Algorand Foundation and Paycode Announce Partnership to Expand Financial Inclusion on Blockchain

New partnership aims to bring secure, offline-first digital payment infrastructure worldwide

SINGAPORE, June 23, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The Algorand Foundation today announced a new strategic partnership with Paycode, a global leader in biometric and offline digital payment systems, to advance inclusive financial infrastructure across underserved and remote communities.

Paycode operates in countries including Afghanistan, Ghana, Zambia, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where large segments of the population remain offline and excluded from formal financial services. Through this collaboration, Paycode and Algorand will explore integrating public blockchain technology to strengthen digital identity systems, improve transparency, and unlock new models for delivering secure, inclusive payments at scale.

"This partnership brings blockchain into direct service of people who need it most," said Staci Warden, CEO of the Algorand Foundation. "Paycode is already reaching some of the most difficult places to serve. Together, we have the opportunity to make those systems more transparent, efficient, and trusted."

As part of the partnership, Paycode has selected Algorand as the blockchain to migrate its digital payment infrastructure on-chain, leveraging Algorand's high speed, security, and energy efficiency to power future offline-first payment systems.

Paycode's technology is currently used by more than 6 million individuals across 8 countries, many of whom live in offline, remote, and underserved regions. To date, Paycode has facilitated the secure disbursement of $250m in aid and social payments, helping drive financial inclusion through biometric identity, offline digital wallets, and real-time payments.

The two organisations will work together to host elements of Paycode's digital payment infrastructure on the Algorand blockchain, with a focus on supporting transparent disbursement of aid, integrating stablecoin-based settlement mechanisms, and building resilient, offline-first financial tools. The partnership reflects a shared mission to deliver systems that are scalable, interoperable, and secure, even in regions with little or no connectivity.

"This collaboration supports our goal to extend secure, offline digital finance to those most excluded from the formal economy," said Gabe Ruhan, CEO at Paycode. "With Algorand, we can explore ways to future-proof our infrastructure and unlock new use cases for public-good payments."

The partnership builds on Algorand Foundation's broader commitment to supporting digital public infrastructure and financial access in frontier markets.

About Algorand Foundation
Algorand's mission is to power a world where information has integrity and innovative ideas can scale. The Algorand Foundation supports Algorand's rapidly growing ecosystem by providing a best-in-class developer environment, supporting key infrastructure and setting technical standards, offering comprehensive support to builders and entrepreneurs, and providing the framework for decentralized governance.

Launched in 2019, the Algorand (ALGO) blockchain has grown into a vibrant ecosystem of developers, entrepreneurs, and enterprise partners that benefit from institutional-grade certainty and resilience. Its low fees, instant finality, and minimal carbon footprint appeal to the protocol's millions of retail users, and developers of all kinds appreciate the ability to use common programming languages like Python. Builders on Algorand are creating protocols and companies that solve important problems at a global scale: instant payments in war and disaster zones, self-sovereign identity for the disenfranchised, supply-chain traceability for global commerce, permissionless protocols addressing financial inclusion, and the creation of entirely new markets through tokenization, to name a few. To learn more, visit algorand.co.

About Paycode
Paycode provides secure end-to-end payment technology that makes sending and receiving money easy. Its industry-leading payments solution, EDAPT, works for anyone, anywhere, using custom-designed technology for security, biometric identification, verification and authentication, fraud prevention, agent banking, offline real-time transacting, know-your-customer (KYC) data and digital money. Paycode's mission is to give biometric identity and affordable access to basic financial services to the unbanked and underserved in Africa and beyond. To learn more, visit paycode.com.