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What if Venmo Could Pay a Momo Merchant in Uganda?

That’s not a hypothetical. It’s what Vonos makes possible today.

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The problem with payments today

Payments are siloed. Venmo talks to Venmo. M-Pesa talks to M-Pesa. PayPal talks to PayPal. If you want to send money from one app to another — especially across borders — you hit a wall of intermediaries, bank rails, and settlement delays. The OpenCharge Network was built to fix this. It’s an open protocol that gives payment gateways a common language. Any app that speaks OpenCharge can talk to any other app that speaks OpenCharge. But speaking the same language isn’t enough. You also need to settle. And that’s where Vonos comes in.

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What is Vonos?

Vonos is a multi-payment router on the OpenCharge Network. Its job is straightforward: when Gateway A wants to pay Gateway B, Vonos settles the difference in USDT — instantly, on the fly, no holdups. Neither gateway needs a direct banking relationship with the other. Neither needs to worry about currency conversion or cross-border compliance for the settlement leg. Vonos handles all of it.

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How it works — the Venmo / Momo example

Let’s make this concrete. A Venmo user in the US wants to pay a merchant on MTN mobile money in Uganda. Without Vonos, this is nearly impossible to do natively. Venmo doesn’t have a settlement agreement with MTN. MTN doesn’t have a Venmo integration. The money just can’t flow. With Vonos, here’s what happens:
  1. The Venmo user taps pay on the merchant.
  2. Venmo opens a pending payment with MTN’s gateway — getting a transaction ID back.
  3. Venmo tells Vonos to settle: credit MTN’s account with this much USDT, here’s the transaction ID.
  4. Vonos debits Venmo’s USDT reserve, credits MTN’s reserve, and creates a signed proof of the transfer.
  5. MTN gets notified automatically. The proof arrives. The payment is complete.
  6. MTN credits the merchant.
The whole thing settles instantly. No batch processing. No T+2. Every transaction micro-settles as it happens.

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Why USDT?

USDT is the settlement currency on Vonos because it solves a specific problem: it’s a dollar-pegged stablecoin that settles in seconds, moves globally without traditional banking infrastructure, and gives every gateway a common unit of value to settle in. Gateways top up their Vonos reserve with USDT. Outbound settlements draw from that reserve. Inbound settlements credit it. Clean and simple.

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What can you build with Vonos?

Once two gateways are connected through Vonos, a lot of use cases open up: Cross-border payments. A user on one app pays a merchant on another, in a different country. Vonos settles in the background. Remittances. Sending money home is expensive and slow on traditional rails. Vonos micro-settles each transfer as it happens — no holdups, no intermediary fees on the settlement leg. Multi-app marketplace payouts. A marketplace needs to pay sellers who use different payment apps. Vonos routes the payouts to each gateway without the marketplace needing individual integrations with each one. Interapp transfers. Move value from one app to another directly, without cashing out to a bank account first.

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Instant settlement — no exceptions

One thing Vonos is firm on: settlement must be instant. If a gateway fails to settle a transaction immediately, it gets suspended. This isn’t arbitrary. It keeps the network fast and trustworthy. Every participant has skin in the game, and that’s what makes the whole system work.

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The Cash Agent network

Vonos is also building something that doesn’t get enough attention: the world’s largest network of cash agents. Think about what it means to be a cash agent today. You might serve one bank, or one mobile money app. Your earning potential is capped by however many services you work with. Vonos is building a mobile app where a single agent — with one USDT reserve account — can process cash deposits and withdrawals for any gateway on the OpenCharge network. More apps. More banks. More services. More earnings. For gateways, this means instant liquidity in new markets without the pain of independently sourcing and managing agents around the world. For agents, it means one app that connects them to the entire network.

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How to get connected

Getting on Vonos is straightforward if your gateway already implements the OpenCharge spec:
  1. Mint an OCID — your gateway’s identity on the network, via opencharge.cloud.
  2. Host your metadata — a signed config with your public key and endpoint, live at the URL on your NFT.
  3. Implement three endpoints — /payment/create, /payment/settle, and /transfer/webhook. These are defined by the OpenCharge protocol, not by Vonos. Build them once, use them everywhere.
  4. Create a Vonos account — link your OCID, verify ownership, top up your USDT reserve.
  5. Start settling.
No custom integration per gateway. No bilateral agreements for each pair. Just the protocol, and Vonos in the middle.

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The bigger picture

The OpenCharge Network is building the infrastructure for open, interoperable payments. Vonos is the settlement layer that makes it real. If any two payment apps on Earth can settle with each other instantly — that changes remittance. That changes cross-border commerce. That changes what it means to be a payment gateway. We’re early. But the pieces are falling into place.
Connect your gateway at vonos.io. Protocol docs at docs.opencharge.network.