Kado Brings Fiat On/Off Ramp to Cosmos

Web3 payments infrastructure company Kado is launching on-/off-ramp services with the Cosmos IBC, Avalanche, Solana, Ethereum and Axelar.

The company’s on-/off-ramp services are integrated with the US’ Automated Clearing House (ACH), Wire Transfer, Visa and Mastercard in over 150 countries, making it possible for users to convert fiat and digital assets with their non-custodial wallets. 

Kado was the brainchild of CEO Emery Andrew and Chief Operating Officer Vince Dowdle working together at a hackathon in May 2021, an idea borne out of personal necessity — they found centralized exchange fiat on and offboarding cumbersome and friction-filled.

Wait times, fees and the multiple counterparties involved presented the co-founders with an idea for a better solution, Dowdle said.

“We wanted to invest in digital assets and spend digital assets,” Andrew said in an interview with Blockworks.

“It started with payment solutions but quickly turned into fiat on and off ramps, being able to transfer money from your bank account directly into your wallet in a single transaction,” he said.

Kado was previously part of the now-notorious Terra ecosystem and had initially launched a Terra UST native on-ramp allowing transfers from bank accounts directly to wallets in less than five minutes. 

After the Terra ecosystem imploded, Kado looked for other ways to launch their solution.

“We always had ambitions to go multi-chain, and now it’s just expedited the process,” Andrew said. “After the collapse of Terra we took a step back to re-envision our value and mission and decided we still want to work on access and utility for crypto with all of these new ecosystems and partners.”

The Terra experience acted as a proof of concept for a multi-chain vision, Dowdle said. It allowed the co-founders to build along with community members and understand the complexities within an ecosystem. 

“It was a use case to get our product market fit, we realized that there was a need for every ecosystem not just here,” Dowdle said.

Kado had roughly 8,000 users on the Terra ecosystem, Andrew said. Its latest launch will extend an invitation to all previous users, plus an additional 50,000 users who are waitlisted. 

The company raised a Seed series in March this year and is backed by investment firms Hashed, Race Capital, Collab+Currency, Republic Capital, and Circle Ventures.

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