Wind.app – As a co-founder of Pathao, one of the most popular ride-sharing apps in Bangladesh, Hussain Elius is most renowned. Elius, however, is delving into the DeFi realm with his most recent venture, Wind.app, a self-custodial smart contract wallet with three primary functions. The first is making it possible for companies to pay their remote workers anywhere in the world. Permitting users to utilize Wind.app as a virtual bank account is the second. The third is the infrastructure—the company is developing an on-ramp and off-ramp—that will allow consumers to convert their cryptocurrency holdings into fiat currency and vice versa.
Wind.app
In the short months since its inception, Wind.app has enabled over $3 million in annualized gross transaction volume (GTV). With involvement from investors like Saison Capital, Alumni Ventures, and Tiny VC, the Singapore-based business announced today that it has raised $3.8 million in pre-seed funding, co-led by Global Founders Capital and Spartan Group.
When Elius departed Pathao, the company had grown to become one of the leading consumer tech firms in Bangladesh and Nepal, attracting funding from backers like Gojek and providing services like food delivery, payments, and BNPL in addition to ride-sharing. Elius started looking into cryptocurrency during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, he came to see how difficult it is for anyone without a computing background—like him—to use.
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“I”m a tech savvy person. If it takes me seven to 10 days to figure out things like MetaMask, gas fees, private keys, public keys, and mnemonics, from me coming from a consumer tech background and going into crypto, I realized that crypto is still for nerds,” he said.
Elius made the decision to create an app that even those with no background in blockchain and cryptocurrency could use. Users do not have to worry about gas costs, for starters. Additionally, they save their money in stablecoins since they find Bitcoin to be too erratic. Users can register for Wind.app using their phone numbers or emails rather than private or public keys.
Initially, Wind.app is primarily focused on paying remote workers and freelancers, particularly in Southeast Asia. It currently operates in Bangladesh, India, and the Philippines with aspirations to expand into other nations. Several of its initial clients are fellow Web3 firms. “Our value proposition is simple to explain to other Web3 companies because they understand it right away,” Elius stated. They can pay their remote workers by using Wind.app instead of an exchange that charges exorbitant fees.
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According to Elius, Wind.app charges less because it uses blockchain for settlement, setting it apart from Payoneer or Wise. Another advantage is that Wind.app’s self-custodial wallet doesn’t require complex KYC, making account opening faster.
“Eventually, we want to go down the ladder and target the underbanked segment, who don’t have as much KYC information anyway, to give them a very easy way to start accepting money,” says Elius.
Despite having customers worldwide, Wind.app has its beginnings in Southeast Asia, more precisely the Philippines, where there is a substantial USD remittance market. According to Elius, the nation is also very aware of cryptocurrencies and many people know what they are.
“I was in the Philippines a couple of times and even some of the tuk-tuk drivers own crypto,” he says. “They own some bitcoin. So it’s both a remittance market and a big crypto market, which makes it a good first market to start off with.”
One feature that may make Wind.app appealing to consumers is that it has built its own offramp and onramp for fiat and crypto coins.
“The reason we did that was because we initially tried to use different partners and saw it was pretty expensive,” Elius said. “Any other on-ramps and off-ramps charge between 2% to 3%, which is a lot especially if it’s a dividend. So we do our own and we got the cost down to less than 30 bips or so. And now we actually started to offer that to other businesses, and other businesses that are moving money.”
Binance and Coinbase are two businesses that are in the same industry as Wind.app, but Elius claims that since most users use them for trading, he does not consider them to be competitors. Instead, Payoneer and Transferwise are more direct rivals. “We are stating that, you know, we are unique since our whole technology stack is unique and we have a distinct regulatory advantage,” Elius remarked.
According to Elius, Wind.app is a self-custodial wallet, meaning that user funds are not accessible to or controlled by the firm, ensuring user protection. Like Trust Wallet, MetaMask, and Coinbase Wallet, wallets are cryptographically secured in the blockchain and users’ phones store their private keys. Users may still access their wallets and move money to other wallets in the event that Wind.app was taken down.
The additional funds for Wind.apps will go toward technological advancement, obtaining permits, and ensuring compliance as it develops its off-ramps. A portion of it will also go into the startup’s direct approach to corporations and individual customers as part of its customer acquisition strategy.
