Hold, move and grow your money - anywhere, instantly. The self-custodial wallet that turned stablecoins into something you can actually spend.
Somewhere in Lagos, a freelance designer finishes a logo and taps send. A second later, a small business owner in Sacramento has the money. No wire, no three-day hold, no bank skimming seven percent off the top. The fee on that transfer rounds to a quarter of a cent. This is an ordinary Tuesday for Sentz.
Sentz is a free, self-custodial mobile wallet for sending, saving, receiving and earning in stablecoins. It runs on eUSD - a digital dollar engineered to stay worth a dollar - and it works in more than 180 countries. The company is headquartered in California, employs a lean team of around 31, and has quietly become one of the most-used stablecoin payment apps on the African continent.
You may also know Sentz by its maiden name. For most of its life it was MobileCoin - a privacy-obsessed cryptocurrency project written in Rust, advised by Signal's Moxie Marlinspike, and bolted into the Signal messenger as its payments layer. The rebrand to Sentz was not cosmetic. It was the moment a crypto protocol decided to become a product your aunt could use.
The internet made text, photos and video effectively free to send across the planet. Money stayed stubbornly stuck in the twentieth century. A remittance from a worker abroad to family back home still routes through correspondent banks, sits in limbo for days, and arrives lighter by fees that the World Bank pegs near seven percent. For the people who can least afford it, sending money home is taxed like a luxury.
Crypto promised to fix this and mostly delivered volatility, jargon and seed phrases scrawled on napkins. A coin worth a hundred dollars on Monday might be worth sixty by Friday - useless as a way to pay rent. Stablecoins solved the price problem but came wrapped in exchanges, gas fees and interfaces built for traders, not parents. The gap Sentz saw was simple: a stable digital dollar that a non-technical person could send as easily as a message, and actually keep control of.
MobileCoin was founded in 2017 by Joshua Goldbard and Shane Glynn, with a roster of advisors heavy on cryptography rather than commerce. The early bet was contrarian: build payments on the privacy guarantees of Monero and the consensus model of Stellar, keep it open-source under GPLv3, and refuse to make users trust a custodian. The keys would belong to the user, full stop.
That bet attracted serious money. Binance Labs led a seed round in 2018; General Catalyst and Future Ventures came in for a Series A; a 2021 Series B drew Coinbase Ventures, Salesforce's Marc Benioff and others. All told the company has raised north of $116 million. It also attracted serious turbulence - an Alameda Research investment that aged badly, and the loss of Chief Product Officer Bob Lee. The company kept building.
The pivotal hire, in hindsight, was internal. Sara Drakeley joined in 2018 as a principal software engineer, rose to CTO, and was named CEO in 2023 - the engineer who watched the protocol grow up and then steered it toward the people who needed it most.
Strip away the history and Sentz is three things working together. A wallet you control. A stable dollar that moves through it. And a reason to leave money in it.
Free and self-custodial. You hold the keys; payments are end-to-end encrypted and settle in seconds. Not even Sentz can touch your funds.
A digital dollar built to always be worth $1, backed by a basket of stablecoins like USDT and USDC, with automated stability monitoring.
Up to 8% annually on your eUSD, compounding daily, with no lockups and no minimum balance. Rolled out first in Nigeria.
Invoice tools for freelancers and creators - send a request, get paid across borders in seconds, keep almost all of it.
Caption: A dollar made of dollars. eUSD is a stablecoin backed by other stablecoins - financial nesting dolls that somehow keep their balance.
Skeptics are right to ask whether "cheap and fast" survives contact with reality. Here is where Sentz lands against the thing it is trying to replace - the traditional cross-border transfer.
Caption: The shortest bar in the chart is the whole business model. Fees, like guests, are best when barely noticed.
The traction is not theoretical. Hundreds of thousands of users in Nigeria already move and store value in eUSD, in a market where local currency volatility makes a stable dollar genuinely useful rather than merely interesting. The early Signal integration proved the technology could handle real peer-to-peer payments at scale. Investors including a16z crypto and Coinbase Ventures put their names behind the thesis.
Plenty of companies say they want to bank the unbanked. Most of them mean "sell financial products to new customers." Sentz's version is narrower and, for that reason, more believable: take the single most expensive, slowest, most paternalistic part of personal finance - moving money across a border - and make it nearly free, nearly instant, and entirely yours.
The self-custody insistence is the tell. It would be easier to build a custodial app, hold everyone's money, and move faster. Sentz keeps choosing the harder architecture because the whole point is that the user - not a bank, not an exchange, not Sentz itself - is in control. That is an inconvenient principle to ship. It is also the one worth shipping.
Regulators are circling stablecoins, banks are quietly building their own, and the digital dollar is sliding from frontier technology toward plumbing. When that happens, the winners will not be the loudest tokens. They will be the apps that made the plumbing invisible - the ones where a person sends money and never thinks about the rails underneath. Sentz is betting it can be that app.
Caption: The boring outcome is the good outcome. Nobody marvels at how their text message got delivered. That is exactly the ambition.
Back in Lagos, the designer who tapped send does not know or care that eUSD is backed by a basket of stablecoins, that the code is written in Rust, or that the company used to be called something else. She knows the money arrived, it arrived in seconds, and almost none of it disappeared along the way. The internet finally fixed the one thing it never could. On a Tuesday. For a quarter of a cent.