Fasa | Devpost

Inspiration

Cross-border trade among informal African merchants runs on slow, expensive rails — bank wires, cash couriers, informal hawala-style networks — with settlement taking days and fees eating into thin margins. On top of that, these merchants are invisible to formal credit systems: even reliable traders with years of consistent activity can't get working capital because there's no paper trail a bank will recognize. We wanted to build something that fixes settlement speed and turns that settlement history into a credit asset merchants can actually use.

What it does

Fasa lets merchants clear cross-border payments over stablecoin rails in minutes instead of days. Every settlement is captured through a merchant dashboard, cleared via a settlement API, and logged. That settlement history feeds a credit engine that converts consistent trading activity into working-capital offers — so a merchant's own payment behavior becomes their credit file.

How we built it

The frontend is a merchant dashboard built with Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind, giving merchants visibility into settlements and balances. The backend is a FastAPI service handling settlement clearing logic and the credit-scoring pipeline that turns transaction history into working-capital offers. The whole stack — frontend, backend, and any supporting services — is containerized with Docker and Docker Compose, so it spins up with a single command for demos and judging.

Challenges we ran into

[This is worth filling in with your own specifics — e.g. was it wiring the stablecoin settlement logic, designing the credit-scoring model from limited signal, or the container orchestration? I don't want to invent challenges you didn't actually hit.]

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting a full end-to-end flow working — dashboard, settlement API, and credit pipeline — all wired together and packaged into a one-command containerized demo, in a short build window.

What we learned

[Also worth your input — technical lessons (stablecoin rails, credit modeling) or product lessons (what merchants actually need) both work well here.]

What's next for Fasa

Expanding merchant onboarding, refining the credit-scoring model with real settlement data, and exploring additional stablecoin rail integrations to widen coverage across African markets.