Sling Money is live in the USA!

You can send money instantly to people across 145+ countries

I believe you should be able to send money to anyone in the world whether they’re next to you or three thousand miles away. You shouldn’t have to know anything about your recipient’s bank account, you shouldn’t have to worry about currency conversion, and the transaction should be basically instant and free or nearly free. I think the only reason why this hasn’t existed since the dawn of the internet is because of technological shortcomings, and those gaps have been closed. It’s now possible. 

I’ve spent the past two and a half years of my life working to make this a reality. 

We’re calling it Sling Money. To Americans I would describe it as a “global Venmo” or “global Cash App.” To everyone else I’d describe it as “WhatsApp for money.”

You can download it today. Just search the Play Store or the App Store for “Sling Money.” Download it, complete signup, find me in the directory and send me a dollar from your welcome gift. I’ll send it right back to you. The transactions will be instant, wherever you happen to be. 

The idea for Sling Money was born about two and a half years ago when I used USDC – a US Dollar stablecoin – on Solana to send my friend Sam Lessin a few thousand dollars for an investment. 

The transfer was instant and free and kind of incredible. But a lot of things about it or around it were terrible – it was clear this technology hadn’t been polished for a mainstream customer base yet – but I knew how to fix all of the rough edges and so I said to Sam “we should start a global Venmo.” Sam runs a venture capital fund and so his reply was maybe predictable in retrospect: “I’ll wire you the money to do it right now. How much do you want?”

I told him to hold off. I wanted to do the work. So my co-founder Simon Amor and I spent the next months talking to everyone I could about this idea – trying to understand how difficult it would be to make a reality, trying to understand why no one else was doing it, probing for the early growth stories of Venmo and Cash App and PayPal and Wise – until I got to the point where it seemed obvious we should build it.

We raised our seed round in the summer of 2022. Ribbit Capital led the round along with Sam’s Slow Ventures and a bunch of angels. And we got started.

Where we are now

We’ve now built Sling Money. The app works. And we believe that all money is going to work this way in the future.

Sling Money now supports instant fiat payments across 76 countries including – as of today – the United States. It took us a year and a half and a bunch of starts and stops to get the US up and running, but we’ve got it. It’s now one of 76 countries across four continents that Sling Money supports instant payments in. 

Now, with Sling Money, you can move money from your bank account in Paris to your bank account in New York City in ~60 seconds and for free. Or you can send money from New York City to your friend or family member in Nairobi instantly and for free. They get a US Dollar stablecoin. Which they can keep or turn into Shillings in their M-Pesa whenever they want. And so on and so forth. We think this is how all money is going to work – instant, easy, cheap to move.

Our mission and what it means to me

Our mission is to connect everyone in the world to a global, instant financial system. At low cost.

We think that this hasn’t been possible previously because of the technological limitations of fiat money, but it’s now possible thanks to ultra-fast blockchains, real-time payment networks and high-quality regulated stablecoins. We’ve had this vision for more than two years now and we’ve been building all the regulatory and technological infrastructure to make it possible. 

It’s been an absolutely incredible journey. We’ve been continually presented with “impossible” challenges, with hard problems, with people telling us why this hasn’t been done or why it doesn’t exist. There have been ups and downs. It’s been a true roller coaster ride. There have been so many times along the way when it felt like it might not work but we’ve ignored the pain in our stomachs and just kept going. And so far, every time we’ve hit an insurmountable challenge, we’ve found a way over or around or through it.

As we’ve been doing this work I’ve come to the conclusion that this product really has the potential to change the world. It has become self-evident that everyone in the world should be able to financially transact with everyone else in the world. That it should be very low cost to do so. And that in a world where this is possible everyone will be better off. And I feel deeply, personally, incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to work on such a thing – and I can’t emphasize enough how much it feels like everything I’ve done before in my career has led up to this moment. 

Why you should use Sling Money

Sling Money is better, faster and cheaper than traditional money transmission products.

If you’re in the United States and only ever transact with people in the US it’s still faster than Venmo and Cash App. Peer to peer transactions are about the same speed as Venmo and Cash App but withdrawals from Sling Money to your bank are faster and free. Those guys charge 1.5 - 3% for instant withdrawals. Our instant withdrawals are faster than their instant withdrawals and entirely free.

With Sling Money it’s the same everywhere in the world. You can send money from New York City to Nairobi and your recipient can get their money in their M-Pesa wallet in a few seconds. 

Our user feedback so far has been insane. I’ve been building products on the internet since I dropped out of high school when I was fifteen. I’ve been lucky enough to work on a ton of products that people really loved like Monzo, Deliveroo and Facebook. But the feedback we’re getting from Sling Money is like nothing else. More people have called this thing “magic” than I’ve ever heard from anyone before about anything. It’s “a dream come true” and “truly magical” and it “works like a goddamn charm.”

All of this works with fiat integration in 76 countries so far, with more to come. And while we’re building out fiat integrations in more countries you can actually add and remove stablecoins in another 75 countries. This means that you can send money to someone in a country where we don’t have fiat payment integrations yet as long as your recipient is at least a little bit technical and can use an exchange like Coinbase or Luno. When we’ve done the math this has resulted in a ~90% discount against traditional fiat money transmitters even when accounting for local crypto exchange fees (if they’re charged at all).

We actually believe all of this should be free. If you can send a picture from San Francisco  to Paris for free on WhatsApp we think you should be able to send money from New York City to Nairobi for free on Sling Money. They’re both just bits. Just information. They should both move instantly and for free.

We are convinced that we can offer transactions between users on Sling Money for free. They cost us basically nothing and they should cost users basically nothing. And we think there’s a chance we may be able to offer our fiat gateways for free, too. We aren’t totally sure yet, but we think we’ve got a shot at doing it – and we’re going to try. So while we’re collecting data and figuring this out you can use Sling Money entirely for free, with us subsidizing the cost a little bit as we build scale.

