Most cross-border work platforms cannot pay someone fifty cents. The fees eat the payment before it arrives. Rosen built its entire product around solving that math problem. The app connects small brands with local helpers in roughly 200 countries, then settles every task in stablecoins. Following its full Hedera mainnet integration, those payouts now clear in seconds for a fraction of a penny.
Sida Zheng, who goes by Stella, co-founded Rosen and serves as CEO. Before Web3, she worked as Program Director at 500 Global. She has sourced deals across AI and blockchain since 2017. That investor background shows in how Rosen frames its market.
The Three Billion People Traditional Rails Ignore
Zheng explains the problem through her own mother. Asked whether she would earn money from another country, her mother assumed it was impossible. She speaks no English. She holds no international bank account. She has no way to meet foreign clients.
That reaction represents roughly three billion people locked inside local economies. Banking access, language, and geography keep them out. Meanwhile, close to 11.75 million MSMEs want affordable international workforce access. Neither side can reach the other efficiently. Rosen positions itself as the missing connective layer between them.
Why the Fee Math Killed Micro-Work Before Now
Traditional cross-border transfers cost between $15 and $30. World Bank data puts the global average remittance cost near 6.36% on a $200 transfer. Those percentages destroy small payments entirely. A $20 task cannot absorb a $15 wire fee.
Freelance marketplaces compound the problem. Fiverr charges sellers a flat 20% commission. Upwork’s combined fees often land between 18% and 20%. Zheng argues the effective drag on cross-border work runs higher still. As a result, an entire category of sub-$50 work never became viable. Nobody built for it because nobody could clear the payment.
What Hedera Actually Changes
Rosen chose Hedera for three specific properties. First, transaction fees stay fixed at roughly $0.001 and are denominated in USD, though users pay them in HBAR. Predictability matters more than raw cheapness here, because gas volatility would break the unit economics.
Second, transactions reach finality in seconds. Helpers see payment land while the task still feels fresh. Third, Hedera supports native USDC issued directly by Circle. Rosen pays in a regulated, fully reserved digital dollar rather than a bridged wrapper.
“Its predictable, fixed $0.001 transaction fee, second-level settlement, and native USDC support provide the essential foundation,” Zheng said of Hedera in the network’s published case study. Compliance drove that choice as much as cost. Users trust the platform partly because they recognize what USDC is.
Circle’s stablecoin has grown quickly alongside that infrastructure. USDC supply reached roughly $78 billion in April 2026, up from $42 billion at the start of 2025. Onchain volume climbed 247% year over year.
Traction Built Without Paid Advertising
Rosen’s numbers grew organically, without paid acquisition. Hedera’s case study documented 41,000+ registered users, 92,000+ completed income moments, and over $1 million in cumulative value. Growth ran near 14.9% month over month at that point.
Zheng now cites more than 56,000 users and over 100,000 income moments. The brand side has passed 100 companies, and roughly 88.5% of them qualify as MSMEs. Rosen counts an “income moment” only when a real payout clears. That definition keeps the metric honest, because a registration alone does not count.
A Real Campaign: TrackBill’s 80 Helpers
TrackBill offers the clearest illustration. The Hong Kong company builds an AI bill-reporting tool that runs as a WhatsApp mini program. Its addressable market covers nearly every WhatsApp country, yet its team stayed small and local. Finding ambassadors across Latin America looked impossible.
Through Rosen, TrackBill recruited over 80 helpers in about a week. Those helpers filmed product videos in their own languages, then posted them to local social channels. Several performed well organically. Zheng estimates a traditional agency would have quoted around $100,000 for comparable reach. TrackBill spent a small fraction of that. Additionally, AI companies now use the same rails for user acquisition, data collection, and survey work.
Removing the Web3 Barrier Entirely
Most Rosen users are not crypto native. Consequently, the app hides nearly all of it. Signup auto-generates a wallet with no seed phrase. Users log in through Gmail or standard App Store authorization. The experience stays deliberately Web2 in feel.
Education happens gradually instead. Rosen posts small onboarding tasks that ask users to complete a simple deposit or withdrawal onchain. A $1 or $2 reward covers the effort. That approach teaches wallet mechanics without demanding upfront commitment. For people who may never qualify for a credit card, a digital wallet becomes the first financial account they control.
What Comes Next
Rosen is running two expansion programs. The mini grants initiative funds a startup’s first $100 in tasks on the platform, with an additional $1,000 USDC prize for the strongest performing campaigns. The company targets 100 participating startups, and roughly half those seats are filled.
The ambassador program builds the supply side. Rosen currently works with over 70 ambassadors across Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Africa, Latin America, the United States, and Canada. Ambassadors organize local events on covered budgets and represent the platform at campus activations. For a distributed labor network, that ground presence does the work advertising cannot.
The thesis is straightforward. If the internet democratized information, stablecoin rails may democratize who gets paid for work. Rosen is testing whether that holds at one cent per task.
