Building Dollar Access Across 20 African Countries on Stablecoin Rails

So I remember I'd always have to walk around with, like, bundles of cash because I didn't have a bank verification number, so I couldn't open a bank account. US dollar stablecoins take up 99.6% of all volume globally. Everybody wants access to the dollar right now because it is the world's reserve currency. European payment infrastructure pretty much works. American payment infrastructure works quite well. So the opportunities now are in Latin America, Africa, Asia.

A lot of these countries don't necessarily have dollars in their banking system, so they only have access to local currency. Looking at stable coins into Nigerian naira, Ghana CDs, South African rand, etcetera, all of the other African currencies is the really hard bit because a, the liquidity can be difficult, b, you need to have very good banking relationships, and c, the off ramp is just the hardest piece.

And that's why we're building for that, to have strong payment regulated infrastructure in 20 African countries. Because if you do hard things well, there's huge opportunity.

Hey. It's Drew. Quick thank you to Altitude for making this episode possible. Altitude is rebuilding business banking for teams on the frontier. They offer the full stack for the modern CFO and founder, a beautifully designed platform for payouts, bill pay, corporate cards, enterprise controls, and so much more. Move money with speed, yield, and total control all from your stablecoin balance. Operate at Altitude. If your business is on the frontier, your finances should be too. You can learn more at altitude.xyz.

Welcome to the show, man. Welcome to Stable Minded. We're so happy to have you on. Pumped to hear about Zinta, about all that you're building there, about your backstory, sort of introduce it to our little corner of the world. Tell us a little bit. So I like to start with kind of the hero origin story. So you're building this. You've built and worked on a lot of things, but it seems like you were kind of a serial operator working working as a consultant with all kinds of different solutions.

What was sort of the origin of your career and like where you were starting, what you were learning along the way? And then take us up to the present moment. Yeah. 100% is great and like really happy to be here. My villain story, I guess. A villain story. Heck yeah. I like it. We're here to take over the world, you know. Yeah. Okay. Very good. So the villain story is I started out after university and I went to go work at a company in The UK that basically did everything.

And I didn't realize this at the time, but they built all the back end infrastructure for pretty much every bank across The UK and Europe. They were called IFDS. Sounds like a villain, Yeah. And literally it literally sounds like a villain headquarters. Right? And at the time, I worked with JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, everybody doing all their back end infrastructure and I was on the grad scheme. Yeah.

So I literally sat down after I completed university and for the two weeks after, I applied to like 30 jobs a day. And within two weeks, I got my first job. Yeah. Right? While everybody else is like enjoying and holidaying and stuff and then they were complaining to me after, it's like, why do I have a grad job? Yeah. So I had this job started and you had four different roles. So you could come in, you could either be a business analyst, a project manager, a developer, or a tester.

So I did one role for six months each over a two year period. Love it. And like Dev, you know, I did engineering degree at university, but I hate coding. So I did that for bit. I like, I don't do this no more. Yeah. Testing was like cool. Again, didn't wanna do I was like, okay, either project manager or business analyst. Another time, I kind of love the analytical thinking behind being a business analyst, so I did that.

And I worked with pretty much every bank at the time, got a real understanding of like back end infrastructure. Yeah. You had a laundry list of of... Yeah. Yeah. Big logos. Big logos. Right? And then this is like the funniest story, right? I then went to go work for a company called Investec, is another bank. They had a bank asset manager side and a wealth manager side. I was working on the wealth management front.

And I was bought in at the time I was like 24 to be this new consultant that was basically going to revolutionize the whole bank. They hadn't done any update, any infrastructure for the last fifteen years or so. When they needed to do make a change in the system, the front office would call someone in tech. They'll be like, can you change it? They'll go make the change. No documentation. Nothing. So I had to come in as this young 24 year old guy that was basically revolutionizing the whole IT department.

