Cross-border stablecoin payments via QR codes with Moreta
How Privy secures onchain global money transfers from real-time EUR and GBP deposits
Debbie Soon
|Jul 1, 2025
Moreta simplifies payments for international travelers, allowing them to pay merchants abroad using QR codes. This means not having to deal with currency exchanges, unfamiliar ATMs, or surprise transaction fees.
With stablecoin rails under the hood, Moreta lets travelers instantly fund a spending account that works across borders from day one. All it takes is a phone to tap into local payment networks, without needing a bank account in every country. In Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines, Thailand, and Cambodia, where QR-based wallets are a dominant payment method, Moreta bridges the gap for travelers from card-first markets like the US, UK, and EU.
By integrating Privy and Coinflow, Moreta offers secure, embedded wallets that enable stablecoin-backed cross-border payments without requiring users to manage crypto directly. Travelers fund their wallets using familiar methods like SEPA (for EUR), Faster Payments (for GBP), or by card. Coinflow handles the fiat onramp, making it easy and cost-effective for users to fund their accounts, and credits the user’s Privy embedded wallet 1:1 with USD. These credits are then redeemed in the background and settled in USDC, allowing users to pay local merchants abroad via QR codes quickly, securely, and without the usual friction.
“We chose Privy to power secure, real-time onchain global money movement so cross-border QR payments could feel effortless. Their infrastructure let us focus on crafting the seamless experiences travelers love.”
— Sam Yu, Co-founder and CTO of Moreta
What are stablecoin rails?
Stablecoin is a digital currency that is commonly pegged 1:1 to fiat currencies like the US dollar. Unlike other cryptocurrencies that are more volatile in nature, stablecoin offers the reliability of traditional money with the speed and programmability of blockchain networks.
For a product like Moreta, which enables cross-border payments for everyday purchases, stablecoin rails provide a faster, more cost-efficient alternative to traditional banking. They allow funds to move across borders in seconds while operating in a dollar-denominated system. This reduces FX risk, avoids costly delays, and delivers the real-time experience travelers expect when tapping to pay.
Why Moreta chose stablecoin for global payments
For Moreta, stablecoin rails are essential infrastructure for enabling real-time payments abroad. They offer:
Real-time settlement: Enables instant redemption of user deposits across time zones.
Price stability: USDC offered the consistency needed for spendable balances denominated in USD.
Programmable flows: Moreta is able to tie credits directly to wallet identity and automate backend flows like merchant payouts and redemptions.
Regulatory clarity: By avoiding direct onramping, Moreta stayed within the bounds of their compliance model. Credits are tied to USDC, but not directly custodied by the user.
Integrating Privy
Moreta integrated Privy to embed secure, programmatic wallets into their backend. This setup enables them to implement stablecoin-backed payment flows without requiring users to have any crypto knowledge. While each user receives a smart wallet protected by Privy, funds are ultimately swept into a Moreta-controlled payment wallet, from which merchant payouts are executed.
Here’s how the integration works:
Wallet creation: When a user signs up for Moreta, the backend calls Privy’s API to create a new wallet. The wallet ID is stored and mapped to the user’s Moreta account for future access and transactions.
Smart wallet setup: Moreta then creates a smart wallet for each user. This is the wallet address that user funds are held and transacted from in the form of credits. It also allows Moreta to support programmable flows and gas abstraction.
Gas sponsorship: To keep the experience frictionless, Moreta uses Privy’s paymaster and bundler setup to cover transaction fees on behalf of the user. This means users can send payments without needing to hold or manage any blockchain-specific tokens.
Sending transactions: Once the smart wallet is configured, Moreta can initiate transactions programmatically from the backend, triggering payments in response to user actions, such as scanning a QR code.
With this setup, Privy gives Moreta the infrastructure to manage wallets, enable gasless transactions, and support stablecoin-backed credits. This abstracts away any crypto complexity, and delivers a seamless consumer-grade user experience.
What's next
As Moreta continues to expand its geographic footprint and roll out features like cashback rewards, the team is building a travel payment experience that’s localized, simpler, and smarter. Privy is proud to support Moreta as they scale to more countries, merchants, and travelers, and help bring seamless onchain payments to the real world, without the complexity.
Want to learn more about building on stablecoin rails?
Learn more about how stablecoin rails work as well as about Privy’s stablecoin infrastructure stack.
Reach out to us to learn more about how we can help bring your use case to life.
