Remi Awarded a Stellar Community Fund Grant to Build Confidential On-Chain Settlement
Remi today announced it has been awarded a grant worth ~$135k from the Stellar Community Fund, to build a confidential settlement layer on Stellar for banks, exchange houses and PSPs.
Quick bit of good news. Remi has been awarded a grant from the Stellar Community Fund, and we're putting it toward one thing: confidential settlement that regulated institutions can actually use.
What this is
The Stellar Community Fund is the Stellar Development Foundation's open-application program for teams building on Stellar. The grant, worth ~$135k, funds what we're building on the network: a confidential settlement layer for banks, exchange houses and payment service providers.
Why this matters
Public blockchains are transparent by design. Every amount, balance and counterparty is visible to anyone, forever. For a lot of uses that's fine. For a regulated institution it's a non-starter, because no bank can broadcast its clients' balances and flows to competitors and the public.
The privacy tools built to fix that usually break compliance instead. So regulated money stays on the old rails: correspondent banking that's slow, pre-funded and expensive across every jurisdiction it touches.
The market has had to choose between privacy and compliance. Our view is that you shouldn't have to.
What we're building on Stellar
The confidential settlement layer keeps amounts and balances encrypted on-chain, while keeping full oversight for the people who are supposed to have it.
It stays confidential, because zero-knowledge proofs confirm that every transfer adds up without revealing the numbers behind it. It stays supervised, because an account can't be created without escrowing a viewing key its auditor can unlock, so oversight is a property of the protocol and not a promise in a policy. Disclosure is selective, so an authorised auditor or regulator can reveal one specific transfer, and only that one, without exposing anything else on the network. And there's no crypto at the edges, because network fees are sponsored behind the scenes, so the people sending and receiving money never hold or touch any crypto.
Why Stellar
Why Stellar? Because it was built for this. The network has focused on payments and cross-border transfers since the start, with fast settlement, low fees and currency-to-currency movement at the core of what it does. That's the same problem we work on every day, so adding a confidential, compliance-ready layer on top of rails already designed to move money makes far more sense than bending a general-purpose chain to do it.
An ecosystem that fits the vision
Remi's vision is infrastructure other institutions can build on, so the ecosystem around a chain matters as much as the chain itself. Stellar brings a community of builders, established anchors and the liquidity that already moves value in and out of local currencies. That gives the confidential settlement layer somewhere to plug in from day one, rather than starting from an empty network.
And it runs both ways. Part of what the grant funds is giving back: open tooling like dashboards, a sponsored-transaction relayer, a client SDK and published cost benchmarks that any regulated operator can reuse to build confidential payments on Stellar. The more the ecosystem grows, the more reach Remi's rails have, so contributing to it is part of building the business.
What happens next
We're building the layer from testnet toward mainnet, along with the dashboards and compliance tooling that make it usable by an operations and compliance team and not just an engineer. We'll share more as the pieces land.
A. Tony Amer, Co-founder and CEO of Remi: "Confidential settlement is the thing regulated institutions have been asking for and couldn't get without giving up compliance. The Stellar Community Fund's backing lets us close that gap. We're grateful for the support and heads-down on the build."
About Remi
Remi builds infrastructure for cross-border money movement, focused on making settlement between financial institutions faster, more private and fully auditable.
About the Stellar Community Fund
The Stellar Community Fund is an open-application program, supported by the Stellar Development Foundation, that funds teams building on the Stellar network. Its awardees are published for the community to see.