And obviously, you had a bunch of people there that literally did not want to change anything. A, for job protection Yeah. But b, also because like I'm a young guy that's like telling them how to do the job, they didn't like it. And this is so funny. I was speaking to one of the lead devs there Yeah. And I said to him, this is what we need to do going forward. This is the structures how things are going to work. And he started screaming at me in the office. He was like, I'm not listening to you.

You don't have the experience. And I literally turned around, I looked at the IT director and the IT director kind of looked at me and he went back into his office. And this is like open plan office. Everyone's looked at me and like, yo, what's going on? We left in the walls. Literally literally thrown straight into the walls. So I said to him, I don't wanna argue you. You're the villain. Yeah. This is this is honestly, this is the villain story. Right? So I was like to him like, I don't wanna argue with you.

At least you just wanna do my job. So what ended up happening anyway, I delivered a couple of things for them. I ended up leaving and I handed in my notice rather. Right? So I was a permanent member of staff at the time. I spoke to the IT director, I was like, this is just not worth. The team are making it very very difficult for me to deliver what you've asked me to do. I've delivered x y z but I handed in my notice because I had another job at UBS.

And the IT director came to me and like, Kai, I really don't want you to leave. What are UBS paying you? I was a contractor. So I told him the day rate and I told him a little bit higher. And he was like, I'm gonna match it. So I was like, cool, no problem. I went back after I had my like leaving party, everybody like cut me cake and everything. And then the next day I came into office, brand new suit and I was like a contractor now, which is basically heading up the whole IT department.

So this is literally the villain story. I went from being a permanent member of staff at the organization to all of a sudden being a contractor and basically telling everybody what to do, otherwise, I'm gonna get rid you. And then from there, I contracted across a number of different organizations in financial services, you know, EFG private bank to Barclays to gambling. So I worked in the gambling sector for a while. I worked in the healthcare sector for a while.

I worked telecoms with Virgin Media and Vodafone, always rolling out, you know, digital transformations. I moved from being a BA to being a project manager, management consultant, and I literally delivered something for a year or two, got itchy, went to go deliver something else. And I did that for a number of time before getting into Crypto and Web three in around 2018. I it. Love

it. So you start Kai Inc. What was the brand? Do you have a brand of this, or was it sort of like one of those brandless consultancy? Yeah. It was CC connections, Kai and Clark connections. There you go. Exactly. I was connecting with I figured it was something like that. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you do a digital transformation, but a lot of it is financial institutions, infrastructure, modernization.

Exactly. So I can see how it's kind of laying some of the foundation. Exactly. And then 2018 shift more into this web three crypto digital asset world. What made that switch? So what made that switch? That's a very funny and interesting story. So we were also always like interested in Bitcoin around university days. And one of my friends, this was 2017, my co founder actually, and I co founded the previous business with him as well. He said to me, Kai, you gotta buy this thing. It's like called Ethereum.

It's like the new Bitcoin. You can build applications on it, like buy it. I was like, yeah. Sounds pretty cool. Cool story bro, like I'll buy it. Then it started rallying crazy and I ended up buying the top of that bull market. And I think that two weeks later, I literally dumped like 80%. But I I was super interested in building applications on chain and we built a real estate tokenization platform on Polygon Yeah. Right, which is Matich at the time. We tokenized a bunch of assets.

We tried to get regulated by the FCA, obviously couldn't. But very interesting experience, learned a lot and we actually end up sending that software to one of the providers that were using it. So it was a good outcome for us. But since then, I'd pretty much been very interested in Web three, you know, from a trading perspective, from a DeFi perspective, from working with different protocols, payment protocols, DeFi protocols, etcetera.

And my love for Web three slash crypto has pretty much been, you know, locked in since then. So you get enthusiastic about this. You have a decent early outcome, but you're an ambitious guy. You want more. Yeah. How do we get from there to where you are now running Zinta? Like, what's the jump to the next stage? Yeah. 100%. Again, great question. So I pretty much got really, really, really interested in Solana around twenty twenty, twenty twenty one.

