Financial Inclusion Mobile Payment - How to

orednavale

We are planning to implement a mobile payment app using an asset pegged to the fiat currency of a third world country. Since it's a third world country, asking people (account holders) to put in the minimum balance of 30 xlm (2 + 1 trustline x 10) is not desirable as it amounts to a minimum day's wage (why would they switch away from cash in the first place?). But if we would shoulder the min. balance, a million users will result in 30M xlm (roughly USD 5M) which is also not economically feasible. Is there any way to implement this in stellar without incurring some much xlm's and still use stellar as the payment infrastructure? I am sure there's a way i am just missing some points, since stellar is made to aid financial inclusion.

bkolobara

orednavale The base reserve will be lowered before the end of the year. It will get cheaper to create accounts. Another solution is to have one account for all users and keep balances of specific users in a database, like all exchanges are doing right now. You can also apply for the partnership grant program if you are building your product on Stellar: https://www.stellar.org/lumens/stellar-partnership-grant-program. This should give you enough Lumens for all accounts.

orednavale

bkolobara Thanks @bkolobara for your insight. I am just thinking if I would use one account for all the users then I wouldn't need stellar operations for sending/receiving assets since it would send and receive assets to/from itself? or does stellar allow that? or am i missing something? how i will make use of stellar network in this use case, could you please somehow elaborate? thanks!

OrbitLens

A minimal reserve is a necessary evil, otherwise Stellar Network may become overwhelmed by millions of active accounts with zero balance. The approach proposed by @bkolobara currently seems to be the only viable solution for micro-payments.
The concept of dependent child accounts has been discussed by SDF. In this case parent account may hold the reserve for child accounts, so you don't need to send a minimum reserve to each child account. Personally I think it would be a great idea. Check this discussion on the Stellar protocol.

robh

It sounds like you don't even need to use Stellar if this is the case. You can just run your own database, or else look at setting up your own blockchain.
I am not sure if it would work, but what about if you create a public key on Stellar, but don't create the account, so you have somewhere to send tokens to and from.
As soon as a user sends some tokens you could create the account as needed and deposit lumens into it then as well as the tokens.
If you go this route, make sure you set your master account to be the one to receive inflation so you get some of those lumens back.