Even if those hurdles could be crossed, there's the hurdle of actually converting the unbanked to use their service. Unbanked people are unbanked because it's not profitable for local banks to convert them to customers, generally because they live in cash economies and don't have very much of it, and WU/Moneygram or the hawala service is difficult to beat on the last mile of remittances. M-PESA filled some gaps because it used a existing network of mobile phone stores and people's confidence in the value of their dumbphone credit in local currency. All rely heavily on shops in villages to attract and serve customers.

But Diem doesn't have any advantages over any of these entities: it's a foreign foundation with no local infrastructure to help people spend their cash and no local knowledge talking about immutable ledgers and cash equivalent reserves, as if the reason the unbanked were unbanked is because the local banks don't write whitepapers rather than because exchanging cash in developing world villages is a very expensive problem to solve relative to the size of the transactions they unbanked might like to make