Traditional international transfers use a network of correspondent banks. Your money might hop through 2–4 intermediaries before reaching the destination — each adding latency, fees, and opacity. SWIFT messages, nostro/vostro accounts, batch processing windows. It's infrastructure designed in the 1970s.

Rare Swap replaces all of that with a single USDC transfer on Base.

What is USDC?

USDC is a stablecoin issued by Circle, backed 1:1 by US dollars held in regulated financial institutions. Each USDC is redeemable for exactly $1. It's the most widely used dollar-pegged stablecoin for payments, with over $40 billion in circulation.

What is Base?

Base is an Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain built by Coinbase. It inherits Ethereum's security while offering dramatically lower fees (typically less than $0.01 per transaction) and near-instant finality. For a payments use case like ours, Base is ideal.

How it works under the hood

Sender pays by card → Coinbase converts fiat to USDC and deposits it into a Privy embedded wallet we created for the recipient
USDC arrives in wallet → Our Inngest function detects the deposit and triggers the notification
Recipient claims → After OTP verification, the USDC is sent through Coinbase's offramp to the recipient's bank account

The entire on-chain portion — from USDC deposit to the recipient's wallet — takes under 2 seconds. The bottleneck is the fiat on-ramp (card processing, ~2 minutes) and the off-ramp (bank transfer, same day to 1–2 business days depending on the country).

Every transaction is verifiable on-chain at basescan.org. Full transparency, by default.