and promoting the best digital cash for emerging markets, therefore:
Thanks for your support!
Ernesto and team
END OF JULY UPDATE
-------------------------------------
SUMMARY
This proposal complements the “Integration of Dash into Unalivio” proposal from March 2024. The 825 Dash funding from this proposal will be used to grow the Unalivio network of merchants, and promote usage of Dash in the network.
Accepting online payments is challenging for traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, especially in LatAm. With Unalivio, merchants can accept a wide variety of online payment methods thanks to our network of cash-in partners while providing stablecoin cash outs for our network, which is highly desired in LAtAm. Our platform has been live since Q1 of this year, and we publicly announced the product in April. We’ve onboarded 15 merchants, who operate 32 physical locations, and serve almost 5,000 clients per month. We support their sales as a preferred digital sales channel. Over the past months we have been refining our product, identifying user insights, and learning how to efficiently get users to pay with our solution.
In our past proposal we offered the Dash DAO to integrate Dash, grant equity to the DIF and promote usage. Our proposal was approved, but for for only 2 of 3 months requested, since the first proposed payment had already past by the time the proposal garnered enough net votes to pass. In addition, a Dash price decrease during that time resulted in Unalivio receiving about 50% less of the requested USD amount.
Given the lower amount of funds received we prioritized improving the product, fine tuning the Dash integration, implementing our system in a new large merchant, and growing the amount of paying users on our platform, postponing the Dash specific promotional actions.
This complementary proposal is aimed to grow Dash usage through activities that incentivize Dash transactions as both cash-in and rewards for end users in front of an audience of around 800,000 potential users. Details follow below.
Our product is live and we're processing Dash transactions!
Go ahead and test it at www.unalivio.com
This new proposal also includes allocating the funded Dollar amount as equity to the Dash network through the DIF.
On the first proposal we offered to grant the requested dollar amount received to the Dash DAO as equity through the DIF. We have honored that commitment and sent a SAFE note to the DIF for the total amount received (500 Dash at an average price of 30 USD). If the current proposal is approved, a further equity grant in the amount received from the network will be honored as well.
Background and key market insights
Unalivio serves small and medium merchants in LatAm by digitizing their online sales, allowing them to receive payments from part of the 30 million migrants who send 142 Billion USD in remittances/year throughout latam.The status quo for remittances is terrible: Markups are as high as 20%; senders do not know if the money sent covered the intended need; and money can get stolen by intermediaries.
That’s why Unalivio is an ideal solution: migrants easily make payments using different cash using payment options available throughout LatAm: cards, local transfers in 4 countries and crypto (We only accept two stablecoins and the two most popular non stables: Bitcoin, USDT, USDC and Dash), allowing users to pay for services in their preferred method.
Brick and mortar merchants use our platform because it allows them to easily sell online, accept multiple payment methods, and have alternative payments systems; these merchants see Unalivio as a tool for growth as we enable them to make international sales, which means they can capture a part of the 148 billion remittance market, while receiving digital USD as opposed to fiat. This is a highly desired function in LatAm, especially in inflationary jurisdictions.
Since making our public announcement last April, we doubled our merchant base, grew user signups 96%, and increased paying users by 173% on a Quarterly comparison.
We had great success during the pilot of our marketplace and received great feedback. Part of that feedback includes expanding our services so merchants can have an easy to deploy white label solution, which is something not many mid sized retailers have in LatAm.
We successfully tested this solution to the fastest growing fast food chain in Caracas to work as their online sales channel: We now serve cakeshop RichieTortas www.regalameunarichie.com
After this improvement which resulted in triple digit increased sales for the quarter, we are finetuning our go-to-market actions, and have begun to deploy our learnings with our network to multiply growth.
Since posting our proposal we kept growing and are now serving 25 locations (up from 12 at the time of writing our past proposal), and have agreements to serve about half a dozen other retailers, which will push us past 100 locations (Including a 70 location pharmacy).
The next step for Unalivio after finetuning our MVP in Venezuela will be to expand to other dollar starved jurisdictions in LatAm. For this we will select a partner VC and work on scaling. We have already had interesting conversations with a few of them and are also applying to accelerators, which will further enhance our growth, improve our reach, and increase the valuation for our angel investors such as the DIF.
See a working demo for Cash in from Chile on this link:
Unalivio is developed for non-crypto users who pay in local fiat, and takes away all the crypto complexity into the backend. We have cash in options with Chilean pesos, Mexican Pesos, Colombian Pesos and Peruvian Soles. As well as multi-currency card transactions.
See payment options with Mexican Pesos, Chilean Pesos and more
Our system is developed for non crypto users, but because we are crypto native, we added payments in BTC, USDC and Dash; making Unalivio a crypto payment platform for LatAm, following the example of platforms we love and like to use such as Bitrefill and SpritzFinance.
