Akasena builds payment software for freelancers and small businesses in Southeast Asia. We help people receive money from international clients without losing a share of every invoice to a spread they never see — and without handing custody of their earnings to anyone, including us.
An Indonesian developer invoicing a client in the United States has bad options. A bank wire arrives days late and loses 2–3% inside the exchange rate before a single fee is charged. Wise does not offer accounts to Indonesian residents at all. The alternatives are better, but they bury their margin in the quoted rate rather than the fee line, and they hold the customer’s balance on their own books.
We measured it. Below is what it actually costs to receive $4,000 from a US client, using published fee schedules — alongside what the same transaction costs at the level of the underlying rails.
| Route | What they charge | All-in |
|---|---|---|
| Deel | FX conversion | 3–6% |
| Payoneer | 1% to receive, plus conversion | 2–4.5% |
| Local bank wire | Inbound FX spread and fees | 2–3% |
| Grey | 0.8% receive, 1% FX, fixed payout fee | ~1.9% |
| KAST | Flat ACH fee, 1% FX out | ~1.4% |
| True cost of the rails | ACH, minting, on-chain settlement | ~0.6% |
The gap between the last two rows is the entire industry. Incumbents charge two to three times what the transaction costs, and almost nobody in the market can see it, because the fee is hidden inside the rate rather than printed on the receipt.
A straightforward way to be paid by international clients, settle in stablecoins, and retain control of the funds at every step.
Customers receive a US account and routing number. Their client pays it by ACH or wire, exactly as they would pay any domestic supplier. Nothing about the payment is unusual on the client’s side.
Funds settle to USDC through licensed payment partners, at a rate the customer can see before it happens — not reconstructed afterwards from a balance that came up short.
The balance sits in a wallet the customer controls. They can hold it as dollar savings, send it, or cash out through whichever route they prefer. We cannot move it, and neither can anyone else.
We publish what we find, including the parts that undercut the popular story. Most writing about stablecoin remittance is imported from markets that behave nothing like Indonesia’s.
It is widely assumed that converting dollars to rupiah through stablecoins earns a premium, as it does in Nigeria or Argentina, where the gap runs anywhere from 5% to 40%. In Indonesia it does not.
Measured within the same minute, the local bid sits 0.05% from fair value — effectively at par. The 30-day mean is +0.06%. The apparent “discount” that others quote is almost entirely USDC’s own deviation from the dollar, not an Indonesian phenomenon. Indonesia’s capital account is open enough that no structural premium forms.
Why it matters: the advantage in this corridor is not an arbitrage. It is the avoidance of a bank spread that should never have been charged. That distinction determines what an honest business here can and cannot promise — and we would rather build on the true number than a flattering one.
The regulated parts of moving money are performed by licensed partners. Our architecture is designed so that this remains structurally true, rather than a matter of policy we could quietly change later.
Current status: Akasena is pre-launch. We are building our first product and selecting the licensed partners who will support it. We would rather state that plainly than imply a scale we have not yet earned.
We are building payment infrastructure for the people we come from: skilled workers in Southeast Asia doing globally valuable work, and losing a piece of every invoice on the way home. This started as a spreadsheet solving one person’s problem, and the numbers turned out to be everyone’s.