Mural and USDC: Redefining Global Payments for a Digital Age

At Mural, we redefine how businesses manage global payments. Our platform streamlines financial operations and adapts to the evolving needs of modern businesses. We adopted USDC as one of our default platform currencies to provide stability and efficiency for payments. USDC is a digital currency redeemable 1:1 for US dollars, ensuring stability and accessibility for our customers. By leveraging USDC, Mural harnesses the speed of distributing digital dollars on blockchains, offering an innovative solution to traditional financial constraints associated with cross-border payments.

Using USDC on Mural simplifies transactions, making global payments faster and more accessible. This approach is part of our goal to create an inclusive financial ecosystem, ensuring lightning-fast transactions and recipients benefit from stable currencies. This article will discuss the challenges businesses faced before integrating USDC into their operations and the impact of Mural and USDC.

The Challenge: The Inefficiencies of Global Payments

The current landscape of global payments is fraught with inefficiencies that pose significant challenges for international businesses:

• Slow Processing Times: Traditional international wire transfers are notably slow, often taking 1-5 business days to complete. (1)

• High Transaction Fees: The global average cost for sending money across borders stands at approximately 6.2%. (2)

• Manual Processing Errors: Traditional payment methods are prone to significant errors, with SWIFT’s self-reported error rate being 6% as of 2019. (3)

• Payment Bounce-Backs/Rejections: A common issue with these methods is frequent payment bounce-backs or rejections due to wrong account numbers, mismatched currencies, or missing tracking data.

• Lack of Global Standardization: Due to a lack of global standardization, banking systems in different countries record payments in different ways, making it tougher to track and locate money movements in real-time.

These factors collectively highlight the urgent need for an efficient, stable, and reliable payment solution capable of streamlining international transactions in today’s interconnected global economy.

The Solution: Embracing USDC on Mural

At Mural, we've identified and are tackling a critical bottleneck in international payments: the inherent slowness, expense, and complexity of traditional fiat currency transactions. Our platform allows businesses to transfer funds globally efficiently and easily. Central to our approach is integrating blockchain technology, enabling internet-speed payments. A key player in this transformation is the use of USDC. By using USDC, Mural streamlines international transactions. This simplifies cross-border payments and actively breaks down the traditional financial barriers that have long hampered global commerce.

Mural provides a user-friendly experience for businesses to embrace USDC; we have taken strides to eliminate the complexities of integrating stablecoins into your financial operations, regardless of the size or technical knowledge of your business. All you need as a business is a bank account and an email to start. Once onboarded to Mural, businesses can efficiently run payroll for large teams in minutes; in the video below, you will see an end-to-end flow of paying a 100-person team - queuing the payment, adding an approval, and settling the transaction in seconds. With Mural and USDC, global payments are easy. 

Real World Impact: A Case Study from Argentina

A virtual assistant agency in Argentina faced significant challenges with its payout process. Managing 80 monthly payouts across multiple platforms, they grappled with time-consuming reconciliations and manual transaction processing, a cumbersome set of tasks that took several hours each month, not to mention per-transaction fees that quickly added up.

Mural provides them with a suite of features to transform their contractor payroll flow. Among those features include batch and recurring payments to consolidate 80 contractor payments into one transaction, saving time and reducing costs by over 70%. These payments come equipped with transaction tracking and secure wallet connections to keep the recipients updated and ensure funds are always sent to the correct destination. Crucially, on/off ramping support allows the agency to fund its payroll easily by connecting its bank for convenient USDC deposits, facilitating smooth transitions between fiat and digital currencies. This comprehensive approach greatly improved operational efficiency and financial stability in a challenging economic environment.

The impact of transitioning to Mural to receive payments in USDC is also significant for the agency's contractors. It allows them to earn a salary to support their families, pay for education, and avoid the adverse effects of local Argentinian Peso inflation. The speed of receiving digital dollars is also crucial, ensuring they receive their salary on time rather than days (or sometimes weeks) late. For many people worldwide who live paycheck to paycheck, time is of the essence, and receiving their payments on time makes all the difference in managing their expenses.

This case study from Argentina highlights some tangible benefits of Mural and USDC, notably in relation to the use-case of international payments. We are seeing significant growth in payment flows in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. As stablecoin adoption grows, we are excited to continue powering international payment flows worldwide. 

Future Outlook

Our vision at Mural is to revolutionize payments by making them faster, more cost-effective, and borderless. We are particularly optimistic about the role of stablecoins, especially USDC, as they are instrumental in realizing this vision. Stablecoins like USDC are becoming increasingly important, particularly in providing stable and efficient transaction options in today's dynamic economic landscape - in 2022 alone, stablecoins settled a whopping $11 trillion in transactions, almost as much as Visa's 2022 settlement volume of $11.6 trillion. (4)

As we look to the future, we continue to enhance our feature set to achieve the mission. We recently released an expansion of our withdrawal (off-ramping) capabilities, enabling users in Europe, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and more to convert their USDC into local fiat currencies quickly and easily directly from Mural. This development is a significant step forward in our mission, allowing more users worldwide to bridge the gap between fiat and digital currencies.

We encourage businesses and individuals to explore the benefits of using USDC on our platform. We invite you to explore Mural and experience instant global payments at a fraction of the cost, powered by USDC, as we continue our journey toward redefining the new financial internet.

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1. https://www.westernunion.com/blog/en/us/us-how-long-do-wire-transfers-take/

2. https://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/ 

3. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/11/04/do-six-per-cent-of-financial-transactions-sent-via-the-swift-system-really-fail/ 

4. https://cryptoslate.com/stablecoin-settlements-were-on-par-with-payments-giant-visa-during-2022/