Hey YC, we’re Shahryar and Dale, the co-founders of Karsa!

tl;dr:

Karsa is a global dollar account—enabling anyone in emerging markets to buy and save in stablecoins to protect against currency instability.

The Problem

Over a billion people live in countries with severe inflation (5-10%+) and are unable to protect their wealth due to strict capital controls (Shahryar’s family in Pakistan still acutely faces this problem). The traditional banking systems in most of these countries are systematically designed to prevent access to assets like dollars.

We’ve spent the majority of our careers in crypto, traveling everywhere from the Middle East to Southeast Asia for work—and we observed how people in regions with economic instability have begun to adopt stablecoins as a store of value. However, existing products—typically peer-to-peer crypto exchanges—are centered on traders and are still too complex for average users, hindering mass-market adoption.

Our Solution

https://youtu.be/C160H4yB08w

Karsa is a global digital wallet that makes it easy for anyone across the world to deposit money using local payment methods and save in dollar-denominated stablecoins.

For a user, it looks similar to a bank—but under the hood, we route our supply from a network of verified peer-to-peer stablecoin traders, whom buyers are making their deposit payments to.

• Structuring it as peer-to-peer allows us to actually be global from day one and circumvent government interference: in most of these markets, centralized products (i.e., requiring a bank account in the relevant country) often get shut down. This means that in many of the regions we operate in, we’re the only way anyone can reasonably get access to stablecoins.
• Unlike incumbent exchanges, however, we’ve entirely abstracted the ‘P2P’. Traditionally, buyers and sellers engage in chats for each transaction (to confirm details, etc.). This is onerous for sellers, and off-putting for new buyers. Instead, we sit in the middle, matching price orders and managing verification, appeals, etc. with sellers directly—much less work for sellers, and an incredibly simple process for buyers.
• We’ve also abstracted everything crypto about it—no crypto knowledge, wallet / key management, etc. needed, so that even your parents could use the platform.
• User funds are held in self-custody crypto wallets, meaning your money is always yours—unlike a centralized exchange (e.g., FTX) there’s no way for us to access, freeze, or lose your funds.

Team

Shahryar and Dale have been working in the crypto space for the majority of their careers (leading business development and protocol engineering, respectively). We’ve lived and worked across the world in the same regions that we want to provide our product to—we deeply understand the tech, the market, and how stablecoins can best be leveraged to create more financial freedom.

We’ve been close friends for years, joined the industry at similar times (Shahryar actually got Dale to FOMO in), and we now work together out of Dale’s kitchen in New York.

Asks

We’re already going live today with sellers in Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Kenya, Paraguay and setting up a couple other regions as we speak. If you know or work with anyone in South Asia, Africa, Southeast Asia, or the Middle East—whether they’re a contract worker, freelancer, developer, crypto trader, SMB owner, or just family/friends who would be interested in saving with Karsa or working with us as a stablecoin supplier—please don’t hesitate to connect us at shahryar@gokarsa.com. Folks with these profiles have been incredibly helpful in getting feedback and suggesting future product features.