Cowrie

Cowrie is a payroll agent. It runs a recurring payroll on Celo with no human in the loop and its defining feature is that it can decline. What it does: pays a distributed team in their own local stablecoin out of one balance, in a single transaction. A payer holding dollars pays people in Lagos, Nairobi and Accra the exact amounts promised, 50,000 naira, 6,500 shillings, 900 cedis and nobody touches an exchange. How it decides: each tick it works out which payroll period it owes, checks whether Mento's FX pools are open, prices the batch, then judges it against a cost ceiling, against what the last run cost and against how much of the FX window is left. It emits one of six decisions (idle, quote, wait, submit, defer, abandon) and writes every one to a run log with its reason. It will hold a payroll rather than settle at a bad rate, then retry inside the same window. In the last two hours before the pools close it widens its buffer and settles instead, because deferring on a Friday evening means waiting until Sunday night. Safety: the batch id derives from the schedule and period, so a crash between broadcasting and recording retries with an identical id and the contract's replay guard refuses it rather than paying twice. Catch-up reaches back exactly one period, never further. It signs nothing without an explicit --execute. Why Celo: every currency it pays out in is on the fee-currency allowlist, so recipients can spend what they receive without first holding CELO for gas. Conversion is grouped one per currency, not one per recipient. Pricing: Cowrie takes no fee. The only cost is ~1% per conversion, against the 3-7% a retail remittance corridor charges. Use it via the CLI, the TypeScript SDK, or the Disburser contract directly. Source: github.com/DeborahOlaboye/cowrie