Ekival

Overview

Ekival is a money transfer app that lets you send cash or crypto from one person to another, across borders, without a traditional bank wire. A sender posts an offer, someone on the other side accepts, and a Cardano smart contract holds the funds in escrow until both sides confirm the trade. It is built for people sending money home, especially into Africa¹.

Ekival runs on the Cardano blockchain and is designed to be non-custodial, so users sign transactions from their own wallet instead of handing over wallet keys. Behind it is Ekival Remit Ltd., a Canadian company registered as a Money Services Business and funded through Cardano's Project Catalyst grant program².

Key Features

• Direct person-to-person transfers. A sender posts an offer, someone on the other side accepts, and a smart contract handles the swap between crypto and local cash, reducing the need for direct trust between the two sides³.
• You keep control of your wallet keys. Funds sit in a smart contract escrow during a transfer and only release when both parties confirm the cash arrived. Ekival is designed so users sign from their own Cardano wallet instead of handing wallet keys to the app¹.
• Mobile money payouts. Recipients can collect funds through familiar mobile money services instead of needing a traditional bank account, which the team built around the way money already moves in many African countries².
• Published fee range. Ekival's FAQ lists fees between 0.5% and 1.5% per transfer depending on the method, with a discount for paying fees in the planned EKI token¹.
• Wallet support in the public DApp. The public DApp currently offers Eternl and Lace wallet connection options. Treat broader wallet support as unconfirmed unless Ekival documents it. Supported assets in the public materials include ADA and the Cardano-native stablecoin Djed¹.

What to Expect

To send money, you connect a Cardano wallet, fund it with ADA or Djed, and post an offer (or accept one already on the board). The app walks you through a dashboard until the smart contract releases the funds at the end. Recipients see the cash arrive in their mobile money account or bank account once they confirm receipt³. The public DApp currently runs against Cardano Preprod.

Ekival is in beta. The roadmap targeted a May 2025 mainnet launch⁴, and the team has reported Project Catalyst milestones as completed, but no public mainnet announcement has been published yet². The team is three people covering smart contracts, business development, and front-end design⁵, and the code lives in the public Ekival Labs GitHub⁶. No public mainnet EKI token was verified, and the token-allocation whitepaper referenced on the roadmap has not been released. Funded Project Catalyst proposals, including 84,000 ADA distributed across Fund 11, give the work some external grounding², but Ekival is best understood as a maturing app rather than a finished service.