Payments from Norway to Iran

Majid

I am a web developer based in Iran. I work remotely for a company in Norway. My employer makes payments to me in USD to a friend's Paypal account and my friend pays me the equivalent in local currency. Paypal takes a whooping 3.5 percent commission (for internal, Paypal to Paypal account credit transfer, i.e. two UPDATE queries).

The Stellar tagline reads "Move Money Across Borders Quickly, Reliably, And For Fractions Of A Penny." and the intro explainer video shows Amy from US paying Tunde in Nigeria. How could we use Stellar to achieve the same? Is having a Norwegian anchor and an Iranian one the only way to do it?

If there is another way, assuming I am happy with getting USD and my employer is happy paying in USD as well, how would it work?

If the 2 anchors is the only way this could be done. Does Stellar have an opinion on having the network enter Iran which is under partial sanctions? (By the way I saw somewhere apparently Stellar could be used in Cuba)

Thanks.

bkolobara

Majid I don't think it's prohibited to have an anchor in Iran; the Stellar network is completely open and anyone can join it. Companies based in specific jurisdictions may refuse to deal directly with this anchor but I can see it exist.

Stellar is still early in development and we are just getting some anchors, sadly Norway and Iran are not yet covered. This would be the most straight forward way of doing it.

Another option is to buy Stellar Lumens directly on an exchange in Norway (EU, US, ...) and send them to an exchange operating in Iran. You would just need to check the price difference and if the oscillations make it a too risky move. Sometimes the price moves 5% in an hour, the 3% PayPal fee would be better in this case.

You can see that we are not completely there yet with "Move Money Across Borders Quickly, Reliably, And For Fractions Of A Penny.", but we are making a lot of progress. Let us know if you find a way of sending money to Iran over Stellar.