From the literal beginning of crypto, the vision was to make sending money electronically as easy and seamless as an email. “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution,” read the opening lines of the Bitcoin white paper, released in 2008.

Yet 16 years later it’s obvious that one of the main hurdles to adopting cryptocurrencies is the difficulty and level of tech savvy needed to set up a digital wallet. The ongoing pain of the wallet user experience made Suku Chief Executive Officer Lapchik mad.

“How is it possible in 2024 my U.S. dollars are not good in my country?” Lapchik, who is from Uruguay but now heads his company from Miami, said to me in a recent interview. “They are good if I have cash, but not digital. It’s crazy.”

Suku is working to change that by making wallet onboarding as easy as answering a text. As he demonstrated to me, Suku uses a cell phone number to send a link that takes you to a page that is in essence your new crypto wallet. No need to write down a seed phrase or take note of your private key, which is 64 random characters long.  

Within a few minutes I had $1 in my SukuPay wallet thanks to Lapchik.

“We abstracted all of that, giving you all the best of crypto without the complexities of crypto,” Lapchik said.

Competition for payments that use crypto rails is fierce, with firms such as Stripe and Lit Protocol, among many others, hoping to carve out a piece of the payments industry pie.

The global payments industry, controlled mostly by banks and credit card companies, is expected to earn $2.2 trillion in revenue by 2027, according to Boston Consulting Group. While the industry’s growth is slowing, BCG noted that over 5,000 fintech startups are trying to disrupt and modernize how money is sent globally. On top of that, Lapchik said that currently 1.5 billion people don’t have bank accounts, a number that’s expected to decrease to 750 million in three to five years.

SukuPay is only operating in the U.S. for now with plans to expand to other countries, Lapchik said. It uses the stablecoin USDC on the Polygon blockchain to send value between users. U.S. customers can use Stripe to put money into SukuPay and use Beam to get it out, Lapchik said. There are no fees to send or receive money with SukuPay, but users do pay a fee to convert to local currency or add funds from a bank account.

Read more: Lit Protocol Is Building The Future Of Decentralized Key-Management

Several challenges face Suku and any other crypto-based payments solution, said David Kroger, senior vice president at StoneX Digital. The first is using banks to get money into and out of the crypto payment rails.

“One of the hardest topics that hasn’t been addressed yet is the identification verification process with offramps for web3,” Kroger said. Having banking involved at both ends means “with web3 right now the ability to actually transact doesn’t exist yet,” he said. Then there’s the ability of the underling blockchain to scale, or not. But Kroger said the current status of needing a 16-word seed phrase for a crypto wallet, which if you lose you lose all your money, is untenable.

“It’s not palpable for retail,” Kroger said.

Inefficiencies in the remittance payment market also motivated Lapchik. He said $65 billion was sent from the U.S. to Mexico last year in remittance payments, which can only be accessed via cash. He wants to know why it can’t be digital, like how almost everyone else deals with money.

“Someone needs to fix this,” he said. “We didn’t build a solution for crypto. We built a solution for everyone.”

Recent innovations in crypto that lead to so-called account abstraction wallets are what make Suku possible. These are wallets that are actually smart contracts, providing more flexibility and functionality than a traditional wallet. That’s how Suku is able to set up new customers with a text message and a few clicks, while all in the background a smart-contract-based wallet is being created. Suku’s goal is to be at least 50 percent cheaper than any remittance service in the world, Lapchik said.

“We spent the last 10 years building infrastructure for this moment,” he told me. “The issue we had with onboarding people is no longer there.”