Initial usage and growth steps
In the inmediate quarter after announcing our platform, 9/10 times users transact in Fiat (mostly cards cards), and 1/10 times it is in crypto, which is what we expected. A happy surprise we are finding is that around 50% of all crypto transactions happened in Dash, probably because it is a well known crypto in the region.
Dash is used in Unalivio in a way that is both sustainable, and maintains Dash presence in LatAm.
We are building for self sustainability, that’s our motto
Benefits for the Dash ecosystem
Equity: The Dollar amount of Dash received will be granted as equity to Dash through the DIF, with the same terms as our Angel investors: A SAFE note with 4M cap and 50% discount.
Cash in with Dash: Maintain and improve Dash as cash-in and cash-out options, supporting Dash usage in the region.
Promotions and Branding: Run Dash-specific promotions. We have approval to run Dash specifics promotions in the very popular retailer Richie Tortas, with a community of almost 800k followers. We will do Cashbakcs on Dash purchases, and also Dash prizes for non-crypto users in order to onboard Dash wallets.In our other merchants we will run discount campaigns and prizes as well. So in total we will spend at least 2000 USD to incentivize Dash payments, and increase awareness to Dash users and potential users.
The team
Unalivio is founded and led by Ernesto Contreras,
Ernesto is a Growth Director with 18 years of experience in the Cryptocurrency, and technology industries; he has lived and worked in China, Venezuela, the US, and Mexico. Ernesto began his career working for consumer product companies and in the past 7 years worked as marketing manager for crypto unicorn Bitso, and Global Head of Growth for Dash Core Group.
Ernesto was a key element for Dash’s growth during his five years working for the Dash DAO. His work includes integrating Dash to over 200 projects, including integrating Dash to Coinbase, Topper by Uphold, ByBit, Binance P2P, LatAm’s 1st crypto debit card with Tauros; integrating Dash into mainstream retail in Venezuela, and enabling tens of thousands of wallet downloads in the region through Dash payroll, Krip phones and more; Ernesto is well known in the global crypto ecosystem.
Ernesto is an Industrial Engineer with an MBA from Hult international business school in their Shanghai campus.
The Unalivio team is composed of a Lead engineer, UX/UI engineer, a Social media, Sales manager and a two sales agents.
Ernesto Contreras - CEO https://www.linkedin.com/in/contrerasernesto/Fabian Fariñas Lead Engineer- https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabian-farinas-6627541a8/
I am proud to have been part of the teams that built the best digital cash in the world, and I am excited to continue growing Dash’s usage and adoption now as an ecosystem builder, as I know Dash has many advantages, and want to have the Dash network be part of my growth on my venture.
Ask
We are asking for 275 Dash per month, for three months. We will use these funds to improve our go to market activities and run Dash promotions on social media, with focus on our new partner Richie Tortas (740,000 followers on Instagram).
Just as we did during the past proposal, the total of 825 Dash (20,443 USD at the time of writing this proposal) will be allocated as additional equity to the Dash ecosystem through the DIF, in the same terms as our Angel investors are entering the company, with a SAFE note capped at 4M usd 50% discount.
Thank you for your support, and I will be looking forward to replying to your questions and comments!
Ernesto and the Unalivio team!
Thanks to the 377 MNs who voted to support growth of Dash in Unalivio!
Even though we fell 48 votes short for this cycle, I believe it is possible that we can get those votes and pass for the next cycle, so we will continue building and promoting the best digital cash for emerging markets, therefore:
- We will work with our merchant partners and promote Dash usage using our videos and ads.
- We will run incentives campaigns to improve usage once we get funds to do so, in the next cycles.
- As we did last time, we will honor the DIF equity agreement to provide equity, we'll just adjust the equity to the new value
Thanks for your support!
Ernesto and team
END OF JULY UPDATE
-------------------------------------
SUMMARY
This proposal complements the “Integration of Dash into Unalivio” proposal from March 2024. The 825 Dash funding from this proposal will be used to grow the Unalivio network of merchants, and promote usage of Dash in the network.
Accepting online payments is challenging for traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, especially in LatAm. With Unalivio, merchants can accept a wide variety of online payment methods thanks to our network of cash-in partners while providing stablecoin cash outs for our network, which is highly desired in LAtAm. Our platform has been live since Q1 of this year, and we publicly announced the product in April. We’ve onboarded 15 merchants, who operate 32 physical locations, and serve almost 5,000 clients per month. We support their sales as a preferred digital sales channel. Over the past months we have been refining our product, identifying user insights, and learning how to efficiently get users to pay with our solution.
In our past proposal we offered the Dash DAO to integrate Dash, grant equity to the DIF and promote usage. Our proposal was approved, but for for only 2 of 3 months requested, since the first proposed payment had already past by the time the proposal garnered enough net votes to pass. In addition, a Dash price decrease during that time resulted in Unalivio receiving about 50% less of the requested USD amount.
