Building Africa’s Trust Layer for Crypto

The Market Gap: Africa’s Financial Friction

Africa’s financial systems are a paradox. Across the continent, millions of people own smartphones but lack stable access to banking. Currency depreciation erodes savings, and cross-border payments remain slow and expensive.

In Nigeria, for instance, the naira has lost 75% of its value since 2016, with inflation soaring to 24% in 2023, leaving ordinary savers desperate for stability. Africa in general received $96.4 billion in remittances in 2024, yet traditional transfers still cost up to 8% per transaction.

Busha entered this uncertainty with a bold premise: trust can be a product.

The goal, as founder Michael Adeyeri often emphasizes, isn’t just to help Africans trade crypto — it’s to empower them to live with it.

They are doing this by designing products specific to the needs of Africans, including:

• Busha Earn
• Busha Spend
• Busha Business
• Busha Connect

Product Architecture: Building for African Realities

Busha Earn was designed for the inflation-weary saver. By offering up to 7.5% annual yields on stablecoins, it gives users a secure, transparent way to preserve wealth.

Beyond savings, Busha’s stablecoin rails cut traditional remittance costs — from up to 8% per transaction down to 1–3%, making cross-border payments faster, cheaper, and transparent.

For everyday needs, Busha Spend turns crypto into airtime, shopping vouchers, and cashback rewards — bringing digital money into daily use.

Then there’s Busha Business, the B2B arm designed for companies handling large volumes of digital transactions. Businesses can use Busha to receive payments in crypto, instantly convert volatile assets into stablecoins, and manage treasury flows without worrying about price swings or chargeback fraud.

But the true breakout product is Busha Connect, a white-label infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Busha commercializes the regulatory and liquidity infrastructure it built for itself — allowing fintech startups, payment gateways, and remittance platforms to plug into Busha’s rails instead of building their own.

That IaaS model represents Busha’s shift from consumer product to regional infrastructure provider — a move that could make it the “Plaid for crypto” in Africa.

How Busha Is Redefining Financial Access for a Volatile Continent

When the founders of Busha first started sketching their ideas in 2019, Africa’s crypto scene was a frontier — bustling, chaotic, and deeply mistrustful.

Speculative trading dominated conversations, but few were asking harder questions:
Could digital assets actually solve real problems? Could they give ordinary people stability in economies where national currencies were anything but stable?

That question became Busha’s north star.

Today, from its headquarters in Lagos, Busha has grown from a retail trading app into one of Africa’s most trusted digital asset platforms — a regulated bridge between volatile crypto markets and the everyday realities of African finance.

With 800,000+ verified users, 8 million executed trades, and a provisional SEC license in Nigeria, Busha is quietly defining what responsible innovation in African crypto looks like.

Its ambition is simple but audacious: to onboard the next one million Africans into the crypto economy — not through hype, but through utility, security, and inclusion.

The Founding Journey: From E-Commerce to Financial Empowerment

Behind Busha’s steady ascent stand two founders who have spent a decade building Africa’s digital economy from the ground up: Michael Adeyeri and Moyo Sodipo.

Both witnessed firsthand how the internet transformed commerce across Africa.

Sodipo, an Electrical and Electronic Engineering graduate from the University of Lagos, was among the early technologists who helped build Jumia, the e-commerce pioneer often dubbed “Africa’s Amazon.”

There, he saw how technology could leapfrog broken infrastructure — but also how fragile digital trust could be in a cash-based economy.

After Jumia, Sodipo led product and business development at Suregifts, a digital voucher platform that helped users access goods and services through e-vouchers instead of cash — again bridging digital tools with everyday needs.

Those experiences became the blueprint for Busha.

Together with Adeyeri, he set out not to create another speculative exchange, but to design a platform where crypto would serve everyday functions — paying bills, saving money, managing inflation.

In an ecosystem dominated by volatility and hype, Busha’s founding philosophy was radical in its simplicity: Make crypto useful.

Funding and the Regulatory Moat

In November 2021, Busha raised $4.2 million in seed funding, led by Jump Capital and joined by Cadenza Ventures, Blockwall Capital, CMT Digital, Greenhouse Capital, and Raba Capital.

But unlike most early-stage exchanges, the funds weren’t used to chase user numbers through marketing.

Instead, Busha invested heavily in regulatory compliance and security infrastructure — a calculated move that would soon pay off.

When Nigeria’s SEC rolled out its Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) framework, Busha became one of the first to secure a provisional license, instantly separating itself from the shadowy gray market that many competitors operated in.

That license became Busha’s most valuable moat.

In a market where trust is scarce, regulatory clarity is currency. For institutional clients, fintech partners, and corporate treasuries, Busha’s compliance posture transformed it from just another exchange into a credible financial intermediary.

Turning Regulation Into Advantage

Africa’s crypto sector has long been defined by regulatory uncertainty. Central banks, wary of volatility, have often restricted bank-crypto interactions.

In Nigeria, for instance, the Central Bank’s 2021 directive froze out many exchanges from formal banking channels.

Busha chose a different path — rather than resist regulation, it embraced it.

By aligning with the SEC’s framework early, the company effectively de-risked itself. That decision now allows Busha to operate where others hesitate, offering institutional partners and consumers alike a sense of permanence in a fast-moving market.

This compliance-first stance is what investors describe as Busha’s “regulatory moat” — a hard-to-replicate advantage now attracting enterprise clients seeking licensed liquidity infrastructure in West Africa.

The Strategic Tensions Ahead

Yet Busha’s path hasn’t been friction-free.

The same compliance rigor that earns it credibility also introduces cost. Because it operates within formal, regulated channels, fiat withdrawals can be expensive, frustrating retail users accustomed to cheaper, informal routes.

This creates a delicate balance: preserving institutional-grade trust while remaining accessible to everyday users.

Busha’s leadership knows solving this tension is key to scaling sustainably.

The company is now exploring more efficient fiat pathways and automation tools to reduce overhead while maintaining strict KYC/AML standards — an approach that mirrors how it solved previous technical challenges in e-commerce and digital vouchers.

The Vision Ahead

Busha’s next chapter is about infrastructure and scale.

The company is already laying groundwork for expansion across East and West Africa, targeting countries with strong mobile penetration but unstable currencies.

Its long-term ambition mirrors a continental dream: to build a stable, open financial network where Africans can save in dollars, transact in crypto, and settle instantly in local currency — all from one trusted platform.

The company’s Connect platform also positions it as a critical layer in Africa’s emerging crypto-fintech infrastructure — the invisible engine that powers compliant, digital liquidity behind the scenes.

As Africa’s economies modernize and regulation catches up, Busha’s quiet discipline — compliance, security, and real-world utility — will prove its greatest competitive edge.

Because in a market flooded with noise, Busha’s message remains refreshingly clear:

Financial freedom isn’t a buzzword. It’s infrastructure.

Building Africa’s Trust Layer for Crypto was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.