When brainstorming for a new enterprise long-time friends Shashank Singhal and Andrew Snow landed on an idea that they were confident would work for a simple reason: They would use it themselves. The Australian coders launched Codugh (pronounced “co-dah”), an API marketplace where software developers can exchange rights to use their coded scripts in return for digital currency.

They entered Codugh into the August 2019 CoinGeek Hackathon, a competition that sought to reward the best applications built using the BitcoinSV (BSV) blockchain. Singhal and Snow claimed first place and the $20,000 USD cash prize. With the funds and added support, Codugh refined its product offering. Two years later, interest is spiking. That’s because Codugh can now provide its users with the opportunity to convert their BSV payments into fiat currency, thanks to STAS — the tokenized protocol developed by TAAL.
 

“Some of the main customers we have seen are non-BSV software developers. Using BSV on our system can complicate things. We hear questions like, ‘What is BSV? How do I get it, and then once I have it what can I do with it?’”

 
says Singhal, the company’s CEO, while speaking rom Sydney.
 

“STAS answers those questions for us. What we intend to do when we begin using STAS in the near future is have a stablecoin inside the Codugh platform itself. That will allow non-BSV users to deposit fiat currency and then be issued stablecoins that can be used to pay each other. They will receive payments in tokens rather than in BSV and those tokens are linked to fiat currency.”

 
Codugh users will deposit money in any currency and exchange it for U.S. dollars when they please. The exchange rate will be based on the market rate for foreign currency, Singhal says. Microtransactions can cost as little as one-hundredth of a U.S. cent, thanks to the BSV blockchain’s ability to scale and accommodate more transactions than any other competing network.
 

“If we were to use Visa or Stripe, it wouldn’t work. You can’t send a hundredth of a cent or a tenth of a cent transaction on those platforms. You’re looking at fees that range from 30 cents to several dollars per transaction. BSV is the only choice for us,”

 
Singhal explains.
 
In the summer of 2021, Codugh launched the public release of its product after running in private beta for most of the year. With Codugh’s marketplace, developers can list their APIs and have them matched to the most likely user. Each time there is an interaction with the API, such as a click on a plug-in or a push of a widget button on a blog, the developer receives a micropayment. STAS allows that micropayment to be converted from digital currency to cash, or vice-versa.

Along with licensing STAS to Codugh, TAAL benefits the start-up company through its ability to process transactions in volume. “TAAL has been good about handling all our requests and working with us to build our use case and ensure we have everything we need to use STAS. That will help Codugh have the best opportunity to reach its fullest possibility,” Singhal says.
 

By the end of 2022, Singhal and Snow hope to have created a new market and new revenue streams for developers. “With STAS we have the chance to have a much bigger platform,”

 
Singhal notes.
 

“It will have a lot of volume and hopefully an international audience and growing excitement for the product.”