And I joined Super Team UK, you know, kind of working with different builders, built a few different things, built training bots, built as you do, and worked with a couple of payment like providers. At the time we built around 2024, we built our, what is now, Zinta, which was Global Chain at the time. Right? Terrible name. Everybody always asks us, was it a Block blockchain, you know, but it was essentially a b to c on and off ramp for Africa. Yeah. Right?

It was using some other people's infrastructure, some of the early days and we were struggling with churn. So users would kind of come to do a couple of transactions and they'll leave. Leave. And then we ended up doing our first transaction for a business. Right? And they needed to move $300,000 from Nigeria to The UK and we actually did it using stablecoins.

So over the last four, five, six months, we've been struggling with these like micro transactions and then we did one transaction that basically we generate more fees from that one transaction than we had over the last four or five months. So we were like, that's it. We're pivoting to businesses. And we doubled down on initially OTC, you know, so stable coin to local currency OTC for Africa, and then start to build a platform around it. That's how it gets into begun.

When you do something and then you make just as much money in one go as you've made over the last several months.

Yeah. You you gotta make that decision. Little side the universe. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's a nudge. Yeah. Okay. That makes total sense. So you see, hey, there could be more volume here. And you're living in The UK at the time, but you have Nigerian roots? Yeah. So half Nigerian, half Jamaican, spent a lot of time in Nigeria. I remember...

So I used to go to Nigeria a lot as a child. Mhmm. Right? And there was one time I went with my grandmother. So I I was really fortunate actually to see not only my grandparents who are... The majority of them are still alive, but actually my great grandparents. And I went to Nigeria when I was seven or eight to... I'd see my great grandmother a couple of times because because she was getting a bit sick.

But then she passed away and I went when I was eight, which was supposed to be for two weeks and I end up staying for nine months. I came back to The UK with an accent and all the kids were laughing at me. Even my dad was like, who's who's... This isn't my son, who's this guy? I'd always kind of gone back to Nigeria, but I hadn't gone to Nigeria from the age of 10 until I was about 24, 25. Yeah. So obviously going back to Nigeria around 25 was like completely eye opening for me, right?

Because all I could see was opportunities. Right? So although it was a great space, a great sea, a lot of things were broken. Where things are broken, you know, for guys like us that are disruptors, you can kind of see elements for opportunity to kind of build and improve things. And in terms of payments, I remember I'd always have to walk around with like bundles of cash because I didn't have a bank verification number, I couldn't open a bank account.

I didn't have a phone number because I couldn't get BVN and I couldn't get an NIN. It was just really complicated for me to pay for things. Did that ever go south having all that cash on you? The hustler boys in Nigeria would always just ask you for more tips. When you're bringing the cash out, they'd be like, okay, this guy's got more money. Let me just ask for more. And that and that was what they'll do. But apart from that, like, I actually think Nigeria is safer than...

Well, parts of Nigeria are generally safer than London now. Alright. Which is crazy. That's interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, spent a lot of time there and kind of figured that, you know, in terms of payments, there was a real opportunity there. And I guess the more I kind of went back and forth, that's when I was like, you know, there's a real opportunity to build and kind of democratize payment infrastructure specifically for Africa. Right? Because when you look at how Africa's evolved, they didn't build landlines.

They went straight to mobile. Even like the banking system, they didn't necessarily build robust banking system. They kind of went to mobile money. And I think the opportunity now is kind of like the lay on top of that is actually building on stablecoins to build that regulated stablecoin infrastructure to make sure that payment flows can work as seamlessly and as smoothly as expected. Yeah. That's really interesting just to note the jump because it's not necessarily a gradual adoption. Exactly.

Like, modern consumer technology, modern banking is just like right there. Now we've got it. But obviously, you're going around and you're still seeing people transacting in with bundles of cash and all the other sort of hiccups of a developing economy. Exactly. And it's not just Nigeria. It's not just Nigeria. It is It happens to be one of the most populous evolving economies. I mean, obviously, but there's a lot of other population centers. There's a lot of population growth across the whole continent. So, yeah.

