The Background
Their business builds on huge market opportunities and desire from both TradFi incumbents and crypto-natives to build solutions that blend traditional and emerging financial spaces. Reap particularly sees notable demand in emerging markets where businesses can be underserved, and face a lack of efficient connectivity for global trade; they’ve identified that the Latin American market in particular has a lot of existing cross border stablecoin flows. Reap has found that stablecoins make cross-border payments more efficient, and cut down on the lack of efficiency of traditional rails. They also make cross-border payments more cost-effective and trackable.
The Challenge
In 2018, Reap started in the traditional payment space. In the last 2.5 years they moved into serving Web3 customers. In the beginning, Reap lacked the tools to accept digital currencies so when they first started onboarding Web3 customers, they struggled to accept, manage and move digital assets. The organization wanted to start with a POC, but didn’t want to limit themselves to choosing an infrastructure provider that would potentially curb their growth.
The Rationale
Reap decided to work with Fireblocks in order to launch their blockchain-based payments offering.
They selected Fireblocks for a number of reasons:
Security was a critical factor for the Reap team. Security over funds was paramount for the organization. Reap found that the Fireblocks platform offered the capabilities and flexibility they needed to manage the security of these funds. At the same time, they were pleased to find that Fireblocks’ security features mirrored their operations on the traditional fiat side, with elements such as workflow authorizations and volume threshold caps.
We had very clear decision criteria when choosing a technology provider. Battle-tested security over funds was paramount. We also wanted robust capabilities to manage that security that existed on the traditional fiat side. Finally, we have a clear vision and roadmap and wanted a partner who could support our innovation and scale with us. Fireblocks was the best partner for all these reasons.
Beyond security, Reap was also looking for an infrastructure player that would allow them to grow and scale on-chain solutions along with the roadmap that they envisioned. This also meant choosing to work with a provider that had the highest breadth of connectivity (or number of supported blockchains)
The Result
Utilizing the Fireblocks platform, Reap was able to develop a full-fledged Web3 product offering. Fireblocks’ extensive API documentation and FAQs made it easy for their engineers to get started.
The team found that their implementation process and the ongoing support they’ve received from Fireblocks has been very strong, speaking to being “impressed” with the responsiveness and technical expertise of the Fireblocks team. As Reap develops new concepts along their product roadmap, they’ve also found that speed of delivery is strong throughout with Fireblocks.
Some of Fireblocks’ features that Reap has found value in include:
- Policy Engine – Offered the team a high level of security, customization, and flexibility. Reap’s finance ops teams can manage funds easily, and attest to the Policy Engine providing significant peace of mind.
- Gas Station – Fireblocks Gas Station allowed the team to move into other blockchains. They expanded into Tron, Polygon and Solana.
- API access – The robustness of Fireblocks’ APIs and technology allowed Reap to create purpose-driven vaults and wallets for customers so that card holders can manage funds.
Reap has grown from having a handful of Web3 customers in their customer base, to now 90% of their customer base being Web3. They’ve multiplied from single digit millions to hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto processing a month with the help of the Fireblocks platform.
We’re seeing a lot of interest from incumbents who want to start building solutions that bridge the gap between web2 and web3. Businesses see stablecoins as a means to cut out the inefficiencies of traditional fund movement. Stablecoin payments are more cost effective, real-time, and trackable.
With Fireblocks, Reap has also built their own ledger system to track customer funds across products and uses. Creating their own wallet infrastructure at the level of detail they wanted helped them build a robust reporting and reconciliation system.
Conclusion
Moving forward, Reap is focused on continuing to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of money movement around the world, listening to client needs and drive the next phase of innovation, expanding to new locations, and building solutions for remittances and credit card companies that make it more efficient with digital assets – all with the help of Fireblocks.