Given the lower amount of funds received we prioritized improving the product, fine tuning the Dash integration, implementing our system in a new large merchant, and growing the amount of paying users on our platform, postponing the Dash specific promotional actions.
This complementary proposal is aimed to grow Dash usage through activities that incentivize Dash transactions as both cash-in and rewards for end users in front of an audience of around 800,000 potential users. Details follow below.
Our product is live and we're processing Dash transactions!
Go ahead and test it at www.unalivio.com
This new proposal also includes allocating the funded Dollar amount as equity to the Dash network through the DIF.
On the first proposal we offered to grant the requested dollar amount received to the Dash DAO as equity through the DIF. We have honored that commitment and sent a SAFE note to the DIF for the total amount received (500 Dash at an average price of 30 USD). If the current proposal is approved, a further equity grant in the amount received from the network will be honored as well.
Background and key market insights
Unalivio serves small and medium merchants in LatAm by digitizing their online sales, allowing them to receive payments from part of the 30 million migrants who send 142 Billion USD in remittances/year throughout latam.The status quo for remittances is terrible: Markups are as high as 20%; senders do not know if the money sent covered the intended need; and money can get stolen by intermediaries.
That’s why Unalivio is an ideal solution: migrants easily make payments using different cash using payment options available throughout LatAm: cards, local transfers in 4 countries and crypto (We only accept two stablecoins and the two most popular non stables: Bitcoin, USDT, USDC and Dash), allowing users to pay for services in their preferred method.
Brick and mortar merchants use our platform because it allows them to easily sell online, accept multiple payment methods, and have alternative payments systems; these merchants see Unalivio as a tool for growth as we enable them to make international sales, which means they can capture a part of the 148 billion remittance market, while receiving digital USD as opposed to fiat. This is a highly desired function in LatAm, especially in inflationary jurisdictions.
Since making our public announcement last April, we doubled our merchant base, grew user signups 96%, and increased paying users by 173% on a Quarterly comparison.
We had great success during the pilot of our marketplace and received great feedback. Part of that feedback includes expanding our services so merchants can have an easy to deploy white label solution, which is something not many mid sized retailers have in LatAm.
We successfully tested this solution to the fastest growing fast food chain in Caracas to work as their online sales channel: We now serve cakeshop RichieTortas www.regalameunarichie.com
After this improvement which resulted in triple digit increased sales for the quarter, we are finetuning our go-to-market actions, and have begun to deploy our learnings with our network to multiply growth.
Since posting our proposal we kept growing and are now serving 25 locations (up from 12 at the time of writing our past proposal), and have agreements to serve about half a dozen other retailers, which will push us past 100 locations (Including a 70 location pharmacy).
The next step for Unalivio after finetuning our MVP in Venezuela will be to expand to other dollar starved jurisdictions in LatAm. For this we will select a partner VC and work on scaling. We have already had interesting conversations with a few of them and are also applying to accelerators, which will further enhance our growth, improve our reach, and increase the valuation for our angel investors such as the DIF.
See a working demo for Cash in from Chile on this link:
Unalivio is developed for non-crypto users who pay in local fiat, and takes away all the crypto complexity into the backend. We have cash in options with Chilean pesos, Mexican Pesos, Colombian Pesos and Peruvian Soles. As well as multi-currency card transactions.
See payment options with Mexican Pesos, Chilean Pesos and more
Our system is developed for non crypto users, but because we are crypto native, we added payments in BTC, USDC and Dash; making Unalivio a crypto payment platform for LatAm, following the example of platforms we love and like to use such as Bitrefill and SpritzFinance.
Initial usage and growth steps
In the inmediate quarter after announcing our platform, 9/10 times users transact in Fiat (mostly cards cards), and 1/10 times it is in crypto, which is what we expected. A happy surprise we are finding is that around 50% of all crypto transactions happened in Dash, probably because it is a well known crypto in the region.
Dash is used in Unalivio in a way that is both sustainable, and maintains Dash presence in LatAm.
- Cash-in: Dash is efficient, and has many liquid cash in options. With the Unalivio integration there are now around 100 Doctors, and around 32 locations that accept Dash. See our announcement news
- Use Dash as an incentive mechanism for preferring crypto instead of fiat. We are working on different schemes for incentivizing affiliates and users to use our platform and get benefits. We want to run a Dashback offer during this quarter when we run a crypto push. Incentives are baked into our model, making it sustainable. We had success with Fiat cashbacks, and want to try it out with Dash now.
We are building for self sustainability, that’s our motto
Benefits for the Dash ecosystem
Equity: The Dollar amount of Dash received will be granted as equity to Dash through the DIF, with the same terms as our Angel investors: A SAFE note with 4M cap and 50% discount.
