You paid someone before you knew their account number

Sometime around 2015, someone at a gathering looked up from their phone and said: "just Cash App me." There were no routing numbers exchanged. No account details read aloud. They typed a short name prefixed with a dollar sign, entered an amount, and the money moved. The whole thing took twenty seconds.

That moment was more significant than it felt at the time. It was the first time tens of millions of people realised a payment address could work like a social handle — memorable, shareable, and human in a way a 22-character IBAN never could be.

The cashtag did not just make payments faster. It changed what people believed a payment address was allowed to be.

How Cash App made paying by name the default

Cash App — launched by Block (then Square) in 2013 — introduced the $cashtag as a straightforward alternative to banking credentials. Set up an account, choose a short name, and that name becomes the address you share when someone owes you money. No sort code. No account number. Just the tag.

By Q1 2025, Cash App had 57 million monthly active users in the United States (Block, Q1 2025 earnings). Venmo, which used a similar @username system, had grown to more than 90 million active users in the US (PayPal, Q4 2024 earnings). Between them, two apps had made paying by name the default experience for well over a hundred million people — a generation of users who now expect to send money by typing an identifier, not by reciting banking credentials to someone.

Only 35% of global cross-border retail payments are credited within one hour of initiation, against a G20 target of 75%.

— BIS Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures, Cross-border Payments Monitoring Survey, 2025

The contrast is almost absurd. A cashtag payment in the US settles in seconds. A cross-border payment to most of the world still takes one to five business days, passes through multiple intermediary institutions, and asks the sender to know exactly what a SWIFT BIC code is.

Bar chart comparing identifiers needed to send money: international wire 7, domestic bank 3, Cash App cashtag 1, Spondula Shandle 1

The wall every cashtag hits at the border

Cash App does not support international transfers outside the US and UK. That is not a gap in the product — it is a consequence of the infrastructure it sits on. Domestic payment rails make a single-identifier address possible because the routing is already known to the network. International transfers still depend on correspondent chains built before the internet, and those chains use identifiers — IBANs, BIC codes, routing numbers — that were designed for institutions, not people.

The result is a jarring split. A healthcare worker who sends $40 to a friend in New Jersey does it in under a minute via a cashtag. The same person, sending £80 to a parent in Lagos, opens a bank app, types a 22-character IBAN, a BIC code, the recipient's full name, postal address, and the purpose of the transfer — then waits three working days to find out whether it cleared. The friction is structural, not cosmetic. No refinement of the bank app's interface will fix it.

What a global payment handle actually does

Spondula's Shandle applies the same principle as a cashtag — a single human-readable name that replaces every credential a payment used to require — but it is designed to work across borders, not within a single market.

When a user claims their Shandle, that name becomes their identity across the Spondula network. A sender in London opens the wallet, types a recipient's Shandle, and sends GBP-S. The recipient in Lagos, Nairobi, Manila, or Mumbai sees the payment arrive in seconds. The handle resolves the destination; the network settles the rest. No IBANs. No BIC codes. No form asking for a postal address. Just a name — and the money moves.

Shandles are claimed on a first-come basis. Once yours is reserved, it stays with you — a stable address that works the same whether the sender is around the corner or across the world.

Why the identifier is the whole product

Cash App's most important contribution to payments was not speed or fees. It was the insight that the hard part of sending money is not moving it — it is telling the network where to send it. Once the recipient's address collapses to a single memorable name, the payment flow follows naturally. The sender knows what to type. The recipient knows what to share.

Every friction point in a traditional international transfer traces back to an identifier problem. An IBAN is a machine-readable address that also has to be human-communicated, which means it fails the moment someone tries to say it aloud, write it on a note, or copy it through a message app without a transcription error. A SWIFT BIC code is a bank's identifier, not a person's — it was never built to travel by word of mouth.

The reason cashtags worked is that the identifier was finally built for people. Spondula's Shandle is the same idea, built for the whole world — not just one market.

Venmo's @handle and Cash App's $cashtag both demonstrated something repeatable: give a network a name-based addressing system and the network grows because the identifier travels. People share the name the way they share a phone number — in a message, on a call, pinned to the till at a market stall. An Shandle is designed to travel the same way, whether the sender and recipient are two streets apart or two time zones apart.

Frequently asked questions

What is a Spondula Shandle?

An Shandle is a short, unique name that acts as your payment address on the Spondula network. Instead of sharing a sort code, IBAN, or wallet address, you share your Shandle — and anyone on Spondula can send money directly to it, across any border the network supports.

Is a Spondula Shandle the same as a Cash App cashtag?

The concept is similar — a human-readable name that replaces traditional banking identifiers — but a cashtag only works within Cash App in the US and UK. An Shandle is designed to work globally, resolving payments across borders wherever Spondula operates, with no domestic-only restriction.

Can I use a cashtag to send money internationally?

Cash App only supports transfers between the US and UK. For cross-border payments to corridors like Nigeria to UK, Philippines to UAE, or India to the Gulf, a different network is needed. Spondula is built for exactly those flows.

How do I claim a Spondula Shandle?

Spondula is currently pre-launch. Join the waitlist and your Shandle is reserved as part of the sign-up — it stays yours when the network opens. Claims are first-come, and once a handle is taken it does not become available again.

Do I need a bank account to use Spondula?

No. Spondula is designed to work with or without a traditional bank account. Spondula Partner Locations — on-the-ground access points run by Local Operators — provide cash-in and cash-out access for users who prefer to interact with the network in person.

Spondula is pre-launch, and the waitlist is where early users come in. If you have ever typed a cashtag and thought "why can't every payment be this simple," the Shandle claim is the first step toward the version of that idea that works everywhere.

Spondula is a global payments network. It is not a bank, exchange, investment platform, or broker. Availability, pricing, and Operator coverage vary by country. Bitcoin rewards depend on real network activity and are not guaranteed. See our terms and conditions for full details.

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