Hello there, and welcome to the 18th edition of Base Directory's newsletter. Every weekday, I'll send you a concise email highlighting everything you need to know about an onchain product built on Base, including my thoughts on it and how you can get started using it.
Today's spotlight is on Bend (formerly known as Beam), a non-custodial wallet making it simple for anyone to transfer and receive international payments within minutes using US stablecoins on Base and Optimism.
How Bend Works:
A core idea at the heart of Bend, reflected in the UI and experience of the product throughout is making global money transfers as simple as possible. The product experience is clearly targeted at a non-crypto audience with cross-border transfer needs which makes sense given that stablecoins are one of the most prominent applications of crypto nearing product-market fit.
For this audience, Bend showcases the value-add of crypto by highlighting the following:
No transaction limits
Complete sovereignty over funds
Near-instant transactions
As someone who has a clear sense of how painful cross-border transfers can be especially from a non-first-world country, I'm a big fan of products that focus on this pain point and onboard more users into crypto from this angle.
To use Bend, users need to fund the wallet with dollar stablecoins on Base or Optimism then proceed to send to the recipient's wallet details.
If the recipient doesn't have a wallet, the sender can create a 'Bend link' to send the money to and share the link with them, allowing the recipient to claim the funds on Bend.
One thing Bend does quite well is communicating its value proposition and how the product works in a way that's accessible to users new to crypto.
You can keep up with updates from the Bend team via their X (fka Twitter) profile and check out the product here.
With Bend, it is.
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To explore other products on Base, visit www.basedirectory.xyz.
Thanks for reading through! See you tomorrow.