Cash in with Dash: Maintain and improve Dash as cash-in and cash-out options, supporting Dash usage in the region.
Promotions and Branding: Run Dash-specific promotions. We have approval to run Dash specifics promotions in the very popular retailer Richie Tortas, with a community of almost 800k followers. We will do Cashbakcs on Dash purchases, and also Dash prizes for non-crypto users in order to onboard Dash wallets.In our other merchants we will run discount campaigns and prizes as well. So in total we will spend at least 2000 USD to incentivize Dash payments, and increase awareness to Dash users and potential users.
The team
Unalivio is founded and led by Ernesto Contreras,
Ernesto is a Growth Director with 18 years of experience in the Cryptocurrency, and technology industries; he has lived and worked in China, Venezuela, the US, and Mexico. Ernesto began his career working for consumer product companies and in the past 7 years worked as marketing manager for crypto unicorn Bitso, and Global Head of Growth for Dash Core Group.
Ernesto was a key element for Dash’s growth during his five years working for the Dash DAO. His work includes integrating Dash to over 200 projects, including integrating Dash to Coinbase, Topper by Uphold, ByBit, Binance P2P, LatAm’s 1st crypto debit card with Tauros; integrating Dash into mainstream retail in Venezuela, and enabling tens of thousands of wallet downloads in the region through Dash payroll, Krip phones and more; Ernesto is well known in the global crypto ecosystem.
Ernesto is an Industrial Engineer with an MBA from Hult international business school in their Shanghai campus.
The Unalivio team is composed of a Lead engineer, UX/UI engineer, a Social media, Sales manager and a two sales agents.
Ernesto Contreras - CEO https://www.linkedin.com/in/contrerasernesto/Fabian Fariñas Lead Engineer- https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabian-farinas-6627541a8/
I am proud to have been part of the teams that built the best digital cash in the world, and I am excited to continue growing Dash’s usage and adoption now as an ecosystem builder, as I know Dash has many advantages, and want to have the Dash network be part of my growth on my venture.
Ask
We are asking for 275 Dash per month, for three months. We will use these funds to improve our go to market activities and run Dash promotions on social media, with focus on our new partner Richie Tortas (740,000 followers on Instagram).
Just as we did during the past proposal, the total of 825 Dash (20,443 USD at the time of writing this proposal) will be allocated as additional equity to the Dash ecosystem through the DIF, in the same terms as our Angel investors are entering the company, with a SAFE note capped at 4M usd 50% discount.
Thank you for your support, and I will be looking forward to replying to your questions and comments!
Ernesto and the Unalivio team!
Show full description ...
Discussion: Should we fund this proposal?
Submit comment
The LatAm region is full of great use cases and opportunities El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Paraguay, soon Honduras. Dash has built a reputation of being a leader in the area, and I know we can keep growing, by learning from our past actions.
Yes, we are generating revenue, and ALL orders are paid on the Unalivio platform.
Here on the Dash video you will see how when the user pays, in this case with Dash
https://twitter.com/somosunalivio/status/1813965727252218027
We add a spread on the payment commission, with an average markup of 4% depending on the method used.
We will also begin to charge merchants a monthly fee for using the service, but this is something we will do later, after fine tuning the model and making sure we are getting more sales for merchants.
All in all, I expect we can be around break even, once we have around 500 merchants (About 12x what we have now, with the current low cost approach)
Let me know if you have any other questions, I'll be happy to answer them
Ernesto
Ernesto
Please let me know your thoughts!!
https://twitter.com/somosunalivio/status/1813965727252218027
Ernesto
We (DIF) have also received the SAFE note mentioned in the proposal.
Overall, I really like their concept. Early feedback from the market place sounds promising and I believe Ernesto is taking all the right steps to move this project forward using quick and flexible iterations based on data and market feedback.
Having Dash prominently featured in their product could be a great benefit to the Dash network.
Sven
Dash Investment Foundation (DIF)
Ernesto
I pasted the proposal on a google docs in here for easier reading,
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N0JVMxDbhDSR8WDK6CztjyJBNIgYfQYOHqtSz0fbHXY/edit?usp=sharing
Apologies, and I will reach out to get this fixed asap
Ernesto
"Venezuela Crypto Remittances Skyrocket as Migration Crisis Worsens;
Migrants sent $5 billion in remittances in 2023, 9% in crypto"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-05/crypto-remittances-becomes-key-for-venezuelan-migrants-supporting-families
It would be nice if someone in the DIF could verify this statement and other ones? It would be a decent reassurance for MNOs as our current funding system doesn't verify anything (spray & pray).
I will contact the DIF and share data with them so they can verify these statements as soon as possible.
Best regards,
Ernesto