Overview
Ekival is a peer-to-peer money transfer platform that lets people send funds across borders by trading crypto for local cash, or the other way around. The platform is aimed at people sending money home — especially into Africa — who want lower fees and faster settlement than traditional remittance services offer1. Senders and recipients connect directly, and a smart contract holds the money in escrow until both sides confirm the trade is done.
Ekival is built on the Cardano blockchain and runs as a non-custodial service, which means the platform never holds your money or your wallet keys1. Behind the platform is Ekival Remit Ltd., a Canadian company registered as a Money Services Business2.
Key Features
- Direct peer-to-peer transfers. A sender posts an offer, a liquidity provider on the other side accepts it, and the smart contract handles the swap between cryptocurrency and local cash3.
- You stay in control of your funds. Ekival never takes custody of money or wallet keys; funds sit in a smart-contract escrow during a transfer and only release when both parties confirm the trade is complete1.
- Mobile money payouts. Recipients can receive value through familiar mobile money services rather than needing a bank account, which the team highlights as a fit for users in Africa2.
- Fees from 0.5% to 1.5%. Transaction fees fall in that range depending on the method, with a discount for users paying fees in the planned EKI token1.
- Cardano wallet compatibility. The platform connects with Cardano wallets that people already use day to day, including Yoroi, Daedalus, and Lace1. Supported assets on the platform include ADA and the Cardano-native stablecoin Djed.
What to Expect
Ekival is in beta and feels like an early-stage product. The roadmap targeted a May 2025 mainnet launch4, and the team has reported Project Catalyst milestones as completed in late 20252, but no public mainnet announcement has been published — visitors should treat the live web app as a work-in-progress.
To use the platform, you connect a Cardano wallet, fund it with ADA, post an offer (or accept one), and follow the transfer through a dashboard until the smart contract releases the funds3. Sending fiat to a bank or mobile-money account requires a small ADA balance to cover the on-chain transaction, since Ekival is fully non-custodial.
The team behind the project is small — three named members covering smart contracts, business development, and front-end design5 — and the smart-contract code is open-source on GitHub6. There is no published independent security audit yet, the EKI utility token has not yet been minted, and a token-allocation whitepaper is referenced on the roadmap but has not been released publicly. Funded Project Catalyst proposals — including 84,000 ADA distributed across Fund 11 — give the project some external grounding2, but anyone using Ekival should treat it as a maturing platform rather than a finished service.
