From Uphold to QvaPay: How One Money Bridge Led to the Next
Uphold led to Airtm, Airtm to a fight with Maduro, that fight to a State Department round table on Cuba, and Cuba to Erich and QvaPay.
Tim Parsa · Co-Founder & CCO, QvaPay · 17 September 2026 · 4 min read Subscribe
QvaPay didn’t start with a business plan. It started with a chain of bridges, each built on the last.
The chain
- Uphold, 2013. JP Thieriot and I co-founded Bitreserve, later Uphold: bank money to bitcoin and back, under U.S. compliance. I built its compliance program.
- Airtm, 2015. We launched Airtm as an app on Uphold’s API: any money to dollars, through a network of peer traders. In Venezuela it found product–market fit, and its peer rate became the bolívar’s real exchange rate.
- Airtm against Maduro, 2018–2020. The Maduro regime blocked Airtm and went after its traders. In 2020 Venezuela’s interim government, working with the State Department and the Treasury, used Airtm under an OFAC license to pay more than 62,000 health workers up to $18 million of recovered funds.
- The State Department round table. After the military-run processor behind Cuba’s main remittance channel was sanctioned and Western Union closed, the State Department’s Office of Cuban Affairs convened fintechs including Kraken, Coinbase, and Stripe to talk about Cuba and invited me to share the Venezuela playbook. It convinced me Airtm’s peer model could work in Cuba under U.S. law.
- Erich and QvaPay. Erich García Cruz had launched QvaPay in March 2020 for the audience that learned the internet on his channel, Bachecubano. In December 2020 I reached him and the other Cuban founders building dollar rails. We started working together, and QvaPay’s first U.S. bridge ran through Airtm.
- The Airtm Cuba Sandbox, 2021–2023, and the OFAC request. We wanted to know whether a U.S. fintech could serve Cuba’s independent entrepreneurs under U.S. law. I put the questions to OFAC in a request for interpretive guidance, which I later published; QvaPay has since renewed and expanded it.
- Erich moves north. Erich and his family moved to the United States to build QvaPay under U.S. law.
- QvaPay, Inc., 2026. In May 2026 our Delaware company took over the service, registered with FinCEN, and adopted its Board-approved compliance program. Cuba’s dollar rail became a U.S. fintech.
Every bridge taught the next one something: compliance first at Uphold, peers at Airtm, resilience in Venezuela, and in Cuba, that the private sector had already built the market and needed a U.S. company to connect it.
I wrote in 2020 that every money bridge I built was practice for the next. I didn’t know then that the next one would be Cuba, or that I’d build it with a founder who had already done the hardest part from Havana.
Every bridge tested the idea that technology beats the trolls who lock money in. Every one paid off. That’s why I’m a techno-optimist about Cuba.
Each bridge added a flow: crypto on Uphold, peer trading on Airtm, family dollars on QvaPay.
| Flow | How we grow it | U.S. tech meets Cuban talent |
|---|---|---|
| Crypto funding and withdrawals Own funds, screened addresses · withdrawals by persons in Cuba: pending with OFAC | USDC from and to screened wallets, settled by Crypto Teller. | Cubans hold dollars on a phone, the way the rest of the internet does. |
| P2P forex Pending with OFAC · no authorization asserted | SkyMind matches orders and more screened traders join. | Every trader is a small business: Cubans earn a spread connecting dollars and pesos. |
| Remittances Permitted · 31 CFR §515.570 (U.S. senders) | Marketing by use case to the diaspora in Miami and beyond; every sender and recipient screened. | Diaspora dollars become working capital for families and the private businesses they start. |
The potential. Remittances into Cuba run an estimated $1.1–2B a year (2024; estimates vary). At the Dominican Republic’s rate per person, Cuba would receive about $9.8B, five to nine times today. That is the market QvaPay is built to serve.
| Market | Cuba today | Cuba at the Dominican Republic’s rate per person |
|---|---|---|
| Remittances received | $1.1–2B 2024 est., estimates vary | $9.8B DR total $11.9B (2025) |
A scenario, not a forecast. The Dominican Republic received $11.9B in remittances in 2025 across 11.4 million people, about $1,040 a person; at that rate Cuba’s 9.43 million people would receive about $9.8B a year, five to nine times today. Method and sources.
The United States is the only power that can realistically finance and sponsor Cuba’s recovery, which makes engagement, not isolation, Cuba’s only option. On cubanew.com ↗
Sources
- Uphold ↗
- Airtm ↗
- Tim Parsa, "Scaling Stranger-to-Stranger Services", 27 November 2020 ↗
- CNN, Venezuelan health workers get cash bonuses via Airtm, 9 September 2020 ↗
- Circle, partnership with Venezuela's interim government and Airtm, 2020 ↗
- Miami Herald, Venezuelans bypass Maduro's blockade using Airtm, 4 September 2020 ↗
- Havana Times, "Western Union to Shut Down Cuba Operations Nov. 23rd", 2020 ↗
- Tim Parsa, "Independent Digital Entrepreneurs in Cuba" (the 2023 OFAC guidance request, published December 2025) ↗
- Erich García Cruz, Bachecubano (YouTube) ↗
- FinCEN, MSB registrant search ↗
- QvaPay, AML/BSA program and transparency page ↗
If this was useful, pass it to someone building in Cuba.