YouSend, a cross-border remittance platform built on stablecoin settlement infrastructure, has formally launched its operations in Canada and the United Kingdom following a private beta in which it processed over USD 1 million in transactions through referral-only growth.
The company holds regulatory approvals in all operating markets: a FINTRAC Money Services Business registration in Canada (M24631755); an FCA Small Payment Institution registration in the United Kingdom (FRN: 929371); and an International Money Transfer Operator licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria, with triple-jurisdiction compliance secured before public launch without an announced public funding round.
YouSend’s stablecoin settlement model replaces the prefunded float that underlies most legacy remittance services. Where traditional operators hold destination-currency cash reserves, creating settlement delays outside banking hours and hidden FX margins, YouSend settles via stablecoins, enabling near-real-time transfer delivery at any hour. In private beta, 95% of transactions were completed in under two minutes; the company reports an average settlement time of under 15 seconds across more than 10,000 processed transactions.
Africa received over USD 104 billion in remittances in 2024, as per the World Bank. Out of that, Nigeria alone received USD 19.8 billion, representing 35% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s total inflows and the country’s second-largest source of foreign exchange. The average cost of sending money from Canada to Africa ranges from 5% to 9% depending on the payment channel. YouSend’s architecture has been designed to structurally reduce that cost by eliminating float entirely.
The company is backed by Digital Currency Group, CMT Ventures, Blockwall, CoinSwitch Ventures, Musha Ventures, and angel investor Pule Taukobong.
YouSend coming live to the British mainland has come at a time when the United Kingdom to Africa has emerged as one of the significant outbound corridors globally. The UK international remittance market reached USD 11.46 billion in 2024 and is predicted to grow at an annual rate of 2.2% between 2026 and 2028.
“The prefunded float model has made cross-border remittance slow and expensive for decades.’ Stablecoin settlement changes the physics of the problem,” Adeoye ‘Oye’ Ojo, Co-Founder, YouSend, said, while interacting with the Sifted.
“I first understood this problem in 2016, routeing a payment from San Francisco to Kenya through Bitcoin because nothing else worked fast enough. I spent the next decade building a regulated solution,” he said further.
Ojo sees YouSend as more than just a remittance app, as he remarked, “The infrastructure is built from inside the diaspora community it serves rather than a product simply marketed towards it.”