Brand identity + product

Landfall: a brand for a stablecoin payments API where every payout visibly lands

Landfall is a payments API: a platform pays people anywhere in the world and the money lands in their local account, settled, in minutes instead of days. We built it from scratch: the name, an illustrated world where one coin is flicked across an ocean and caught, a hand-lettered wordmark, the payouts console, the recipient's phone and the brand out on the street.

Project: An Alterra Studio project: we built the company's brand, product and launch from scratch
Stage: Stablecoin payments, Series A stage
Services: Naming, world and key art, wordmark and mark, product UI, posters, out-of-home and applications, animated board
Tools: Imagine (our in-house design app), Nano Banana Pro, Kling, HyperFrames

Brief

The problem and the brief

Stablecoin payment companies promise "global" and "borderless". Not one shows a payment actually arriving.

Landfall is a payments API. A fintech, marketplace or platform calls one endpoint to pay a seller, creator or contractor anywhere, and the money lands in the recipient's local account, settled, in minutes instead of days. Landfall handles the stablecoin leg, the conversion, the local payout rails and the compliance checks; the platform sees one balance in dollars and one status per payment: sent, crossing, landed.

The brief, in a founder's words: "Our homepage talks about global money and the future of payments when a head of payments wants to see one payout land, with the time and the fee, and we lose them before they book a call." The name is the moment a crossing ends: the first touch of land.

What the buyer is up against

The research

3.5%

of cross-border payment services credit a business-to-person payment within one hour.

Source: Financial Stability Board, 2025

44.3%

credit it within one business day.

Source: Financial Stability Board, 2025

1.8%

is the average cost of a business-to-person cross-border payment.

Source: Financial Stability Board, 2025

Three doubts a payments team brings to the first call

CTOAnother rail to integrate, with crypto risk on our books.
Head of paymentsWhere is the money between sent and landed?
Person being paidWill it arrive as real money in my account?

Logic

The strategy: show one payment land

Every screen follows one payment from one API call to a peso balance in Manila. The illustrated world tells it without words: one person flicks a coin across the ocean, another catches it.

Doubt 1 · Crypto risk?Another rail to integrate, with crypto risk on our books.
Dollars in, local money out
The console reads in dollars and in each recipient's currency: 42,180.00 PHP, 13,450.00 MXN, 1,120,000.00 NGN, each with its local rail. The stablecoin leg is one line in the detail panel, not the headline. The brand shows no tokens, chains or glow: the coin is a plain yellow disc, money in hand.
Only 2 of 10 competitors even say "stablecoin" on the first screen. The buyer is buying payouts, not a coin.
Doubt 2 · Where is it?Where is the money between sent and landed?
Sent, crossing, landed, with the time
Every payment has one status and a clock. Rows tick from Crossing to Landed as the batch runs, and the detail panel draws the skip path with a dated node for each step: initiated, sent, landed in 1m 44s.
Only 3.5% of cross-border payment services credit a payment within an hour, so "where is it?" is the support ticket every payments team knows.
Doubt 3 · Real money?Will it arrive as real money in my account?
The person paid sees pesos, not crypto
On the recipient's phone it's a notification and a receipt in their own currency: "You've been paid ₱42,180.00", landed in their account by InstaPay, with the rate and a fee of zero for them.
44.3% of services credit a payment within one business day. Landfall's promise is minutes, shown in the one place the recipient checks.

System

The design system

Violet for the ocean, warm grey for the shores, graphite for type. Coin yellow is the money and nothing else.

Violet #5B35E8The ocean, the brand ground, Crossing
Warm grey #BDBAB2Shores, Sent, quiet surfaces
Graphite #1F1F24Type, people, Landed
Coin yellow #FFC72CThe payment in flight or just landed. Never anything else

The world. A flat violet ocean with a narrow shore at each edge and one small person on each. One flicks a yellow coin; it skims across in one move and the other catches it flat in an open palm. The same two people and one coin, on every piece.

Wordmark and mark. Hand-lettered, traced as drawn. The L alone, in a rounded tile, is the app icon and the avatar.

Type. Sofia Sans throughout, from the console's tabular amounts to the posters.

What we left out. All 10 competitors put a picture where the product should be, 5 use a globe, map or flags, and 4 use blue. Landfall shows no globe and no map, and its violet stays flat: no gradient, no glow.

Landfall key art: a coin flicked across a violet ocean from one shore to the other

The 10-second board, made for LinkedIn and X.

The catch: the payment lands in an open hand.

Poster: paid in Manila 1m 44s after you hit send

A violet coach jacket with the Landfall badge on the back

Poster: 1,284 creators, 41 countries, one API call

The Landfall poster in a bus shelter at dusk

A yellow coin balanced on a thumb, ready to flick

Illustration: one person flicks coins to many people on many islands

Method

The category audit

We scored 10 funded stablecoin payment startups on our startup homepage benchmark. They average exactly the benchmark, and not one shows a payment arriving.

Each homepage was scored on 12 criteria, 0 to 2 each, at 1440 and 390 pixels wide. The group averages 14.1 out of 24, the same as the 100 startups in our wider benchmark. Proof is thin: 4 of 10 have no customer proof.

The gaps are on the first screen. 0 of 10 show the product there at both widths, though 5 promise speed in words. 2 of 10 name who it's for, 2 state a specific difference, and 9 lean on "global", "borders" or "cross-border". Those are the gaps Landfall's homepage is designed to close.

Homepage score out of 100 (12 criteria, 0 to 2 each): 10 funded stablecoin payment startups, October 2026

Company A71
Company B67
Company C67
Company D63
Company E63
Company F63
Company G58
Company H50
Company I50
Company J38
Benchmark average, 100 startups59

Alterra Studio startup website benchmark 2026. Companies are anonymised.

The offer

What we'd ship

For a real payments company, this is a Brand + Website Build.

Brand: Name check, world and key art, wordmark and mark, palette and type, and the rule for the one yellow
Homepage: A first screen that shows one payment land, with the time and the fee, at desktop and phone width
Product: The payouts console and the recipient's receipt in the brand
Launch: The animated board, posters, out-of-home and social for launch week

After this

What's next

Build the homepage with one payment landing as the first screen at 1440 and 390, and score it on the same benchmark.
Ship the developer docs in the same world: the API reference as the shore the coin lands on.