Yeah. Tons of opportunity. Exactly. And you see it as, oh, this is not just a place of opportunity, a place with lot of people, a place with a lot of challenges. It's also ripe for stablecoin adoption. And specifically for you right now, I'm I'm thinking about other places where... Like, now, we're we're in New York. Right?

And sometimes people talk about there not being as much product market fit for stablecoins in The US because we don't have some of the pain points that other nations or other regions more broadly have. We have, like, annoying things. The same annoying things of, oh, I can't transact in this way on the weekend, or I have to go through this. But go to LatAm or go to some parts of Asia or

the whole, like, Sub Saharan Continent Of Africa. It's like, oh, there's some serious product market fit there. But it still feels like perhaps because of development or infrastructure or something, there's not as many players or as much that's sort of mature in terms of this market in this sort of sub sector of the economy in Africa. Is that what you see? This still feels kinda early? Yeah. I think there's like a huge opportunity. Right?

And I think, you know, kind of speaking to your point, I feel the same way about Europe. Yeah. So when I'm in London, your payment just worked. Our payment system is better. Right? Yeah. Than The US payment system. Even on weekends, you know, chaps work. It's quick. I make a payment, it comes pretty much instantly. And actually, to popular belief, a lot of African countries, kind of similar to like Brazil and Hicks. Yeah. Their local currency to local currency payment system is immediate. Right? Amazing.

If I said Nigeria... Midfast Yeah. For us. Yeah. It works brilliantly. It's more when you're talking more about global dollar access and euros, pounds, etcetera. That's where kind of the issues arise. Yeah. And looking specifically at the opportunities, I think there's a real opportunity to build specifically regulated payment infrastructure. Mhmm. Because as TradFi is merging more with the crypto world, large enterprises,

government agencies, and businesses will wanna work with the regulated entities Mhmm. To make sure that they can actually build that long lasting payment infrastructure. Mhmm. And that's where I see the huge opportunity. And you've seen that from both sides. You spent the first chapters of your career as a TradFi infrastructure guy. Exactly.

You were a leading edge tech adopting person, but you were with UBS, Barclays, JPMC, like lots of other large organizations that we know to be part of the traditional financial stack, but now you've been crypto pilled.

Stablecoin pilled. Crypto pilled. Whatever you wanna call it, you know. But you see the opportunity of bridging that as well as maybe bridging markets like The Middle East, Africa, Europe. 100%. And actually, I think the last mile is the important piece. Right? Because when you look at payments, it's kind of like first mile orchestration and last mile. I think orchestration has pretty much been done by the blockchain, which is, you know, quite easy in terms of, like, you know, stablecoin payments.

Think when you're turning, everybody wants access to the dollar right now, you know, because it is the world's reserve currency. By looking at stablecoins into Nigerian naira, Ghana CDs, South African rand, etcetera, all of the other African currencies Yeah. Is the really hard bit because, a, you know, the liquidity can be difficult. B, you need to have very good banking relationships. And c, the off ramp is just the hardest piece. Yeah.

And that's why we're building for that because if you do hard things well, you know, there's huge opportunity. Yeah. There's a big opportunity there. You see that there's maybe something defensible there. Like, what is the defensibility of doing that? Is there gonna be other bigger players that come in after and try to gobble folks like you up, or do you think you can win and stay? I think it's a mixed bag. We're definitely building for the long term. Yeah. Right? The reason why we set up...

We set something up with the AVAP Yeah. Which is the African Virtual Assets Forum. And essentially what that does is it's brought together to drive stable coin adoption and regulation Mhmm. Across a number of different African countries. It's got central bankers, ministers of finance. We have a bunch of different events that we're doing across the Continent Of Africa. Our first event will be in Senegal, sponsored by Tether and Solana Foundation. Mhmm.

With that, we're able to actually drive a lot of the regulatory clarity that's needed across the Continent Of Africa. And that will work as a really good distribution tool for us to be able to onboard businesses onto our infrastructure, to be able to be that household name in terms of, you know, building those regulated flows. In terms of somebody larger gobbling us up, it may happen in the future. Right? They may be interested in acquiring us for our licenses and what we're building.

