Table Of Content
Key Takeaways:
- Nigerian startup Stabyl has raised $2.7 million in pre-seed funding to build an institutional foreign exchange liquidity platform for Africa.
- Rather than serving consumers, the company provides infrastructure that helps banks and payment companies source FX liquidity and settle transactions using both banking rails and stablecoins.
- The funding reflects a growing shift in African fintech from building payment apps to addressing the liquidity bottlenecks that hinder cross-border payments.
Stabyl has emerged from stealth with $2.7 million in pre-seed funding. Stabyl describes itself as a “unified liquidity layer” for Africa’s financial institutions.
The pre-seed funding was led by Konga, the e-commerce group whose co-CEO, Prince Nnamdi Ekeh, is also a co-founder of Stabyl.
KongaPay will serve as Stabyl’s first naira settlement partner and initial real-world test case.
The founding team also includes Zachary Schwartzman, who previously co-founded a blockchain-based payment platform and served as an analyst covering African tech IPOs.
Michael Anyi, a software engineer with over a decade of experience building financial and blockchain infrastructure, is also a part of the team.
The company says its story began as a conversation between Ekeh and Schwartzman on a basketball court at Oxford, where both were studying for their MBAs.
Stabyl is building infrastructure for African financial institutions and enterprises to provide reliable access to foreign-exchange liquidity.
The company’s initial focus is the naira-dollar corridor, with plans to expand into additional African currency pairs.
Payments Move Fast. Liquidity Doesn’t.
Many African fintechs have already solved the front end of cross-border payments. They can collect money, route it across borders, and deliver it to recipients in multiple currencies.
What they consistently struggle with is what happens in the middle. These companies still need to source dollars at competitive rates, lock in pricing, and settle quickly before markets move.
To do this, they contact multiple financial institutions, compare prices, and wait. This process is slow and fragmented. Stabyl is trying to build a faster solution.
How Stablecoins Fit Into Institutional FX
Stabyl’s solution centers on a mechanism known as the central limit order book (CLOB). CLOB is an electronic trading system that matches buy and sell orders based on price and time priority. Traditional stock exchanges like NASDAQ use it.
Stabyl aggregates liquidity from participating payment service providers (PSPs) and financial institutions, while maintaining its own reserves to cover periods when demand outstrips available supply.
Settlement on Stabyl will occur on both traditional bank rails and blockchain networks. For Stabyl, these pathways are inseparable.
In Ekeh’s words, “Stablecoins are great, but they’re not great on their own. You still need to convert back to local currency.”
On its naira end, Stabyl partners with KongaPay. Infrastructure for the stablecoin side, which supports both USDT and USDC, will be provided by DFNS.
Institutions that want to embed Stabyl’s liquidity directly into their own treasury systems can do so via its API.
African Fintech Is Moving Down the Stack
The first wave of African fintech digitized payments. M-Pesa mobilized mobile money. Flutterwave and Paystack built payment gateways. Wave and Chipper Cash made transfers cheaper. These companies competed at the application layer, on user experience, pricing, and distribution.
The second wave is rebuilding the infrastructure underneath. Flutterwave has publicly moved toward a stablecoin-first settlement strategy for its institutional corridors. Yellow Card, originally a crypto exchange, has pivoted toward regulated institutional infrastructure and secured Swiss regulatory approval as part of that repositioning. WapiPay is expanding licensed payment corridors. Crossmint’s integration with Paga is laying stablecoin payment rails for Nigerian enterprise clients. Polygon has pursued African payment partnerships targeting settlement efficiency.
The Next Wave Targets Liquidity
Stabyl is part of the same new wave of rebuilding. However, rather than competing for consumer wallets or retail remittance flows, it targets the liquidity layer.
Instead of seeing these companies as potential competition in the same market, Stabyl sees itself as plumbing that all those consumer-facing platforms depend on.
Schwartzman, Stabyl cofounder, says,
We’re trying to provide liquidity to other liquidity providers, foreign exchange companies, payment service providers and financial institutions. So, if we look at everything as a pie, we’re not trying to gain market share from this pie. We’re creating more dough to make this a bigger pie for everyone.
Why Liquidity Infrastructure Could Become the Next Competitive Advantage
If Stabyl works, there are several concrete advantages.
Institutions could gain access to better pricing. A marketplace with a real order book creates price discovery. Participants can stop settling for whatever rate their bilateral counterpart offers and start accessing a more transparent and competitive market. This could potentially trickle down to end users of these financial institutions.
Stabyl could provide even faster settlement by removing the manual back-and-forth that currently delays FX settlement. Stabyl’s CLOB approach means transactions are automated, matched, and queued immediately, rather than waiting for typically delayed human approval.
Treasury teams also spend significant time managing FX sourcing. Automated infrastructure could potentially reduce that overhead, freeing capital and staff for higher-value work.
The electronic liquidity market could increase transparency. Because everything is automated, it creates an audit trail that fragmented dealer networks do not. For institutions under regulatory scrutiny, that visibility has real value for compliance.
Regulation May Finally Be Catching Up
Infrastructure businesses like Stabyl need regulatory clarity as much as they need capital. The timing of this raise is not accidental.
Regulation for the crypto industry across the African continent has been on the rise. Rwanda and Zimbabwe have made their first attempts to regulate crypto firms.
Kenya’s VASP Act was passed in 2025, and its Finance Act, enacted in June 2026, provides regulatory clarity for the country’s crypto market.
South Africa’s FSCA has one of the most comprehensive frameworks on the continent, and it’s currently open for public comment on its draft Capital Market Flow Management Regulations.
Nigeria, where Stabyl will kick off operations, has also made regulatory advancements.
In 2023, Nigeria’s Central Bank lifted its ban on cryptocurrency. In 2024, it introduced the Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Program, providing a regulatory framework for interested VASPs.
In 2026, Nigeria advanced a bill to regulate VASPs and other crypto firms.
These shifts matter because they allow institutional players, Stabyl’s ideal clients, to engage with stablecoin infrastructure without legal exposure.
Stabyl says it intends to use the pre-seed capital specifically to expand its regulatory and compliance reach.
Why This Matters
As stablecoins become embedded in institutional payment workflows, the businesses managing liquidity could hold some of the most durable positions in Africa’s digital financial ecosystem.
Stabyl is early, operating in a single corridor, and still building toward regulatory approval. But it is building something the rest of the stack genuinely needs.
