Decades after the independence of African states, a new scramble is underway. It is not for land, gold, or rubber, but for data, digital infrastructure, and the financial pathways that will define the continent’s future.
The Virtual Asset Service Providers Association (VASPA) recently convened a critical X Space event titled, “The Scramble for Digital Africa: Who Builds the Rails?” The X Space was moderated by Favour Uche (Assistant Lead, Policy & Regulatory Affairs, VASPA). Analyzing the insights from this pivotal discussion, the consensus among these innovators is clear: the future of African finance belongs to those who build its foundational infrastructure today.
We are gradually moving past the era of relying solely on foreign infrastructure. A new vanguard of African-built, globally competitive brands is emerging to tear down the continent’s financial borders. Here is a look at some of the titans laying the tracks and the hard truths they shared about winning in digital Africa—not necessarily scrambling for it.
The Vanguard: Meet Leading Architects of Africa’s Digital Future
The brilliance of this panel wasn’t just in the theory; it was in the practical, battle-tested experience of the brands represented. These are the companies actively turning the continent’s biggest obstacles—fragmentation, illiquidity, and regulatory hurdles—into massive market opportunities.
- Bantu & Interstellar (represented by Victor Olorunfemi): Fragmentation is the enemy of adoption. Bantu and Interstellar are tackling this by shipping and growing interoperable digital rails across Fintech and Web3. Their market positioning is clear: they are the architectural backbone connecting the isolated islands of African finance into a unified, powerful network.
- Bitsave Protocol & Bizmarkets (Founded by Karla Nweke): The ultimate test of blockchain is real-world utility. Bitsave and Bizmarkets are leading the charge in asset tokenization, helping traditional businesses raise capital on-chain. By connecting real-world entrepreneurs with decentralized liquidity, they are democratizing wealth generation and proving that Web3 can fund the real economy.
- BoundlessPay (Founded by Franklin Peters): Cross-border payments in Africa have historically been a nightmare of high fees and slow settlement. BoundlessPay is masterfully eradicating this friction. By driving truly borderless payments, they are positioning themselves as the essential conduit for pan-African trade, ensuring that value flows across the continent as seamlessly as a text message.
- cNGN (Spearheaded by Uyoyo Ogedegbe): You cannot build African financial rails without ensuring that the value that travels on them are tradable. By enabling a robust, compliant local stablecoin from Nigeria, cNGN is solving the problem of Naira not being directly tradable with other virtual assets. They are building the critical bridge between everyday fiat reliance and the borderless efficiency of Web3.
- ToroNet (Co-Founded by Dr. Ken Alabi): While others build apps, ToroNet is building the bedrock. As a layer-1 blockchain infrastructure provider purpose-built for global innovators, ToroNet offers the scalable, localized foundation that African developers desperately need. They are proving that the continent’s core infrastructure does not need to be outsourced.
The Core Directives for Winning the Market
Through the lens of these industry leaders, four undeniable directives emerged for any brand looking to scale in Africa’s digital economy:
1. Interoperability is Non-Negotiable
Fragmentation across 54 nations is a serious blocker. Brands like ToroNet and Bantu understand that African-built chains must talk to each other. The ultimate moat is not a walled garden, but seamless integration with interoperability protocols.
Dr. Ken Alabi observed that one of the things Africa needs more than many others is access to this new digital revolution. “Africa’s cost of financing is high, access to payment systems is low in many [African] communities. The World Bank rating for us in terms of banking penetration and mobile money access is about 50%, whereas in many others over 90%.”
To solve this, he argues against siloing. “We don’t want to build a system that is fragmented. Your asset, which belongs to you, should be free to move. You don’t want to have a project that needs payment for somebody and you say, ‘Oh, my tokens are on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, or Tron.’ This fragmentation is one of the things that is going to be holding the crypto industry back.”
Drawing a parallel to traditional finance, Dr. Alabi pointed out, “Nobody says, ‘Oh, my money is in Bank of America, so I can’t pay my mortgage with Chase Bank.’ Right? Money should be free to move across networks. If I have tokens… it shouldn’t be locked on one chain.”
Furthermore, ToroNet views transaction costs as a barrier. “We don’t believe that when you do a transaction, you should be required to pay gas fees. Gas fees lock you into an environment. People keep asking us why did you build something else? Because what exists isn’t going to work… Transactions should be like a public utility. Let the fees be on the entry and exit layer, just like it is for banks.”
Dr. Alabi summed up the interoperability mandate perfectly: “If one has to compete by locking people in, you won’t last.”
2. Liquidity Must Be African-Owned
Elegant rails mean nothing without volume. The panel highlighted that traditional finance (TradFi) and real-world assets hold the key to the liquidity crypto desperately needs.
Franklin Peters of BoundlessPay maintained that liquidity in Africa is massively fragmented. “Our counterparts have been able to aggregate massive liquidity concentration. The Binance, Bybit, HTX… have bridged this. Looking closely at how money moves, up to 80% of the money flow moves through these exchanges whereby these exchanges are able to share liquidity, leveraging APIs and back-end agreements. This is one thing that is lacking in Africa. We have not been able to build to this point.”
Karla Nweke (Bitsave) challenged the ecosystem to look at how Western DeFi is funded. “Where does the yield in DeFi come from? …There are two places: token emissions, which many of us know, and US treasury bills. An entire industry is being funded by an economy. So, I keep asking, where is our own DeFi? If we are going to solve our liquidity problem, we have to look for a way to make the values, the economic values, that we already have in our own system put them on-chain. And this is the mindset behind the product I built called Bizmarkets where DeFi can farm real businesses for yields.”
