Karum — merchant of record for the unserved

MERCHANT OF RECORD FOR THE UNSERVED

REV. 0.1 · DESIGN DOCUMENT

A merchant of record and settlement network for the countries the global payments system declines to serve.

Mission

A developer in Lagos or Karachi or Jakarta can build something worth paying for and still have no way to take the money. Not because they are sanctioned and not because they are criminals, but because serving them is unprofitable at the scale of the companies that own the rails. Karum is a merchant of record for those makers. We are the seller, so tax, refunds, fraud and compliance are ours. Money is collected in the buyer's country and paid out in the maker's, and only the net difference between corridors ever crosses a border.

Vision

Where a maker lives should not decide whether they can be paid.

Roughly four billion people sit outside the reach of the global payments system for reasons that are commercial rather than legal. Stripe supports around forty-six countries. Everyone else is a rounding error at that scale, so nobody builds for them.

Karum makes those corridors worth operating. One ledger, local collection and local payout in every market, netted across nodes so the cost of moving money is paid on the residual rather than the flow. A maker signs up to something that behaves like a local provider, sells to a buyer anywhere, and never has to know which currency, which rail, or which entity moved the money.

Architecture

One sale, two countries

USDC · Base
Lightning
SEPA
Faster Payments
NIBSS / NIP
M-Pesa
Pix
UPI
GoPay
GCash
OXXO
iDEAL
Boleto
Fawry

Isometric diagram in three layers. Buyer's country: a buyer in Spain pays €40 over a Spanish rail, the acquirer settles in euros. Karum's layer: a Spain node ledger records €40 in, a €36 payable to the maker's node and €4 of group margin, and a Nigeria node ledger records a ₦61,200 payout; both nodes reach a UAE hub that nets positions, and only the net position - +€36 up, −€36 down, which cancel - crosses between them. Maker's country: the maker is paid ₦61,200 over a Nigerian rail or in USDC to a self-custody wallet. — Read it in three layers. The outer two are the countries, and neither payment is cross-border: the buyer pays €40 over a Spanish rail with the acquirer settling in euros, and the maker is paid ₦61,200 over a Nigerian rail or in USDC straight to a wallet. The middle layer is ours. Each country runs a node holding its own multi-account ledger in its own currency, so the Spain node carries €40 in from the buyer, a €36 payable to the maker's node and €4 of group margin, while the Nigeria node carries the ₦61,200 payout and the €36 it is owed back. Only the net position of each node reaches the hub, and the hub nets those positions against every other corridor — here the two sides offset to nothing. What finally settles is the residual of the whole book, over stablecoin for emerging corridors and over an FX broker for the majors. Collection stays local because it has to: most buyers in these markets cannot pay a foreign merchant at all.

Structure

Holding, entities, ledgers, rails

Isometric diagram of the Karum group: a UAE holdco owning IP, treasury and the netting engine; a UAE operating company as primary merchant of record and a Liechtenstein operating company as the licensed EEA entity; ghosted later-stage entities in Mauritius and Kazakhstan; node ledgers below them; and local rails and banks at the base. — Holding, IP and treasury sit in the UAE. Each corridor is a node with its own ledger in its own currency and its own local rails. Liechtenstein is the second entity and exists for one reason: to hold an EEA payment licence so we can offer maker balances, instant payout and passporting across thirty countries. Mauritius and AIFC are added only when those books justify a regulator, an audit and a transfer pricing file. Four entities cost roughly £150–250k a year to maintain before anyone is paid, so we start with two.

Build

What is ours

LedgerDouble-entry, multi-currency, per node. The system of record, and not a commodity.
Netting & settlement engineComputes net positions, picks the rail per corridor, executes settlement. The core IP.
Reconciliation engineEvery transaction across every rail and entity. If this breaks, we do not know our position and cannot pay makers correctly.

Checkout & deliveryPayment links, hosted storefront, licence keys, subscriptions, multi-currency pricing.
Risk & fraud rulesVelocity limits, device fingerprinting, 3DS triggers, chargeback scoring. What keeps the acquiring alive.
Corridor rulesPer-market rails, methods, limits, documents and tax regime.

Partners — corridors

Local providers, by market

Collection stays in the buyer's country. Payout stays in the maker's. Where a currency cannot legally leave its country, the collection aggregator absorbs that problem and settles to us in hard currency, or we pay the maker in USDC to a self-custody wallet instead.

Corridor coverage
Corridor	Collection	Payout	Note
Nigeria	Paystack, Flutterwave, dLocal	Payoneer, local bank, USDC	SEC-licensed VASPs for NGN↔USDC
Kenya	Flutterwave, dLocal	M-Pesa, Payoneer
Ghana	Paystack, Hubtel	Payoneer, local
South Africa	Paystack, Peach Payments	Payoneer, local EFT
Egypt	Paymob, dLocal	Payoneer	fiat only
Morocco	dLocal (limited)	Payoneer	crypto restricted
Pakistan	dLocal (limited)	Payoneer, USDC to wallet	no legal crypto↔fiat
Bangladesh	dLocal, local gateways	bKash, Payoneer	crypto restricted
India	Razorpay, dLocal	Razorpay, Payoneer	30% crypto tax
Indonesia	Xendit, Midtrans, dLocal	Xendit, Payoneer	crypto not legal as payment
Philippines	Xendit, PayMongo	GCash, Xendit
Vietnam	2C2P, dLocal	Payoneer	no framework
Turkey	iyzico, dLocal	Payoneer	crypto payment prohibited
Brazil	EBANX, dLocal	Pix, Payoneer
Argentina	dLocal, Mercado Pago	Payoneer, USDC	deepest crypto corridor
Mexico	dLocal, EBANX	OXXO, Payoneer
Colombia	dLocal, PayU	Payoneer
UAE	Network International, Telr	local rails	group treasury
EU / EEA	Stripe, Adyen, Mollie	SEPA, Wise Platform	Liechtenstein entity
UK	Stripe, Checkout.com	Faster Payments
US	Stripe, Adyen	ACH	via BaaS partner, no state MTLs

Partners — infrastructure

Everything that is a licence, a network or a commodity

None of this is built in-house. Every rail is dual-sourced from day one, because a single provider dropping one corridor is enough to lose a cohort of makers.

Infrastructure
Function	Providers	What it covers
Identity & KYB	Sumsub, Persona, Veriff, Trulioo, Middesk	maker onboarding, UBO tracing, document verification
Sanctions screening	OpenSanctions, ComplyAdvantage, Dow Jones RS	continuous re-screening on every list update
Tax	Fonoa, Avalara, Taxually	VAT OSS, US state nexus, digital services taxes
Card acquiring	Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com, Network International	buyer-side acceptance
Local aggregation	dLocal, PPRO, PayRetailers, EBANX	forty-plus markets under one contract
Global payout	Payoneer, Tipalti, Nium, Thunes, Wise Platform	individual payout into ~190 countries
FX & treasury	Airwallex, Ebury, StoneX, Convera	major-pair settlement and hedging
Stablecoin	licensed VASPs per corridor, Circle, Fireblocks	net settlement between nodes, stage 3 onward
Chain & Travel Rule	Chainalysis, TRM Labs, Notabene	crypto compliance and originator data
Banking	Emirates NBD, Mashreq, Wio	the constraint that actually matters