Numbers Over Addresses.
Saku - Numbers Over Addresses.
We Removed Addresses from Money
Crypto adoption didn’t fail because people can’t use apps. It failed because money still speaks machine language.
Every user already has a verified, global identity:
a phone number — trusted, remembered, embedded in social behavior.
But onchain, value moves through hexadecimal addresses:
memorized by no one
disconnected from social graphs
impossible to reason about at human speed
This forces users to translate intent into infrastructure. That friction kills adoption.
Saku removes that translation layer.
We built a non-custodial protocol where numbers replace addresses.
Users send value to phone numbers.
Smart contracts handle everything else.
No wallet addresses.
No copy–paste.
No crypto UI mental model.
This works only onchain.
Why?
Phone numbers are mapped to wallets via immutable smart contracts
Transfers are permissionless and trustless
Ownership is enforced cryptographically, not by servers
This is not a better wallet.
This is a new interaction model for money:
intent → execution → settlement.
Why this scales:
8B phone numbers = pre-existing onchain endpoints
Social graphs = built-in distribution
No onboarding = users already have an identity
Non-custodial = no trust assumption
Arbitrum L2 = cheap, instant finality
When abstraction is complete, users don’t know they’re using crypto.
They just send money.
During the hackathon, we successfully designed and deployed Saku entirely on Arbitrum, focusing on building a fully non-custodial protocol that maps phone numbers to wallets through immutable smart contracts. We implemented and tested the complete end-to-end transaction flow from phone number input and wallet resolution to onchain execution and settlement ensuring low fees and fast confirmations. In parallel, we developed a minimal frontend that removes wallet address exposure and abstracts infrastructure complexity, delivering an intuitive user experience while maintaining a permissionless and trustless architecture secured by Arbitrum.