Xelio

Xelio is a Solana-native financial infrastructure platform founded in February 2025 that routes stablecoin payments over SMS and WhatsApp, eliminating the need for smartphones, app downloads, internet access, or familiarity with blockchain technology. The project was incubated through Solana Turbine and placed fourth in the Stablecoins track at the Solana Breakout Hackathon 2025. Its core insight is that settlement finality on Solana is already sub-second and near-free — the only remaining barrier to global stablecoin adoption is the access layer, and SMS messaging reaches billions of people who will never own a smartphone. Nigeria is Xelio's primary market: 87% of the population owns a mobile phone, roughly 40% remain unbanked, and the country ranks second globally for crypto adoption according to Chainalysis. Remittances to Nigeria exceed 20 billion dollars annually, but senders typically pay fees of 6-10% through legacy corridors with settlement taking days. Xelio replaces that corridor with Solana-settled stablecoin transfers initiated by a single text message. Xelio operates two distinct products. StableChat is the consumer-facing offering: a user sends a standard SMS or WhatsApp message to any phone number and funds are delivered instantly. The recipient does not need to take any action to receive money — on their first transaction, Para's server-side SDK automatically generates a self-custodial MPC wallet linked to their SIM identity. The user never sees a seed phrase, never downloads an app, and never opens a browser. Local agent networks in Nigeria allow recipients to cash out to physical naira at nearby kiosks, bridging the final mile between on-chain settlement and physical currency. StableChat supports USDC, USDT, and Solstice's USX stablecoin, the latter integrated through Solana Mobile's Seed Vault hardware signing module for additional security. StableCorp is Xelio's business-to-business offering targeting cross-border founders and small businesses. It provides company incorporation across five jurisdictions, digital bank accounts, stablecoin-denominated invoice processing, and AI-assisted compliance tooling, allowing businesses to receive USDC and USDT from international clients without correspondent banking intermediaries. Both products run on the same underlying stablecoin infrastructure but address fundamentally different market segments. Xelio's technical architecture rests on three layers. The settlement layer is Solana, chosen for sub-second finality and per-transaction fees measured in fractions of a cent — characteristics that make sub-dollar remittances economically viable for the first time. The wallet layer is Para's embedded MPC wallet infrastructure, which distributes signing keys across multiple parties so there is no single point of compromise. Para pre-generates wallets before users even know they are being onboarded, enabling zero-setup onboarding tied to SIM card identity rather than memorized seed phrases. Para's production deployment spans more than 15 million wallets across its client base, giving Xelio a proven custody foundation rather than a bespoke one. The interface layer is SMS and WhatsApp messaging, which together cover effectively the entire mobile phone population in sub-Saharan Africa. Xelio's partners include Solana Foundation, Circle for USDC rails, Para for wallet infrastructure, Bridge (the stablecoin orchestration platform acquired by Stripe in late 2024) for fiat on/off-ramp operations, and Colosseum as the hackathon and accelerator backer. The founding team consists of Soumalya Paul, Manik Biradar, Arnab Ray, and Tarun Shekhar, incubated through Solana Turbine. No additional professional backgrounds have been publicly disclosed. The global remittance market exceeds 700 billion dollars annually, with sub-Saharan Africa receiving approximately 50 billion dollars per year. Legacy providers charge fees that disproportionately harm low-value senders — a worker sending 100 dollars home pays roughly 6-10 dollars in fees. Solana's fee structure makes it theoretically possible to route these corridors for less than a cent, but only if the user-facing interface meets people where they already are. Multiple prior projects attempted SMS-based crypto payments but foundered on the wallet creation step, which still required users to set up accounts. Xelio's differentiation is that wallet generation is fully automated on first contact, removing that bottleneck entirely. At the time of writing, Xelio is in active pilot in Nigeria with plans for broader geographic expansion. The project has no announced token of its own.