Felix: instant remittances for one million families, settled on Tempo
Felix Pago built a remittance product that lives entirely inside WhatsApp, processing over $5 billion for more than one million users across nine Latin American corridors. Felix is adding Tempo to its settlement infrastructure for predictable costs, dedicated payment capacity, and sub-second finality at scale.
“As we scale, we're intentional about building redundancy across our settlement infrastructure. Tempo adds a settlement layer purpose-built for payments, which is important for a real-time remittance product like ours.”
How Felix Pago works
A worker in Houston opens WhatsApp, types a few words to an AI chatbot, and money arrives in her mother's bank account in Guadalajara within seconds. She never sees a blockchain, never holds a token, never downloads an app.
Felix Pago makes cross-border remittances feel like a WhatsApp conversation. A user in the US texts Felix's AI chatbot, says how much to send and where, picks a payment method, and the recipient in Latin America receives local currency deposited within seconds. No app download, no storefront visit, no crypto terminology. Felix currently serves nine corridors across Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean and has processed over $5 billion in total volume for more than one million users. The majority of transfers cost a flat $2.99.
The challenge with settlement at scale
Felix settles remittances through stablecoins behind the scenes. The sender pays in dollars, Felix converts to stablecoins for settlement, and the recipient receives local currency on the other end. Neither side ever touches crypto. This architecture is what lets Felix charge $2.99 per transfer while offering competitive exchange rates, undercutting legacy remittance providers significantly.
At over $5 billion in cumulative volume and growing, the economics of the settlement layer compound. Every fraction of a cent in transaction fees matters when you process hundreds of millions of dollars per month on a flat consumer fee. And for a product that promises delivery in seconds, settlement reliability is not optional. Downtime or degraded performance means a sender in Houston watching a WhatsApp thread and waiting for confirmation that never comes.
As volume has scaled, Felix's focus has shifted toward building redundancy across all critical infrastructure. Settlement is the layer where cost predictability and throughput most directly determine whether the unit economics hold. Felix needed infrastructure that was both reliable under load and purpose-built for payment flows.
Why Felix chose Tempo
Felix is integrating Tempo into its settlement infrastructure to add redundancy and improve performance as volume scales. What drew Felix to Tempo was its focus on payments as a first-class use case.
- Predictable transaction fees
- Tempo charges a flat fee per transaction regardless of network conditions. For a business that commits to a $2.99 consumer fee, knowing the settlement cost in advance is the difference between sustainable margins and guesswork. There are no gas auctions and no fee spikes during periods of high network activity.
- Dedicated payment lanes
- Tempo reserves blockspace at the protocol level for payment transactions. A surge in trading volume or other on-chain activity never affects payment throughput or latency. For Felix, this means settlement performance stays consistent whether the network is quiet or under heavy load.
- Sub-second finality
- Transactions on Tempo finalize in under a second with deterministic settlement. When a user sends money through WhatsApp and expects it to arrive in seconds, the settlement layer has to keep that promise every time. Deterministic finality removes the ambiguity of probabilistic confirmation that exists on general-purpose chains.
“Our priority is delivering a consistent experience for users sending money in real time. Tempo helps us strengthen that by providing fast and predictable settlement as part of a broader, redundant infrastructure strategy.”
What's ahead
Felix is starting with its existing remittance corridors across Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Lower, more predictable settlement costs give Felix room to either reinvest in growth or pass savings back to senders as lower fees.
The US-to-Latin America remittance corridor moves hundreds of billions of dollars a year. More than half of transfers in the region still happen at physical storefronts. For the families who depend on Felix to get money home, better infrastructure behind the scenes means more money arriving on the other end.