Uyoyo Ogedegbe (cNGN) echoed this need to plug into established capital. “There are many things we are not doing that we need to do. A big part of that is financialization—going to where local liquidity, such as market makers, pensions [reside]. Capital sits where capital is. You start by locating capital and plugging into it. You don’t build a capital base overnight. Fortunately, with the tokenization wave, a lot of the traditional players are now looking at the industry.”
3. Regulation is a Feature, Not a Bug
Rather than resisting regulators, the smartest brands are treating compliance as a core product feature.
Uyoyo Ogedegbe shared cNGN’s proactive approach: “Since 2022-2023, we have been engaging with the regulators. And there has been some progress, not just in Nigeria but across Africa. We are working with stablecoin issuers in Africa, and we are likely to have 2–3 more regulated stablecoins in Africa this year. Some things take time—requires a lot of learning, oversight, and process. There is VARA. CBN seems to be involved in that with the NRS and SEC. Even the SEC too has made a lot of progress… When the time is right, whatever the country decides, we are happy to play by the rules.”
Franklin Peters shared a stark lesson on regulatory resilience. “Pre-2020, it was an open market. There was no regulation. Then in 2021, came the ban… to stop crypto-related transactions in Nigeria’s banking and financial system. I have been pro-regulation from day one. Back then a lot of maximalists would attack you if you were considered pro-regulation. At some point, we built a version of BoundlessPay and Bitfxt… We partnered with Providus Bank who was our link to Mastercard. When the ban was announced, it killed our business because the entire business model back then was powered by banking access.”
Peters had to pivot, acquiring a financial services provider with a license in Mauritius to remodel BoundlessPay into a plug-and-play model. His advice to builders? “If you are building a product, don’t lay all your eggs in one basket or infrastructure.”
4. Product Clarity is Key to Adoption
Victor Olorunfemi (Bantu) recalled how fixing basic pain points drove their innovation. “When we started building in this space as far back as in 2017, the problem that we set out to solve has been currency fragmentation… The big problem statement was that if you had to travel to 5 countries in Africa… you had to first port your Naira into USD, get to the other country and convert it back to the local currency… This fragmentation problem is still there today and we continue to innovate.”
Karla Nweke noted that when you solve a real problem, users ignore the friction. “If you build something that people need, they don’t mind the hassles. When we started Bitsave, the first users were not Web3 natives… We have businesses that know nothing about blockchain. All they care about is that if they come on our platform they will get loans. The biggest case for adoption is to build something that people actually need. They don’t often care if it is blockchain technology.”
Franklin Peters pushed back against naysayers who claim the African payments and crypto space is saturated. “The industry in Nigeria has not even attained 1% of maturity. In shipping unicorns, we are yet to get to a fragment of maturity… Let people build. Support as many as you can support. Let us get to a point where we can say there is a crypto startup from Nigeria that has become a unicorn… Even if exchanges have millions of users, the majority of the exchanges in Nigeria do not have up to 15% of their users actively trading. We have not been able to scratch the surface.”
As Buki Ogunsakin (Vice Chair, Program & Communications, VASPA) puts it “Clarity is distribution. Solve problems visibly; let the tech sit quietly underneath… Clarity is the biggest distribution strategy nobody talks about enough.” Favour Uche agreed: “Build without jargon, abstract the technology, and solve the problem visibly.”
Final Words: The Single Biggest Threats and the Solution
When asked about the single biggest threat to the digital Africa movement, the panelists offered chilling yet actionable insights:
Dr. Ken Alabi: “Competition is out there. But I think we are well positioned to do very well, because we understand our own environment… We have an opportunity to build what we need, and build better. At the same time, we don’t have to throw the baby away with the bathwater… Our own experience is seeing farmers, market people, churches who donate every Sunday—millions of people—use blockchain but do not even know they are using crypto. Let’s look at what is good, what we need, and build something for our community.”
Franklin Peters: “The biggest threat is lack of regulatory protection for innovation. We are running out of time. We can be as big as the biggest brands out there. But we are in our holes because we are being fought from all angles. This is why at Boundlesspay today, we have remodeled to a plug-and-play model, leveraging partnerships.”
- Karla Nweke: “The best case for adoption is if we look at pain points. If we solve certain pain points for users, they will happily come on chain. We have businesses that know nothing about blockchain. All they care about is that if they come on our platform, they will get loans. The biggest case for adoption is to build something that people actually need. They don’t often care if it is blockchain technology. And it is not just about the tech but the coordination as well.”
- Victor Olorunfemi: “The biggest threat is the incursion of foreign interests without proactive protection or sovereignty. This happened time and again in history. Sovereignty without innovation is stagnation and innovation without sovereignty is colonization. We need a long game. Operators also need to find a way to play together as a team, while building individual products.”
- Uyoyo Ogedegbe: With regulation, some things take time—requires a lot of learning, oversight, and process. Our focus is to figure out how to make this infrastructure more accessible, more liquid, and more efficient and how to distribute it to players that need it the most.”
The Bottom Line
The scramble is literally on. The choices made today will determine if Africa controls its own digital destiny or simply rents it from foreign powers. Thankfully, with organizations like VASPA drafting policy frameworks and brands like Bantu, BoundlessPay, Bitsave, cNGN, and ToroNet laying the tracks, one could safely say that the continent’s digital sovereignty is in capable hands.
About VASPA
The Virtual Asset Service Providers Association (VASPA), founded in September 2024 and headquartered in Nigeria, is the premier Africa-focused advocacy group for the virtual asset industry. Our mission is to foster innovation, harmonize regulation, and build a safe and thriving virtual asset ecosystem across the African continent. For more information about us, please visit our website, www.vaspa.org. To become a Patron or Partner of VASPA, visit our Membership page: https://vaspa.org/become-a-member/. Individual and corporate members are also welcomed.