Wait, you’re subsidizing transactions?

Yes. Because we think that, at scale, we may be able to do this entirely for free. 

When we started Sling Money I promised myself we weren’t going to build one of those companies that build a gross margin negative product and “made it up on volume” later. But here we are. I think we’ve got a 10% chance at making money transfer across the world instant and entirely free for everyone, and that’s just too big a prize to ignore. We’re going to go straight for it. And if we discover we can’t do it, that’s OK, we’ll figure out how to just make it “really, really cheap” compared to everyone else who’s using old-fashioned fiat technology. It’s fine.

I’m confident we can build a profitable business here. I think the real question is how big it’ll be. Stablecoins and blockchains allow us to build a much more efficient product and service, globally, than is possible with traditional database-based ledgers. And when we add AI and other modern technologies into the mix that help us with compliance and customer service we think we have the potential to build an insanely efficient company.

How it works under the hood

Sling Money works totally differently than just about every traditional financial product you’ve used. That’s because it’s built on top of completely different technologies.

The most fundamentally different thing about Sling Money from almost every other financial product you’ve used is that it’s a self-custodial product. 

Your money actually belongs to you. We can’t access the contents of your wallet. We don’t have your private key. We can’t initiate a transaction on your behalf. This is fundamentally different from a traditional bank, peer-to-peer payment system or even crypto exchange where all of the assets held by the company are held in a shared ledger and there’s just a database entry that they maintain that determines how much money you have.

This is a wildly different way for money to work, and I think probably a lot better. Your Sling Money balance has more in common with the cash you have in your pocket right now than it does with the money you have in Venmo or Chase.

These facts, together, mean that when you have money on Sling Money it’s really yours, and it’s basically free and instant to send to anyone else, anywhere the blockchain works. Which is pretty much everywhere. In this sense Sling Money is global by default.

In fact, the technology we’ve built Sling Money on top of is so global by default that we’ve had to do a ton of active work to make it work in fewer geographies. This is like the opposite of how traditional “fiat” money works. We’ve had to restrict the places where people can use Sling Money to comply with the law. Which takes a ton of active effort. It’s a kind of fascinating difference from a traditional bank where you really would have to do a ton of work to make it work in more than one country or currency.

This kind of theme repeats across all of the product. We’ve had to basically invent compliance systems from the ground up. We have invested heavily in AI technology, new types of transaction monitoring, and built a ton of tooling to make compliance work on the blockchain the way our regulators expect it to work. We have been the first customer of multiple new companies building compliance technology software. We have pushed our partners to build new things for us. We have built entirely things ourselves when we’ve needed to. It’s been wild.

A bunch of our engineering team used to work at a bank. I remember the first time one of them – who had worked on the core banking ledger at Monzo Bank – looked up and said something to the effect of “this is how all money will work in the future.”

And I really believe that. Once you start working seriously with blockchains and stablecoins it’s very hard to imagine that the old way of storing and moving and thinking about money will persist. This new technology is just too good. It’s going to replace the old stuff. It’s just a matter of how quickly it’ll happen.

I’ll do more posts in the future about all of the interesting things we’ve learned along the way and everything we’ve built. About some of our internal tools, some of the ways we use AI, some of the things we’ve discovered about the new physics of money. But that can wait for another day.

The team

We’re a fairly small team, and we plan to stay pretty small. We think it’s possible to build Sling Money in a more efficient way than past companies like this. We’re currently 23 people. We’re about 20% compliance and financial crime, 55% product and engineering, 10% marketing and 15% ops, partnerships and finance.

My co-founder Simon is a designer. Almost everyone on the team has worked together before and  I think everyone genuinely likes each other. For some of us we’re now on our third company working together.

And I think that, as a group, we’re uniquely suited to build this thing. We’ve got people here from the early Square days, the early Monzo Bank days, from Facebook, from Deliveroo, from Qonto, from Spotify. We’re a nice mix of people who have built social software at scale and people who have built regulated financial software at scale. 

And we have some incredible investors onboard as well. Justin Saslaw at Ribbit Capital sometimes feels like our third co-founder. The entire team at Ribbit has been incredible. As has the team at Union Square Ventures and our many wonderful angel investors.

I think that one of the single most important things in life is who you spend time with. And I feel incredibly lucky to spend so much time with this team of people. They are a joy and they make me better every day. And another really important thing is to work on things that matter and have the potential to make the world a better place. And I believe we’re doing that, too.

Where does it go from here?

We’re getting ready to enter growth mode. Now that we have the US, most of Europe, 26 countries in Africa, Brazil, and a bunch more countries, we’re going to start stepping on the gas. We’ll try to grow as fast as we can while staying in control of our compliance obligations and managing fraud and financial crime risk. 

And we’ll continue expanding into more countries. We have about twenty more countries on the short-term integration list. We really want to connect everyone in the world to an instant, global financial system. 

And as we do this we’ll collect a ton of data to determine whether or not it’s possible for us to offer Sling Money for free to everyone, or if we can do something with a free tier, a subscription model, or just much lower per-transaction pricing than people are used to. We will see. I’m optimistic.

Please send your feedback

I’d be really grateful if you’d sign up and try Sling Money out. We’re extremely early in our journey and every single piece of user feedback is valuable to us. You can get it by searching “Sling Money” on the App Store or Play Store. You’ll have to do IDV at the front door. Most people get through it in between two and five minutes. And from there you can send me a dollar from your welcome gift. Just find me in the directory. I’ll send it back to you, with a bit of interest. I can’t wait to hear what you think.