Kova

Dollars for every phone.
A dollar account you open with Face ID. Pay a shop, send to a friend abroad, or pay a phone
with no apps and no internet. Every payment settles on Monad in about a second, and Kova pays the fee.

Try it at mykova.app · iOS on TestFlight · Live users · For reviewers ·

_{A real run on Monad testnet: a Kova wallet pays a phone number, the phone gets a text, then dials Kova's USSD code (on Africa's Talking's simulator).}

The problem

You live in London. Your grandmother lives in a village back home. She has a basic phone, no smartphone and no data. Sending her $50 today means agent fees, slow transfers, and a currency that loses value while it waits.

Stablecoins fixed the money, but not the experience. They still ask for an app, internet, a gas token, a seed phrase and a long address. Hundreds of millions of people have a phone but no internet, and most people never get past the seed phrase.

With Kova, you send dollars to her phone number. She gets a text. She dials a short code, enters her PIN, and checks or spends her dollars, with no app and no internet. You set her up once from your Kova app: her number, a PIN, a daily limit, and a code Kova texts to her phone.

We believe that if you solve a real problem, people use the product. This is the one we chose.

What it does

Pay in about a second Scan a code or tap a till, approve with Face ID, paid. The fee is $0.00: Kova pays the gas. The passkey is the wallet, so there's no seed phrase.	Send to a phone number or a .nad name Type +234…, ada.nad or just ada. Kova finds who it is, shows the address, and the money lands in about a second. Or send a link to anyone.	Dollars on any phone No app, no data: a text when dollars arrive, then *384*53916# and a PIN to check the balance, pay a till or send to another phone.
Pay with no signal In a market or a basement, Face ID signs the payment on the phone and it travels as a code. Whichever phone gets signal first settles it on Monad.	Private payments Turn on "Send privately" and the dollars go to a one-time address only the recipient can open. The name and note travel sealed, for them alone.	Limits for cards, people and AI agents Every card, teammate or AI agent that spends from your account gets its own key and daily limit, kept in a contract on Monad. Claude can pay over MCP, within its limit.

How it works for a phone with no internet

 your Kova wallet ──signs──▶ Kova API ──relayer pays gas──▶ Monad: AUSD lands in her pocket
                                │
 her phone ◀── text: "$1.00 arrived. Balance $9.25. Dial *384*53916#"   (Africa's Talking SMS)
 her phone ──dials *384*53916#──▶ Africa's Talking ──▶ Kova API: balance, pay a till, send

• Each phone number gets a pocket: its own address on Monad, holding AUSD, with a PIN and a daily limit (at most $200). The pocket's key is sealed on Kova's server (AES-256-GCM), the PIN is hashed (scrypt), and three wrong PINs lock it for 15 minutes.
• The wallet that set the pocket up can always take the dollars back, with no PIN, even if USSD is paused.
• A spend is signed from the pocket as an EIP-3009 authorization and relayed like any other Kova payment. Each USSD session pays once, however many times the network resends a screen.
• Sending to a number Kova doesn't know holds the dollars at a one-time address, texts an invite, and lets the sender take them back until they're claimed.
• Code: ussd.ts, pockets.ts, phone-payments.ts, arrival-sms.ts.

Today this runs on Africa's Talking's simulator with test dollars. Next: a live USSD code per country, and cashing out to mobile money (M-Pesa, MTN MoMo) from the same menu.

How Kova uses Monad

• Payments are signatures. The payer signs an EIP-3009 transferWithAuthorization for AUSD. Kova's relayer submits it and pays the gas, so nobody holds MON.
• One round-trip to paid. The relayer estimates gas, counts its nonce locally, signs and sends with eth_sendRawTransactionSync, so the receipt comes back with the send: about 0.4 to 0.5 s on the server, about a second from tap to paid on a phone in Lagos.
• Why Monad. Finality fast enough for a checkout line, and gas cheap enough for Kova to pay it for every user. That's what makes a dollar app with no gas token possible. It also makes privacy affordable: a fresh address for every private payment, and a transaction to spend each one.
• Charges carry their reference on-chain. A checkout's reference rides in the authorization's nonce, so Kova's chain watcher settles a payment whoever submits it.
• Limits live on Monad. KovaCard holds each spending key's daily limit, freeze and cosigner, so the limit is kept by the contract, not by Kova's database.
• Names on Monad. ada.nad comes from Nad Name Service on Monad mainnet. A pasted address shows its own .nad name only when that name points back to it.
• Privacy by permission. Private payments use ERC-5564 stealth addresses (stealth.ts), each posted to the standard announcer so any wallet can find its payments from the chain alone. The sender's memo is sealed for the recipient's viewing key. The amount is public; who it went to isn't.
• Exchange rates from Chainlink CRE. A workflow (apps/rates) checks two FX sources against each other, reaches consensus and writes a signed report to KovaRates on Monad testnet. Mainnet uses a fixed reference table, labelled as such.

Who's using it

mykova.app/stats counts Kova's users live, straight from Kova's database on each network, and refreshes every minute. It shows people, payments, money moved, shops, links and where new people came from. It counts totals only, never who someone is.

On 23 October 2026:

These counts include our own testing, and the page says so. A person is a wallet that did something only Kova wallets do: made its passkey backup, published a note key, took test dollars, paid a Kova charge, sent or claimed a link, or opened a shop. Kova's demo account, which App Review signs into, is left out. The numbers come from apps/api/src/routes/stats.ts, and anyone can read them at GET /v1/public/stats on each network's API.

Proof on Monad

Kova's API, relayer and contracts are live on mainnet. This week mykova.app runs the testnet build, with free test dollars, for the phone-payment demo.

Mainnet (chain 143)

Testnet (chain 10143), one receipt per feature

Architecture

flowchart LR
  subgraph People
    app["Kova app (iOS, Expo)"]
    web["mykova.app (Next.js)"]
    phone["Any phone (USSD, SMS)"]
  end
  subgraph Kova
    api["Kova API (Hono)"]
    db[("Postgres")]
    watcher["Chain watcher"]
    relayer["Relayer (pays gas)"]
  end
  subgraph Monad
    ausd["AUSD (EIP-3009)"]
    card["KovaCard (limits)"]
    rates["KovaRates"]
    nns["Nad Name Service"]
  end
  at["Africa's Talking"]
  cre["Chainlink CRE"]

  app -- "signed authorization" --> api
  web -- "server-side calls" --> api
  phone -- "*384*53916#" --> at -- "USSD callback" --> api
  api -- "texts" --> at -- "SMS" --> phone
  api --- db
  api --> relayer -- "transferWithAuthorization" --> ausd
  relayer --> card
  watcher -- "reads transfers" --> ausd
  watcher --- db
  cre -- "signed report" --> rates
  api -- "reads" --> rates
  app -- "looks up names" --> nns
  web -- "looks up names" --> nns