But as it stands for now, I'm very much interested in building something long lasting and something that, you know, stands the test of time. I love it. So it feels very exciting to me to hear you talk about this because you've got various different players. You've got some of the folks like Tether and Solana,

these very important establishment ecosystem players. Now you're talking about government systems, the regulated finance side of it, as well as some of the more traditional finance operators. And you are being part of this ecosystem connector

through EVAP as well as through ZYNTA. Like, what a moment. Yeah. I I I think it's great. And for us, like, we have regulation at the forefront of our mind. Right? Yeah. So even though we're a company that's kind of been operational for about a year and a half, we're in a number of different regulatory processes. We already are licensed in Canada with the Canadian MSP and RPA.

We are part of the first Nigerian cohort for the new regulation underneath the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Nigerian Revenue Service, which is fantastic for a, you know, a pre C stage company. We also are about to get our licenses in Liberia and Senegal. Yeah. And we submitted to Sandboxes in Ghana and Zambia as well. So, you know, considering where we are and in terms of the footprint that we're looking to expand into, we're very much aggressive on acquiring the licenses and building properly.

Compliance is a difficult thing to run away from over time. Sure. I think a lot of businesses, you know, that have achieved really good scale have been able to scale because they're avoiding some compliance processes. Right? But building for that now really builds a a very strong foundation of the business and enables, you know, there's opportunities for scale, for potential acquisition, and for... To actually work with some of the larger enterprises and government agencies globally. Yeah.

Take me into some of these economies.

It can be Nigeria or what you're seeing in Ghana, Senegal, any of these. What are some of the pain points that you think can be solved in the near term in terms of, like, what does the financial system look like here? I mean, there's sort of the headlines things that we hear about. But what are you seeing as problems where you specifically wanna take this on? And if you get this right over the next couple of years, this will get fixed in terms of financial systems in these countries.

I think it's important to kind of clarify how payments work Please. First and foremost. So specifically with our kind of business, there's there's generally, in my opinion, like, of four layers. Right? So there's like, I could build an API that's connected to somebody else's API, that's connected to somebody else's API.

And I think that's a lot of what's happening in this space. And generally, there's a couple of different providers that are providing APIs to everybody else. Right? If you're that kind of business, yeah, you get quick access, but essentially subservient to their compliance demands to, you know, speed of operation, landed transactions, and it can be quite difficult to scale that kind of business. The level above that is where you have direct relationships with the liquidity partner.

So, you know, you may build an API or flows into that liquidity partner. You have a really good relationship with them. We have some great relationships. We have a couple of our liquidity providers that are actually investing in us in this round because we do some decent flow with them. The level above that is like your license in a specific entity and you're able to work directly with a local banking partner.

So whether that is commercial bank, a state bank, a microfinance bank, whatever, and you would do direct flows with that bank and USD to USDT with Tether, for example, with Circle minting, burning, whatever. The level above that is you actually own your own bank. So you are able to capture deposits, you're able to have the local currency to stable currency liquidity, and you're able to manage all the off ramps and virtual accounts and everything else.

So where we are now in terms of what we've built today, we're pretty much like at that two and three... There's two and three phases. Mhmm. But our goal is to, like, acquire the banks as well. Right? So we're looking to acquire, like, some of our own NFB or microfinance banks, etcetera, to operationalize a lot of the stack. And we think that there's a big opportunity there in building

as much of the regulated stack as possible. Do you feel like it's kind of an open field enough

to play there where you can hit on several of these levels? Yeah. I think what we'll be able to do really well is number three, which is like, you know, acquire licenses in a bunch of different regions. We already have some really, really good banking partners across the Continent Of Africa from, you know, Providence Bank to UBA to Wema Bank, etcetera. So we're very, very excited about, you know, the opportunities that lie there. But over time, we do wanna operationalize our post as well. Totally. Okay.

So folks, you said we went to mobile adoption and then mobile banking adoption pretty quick,

but you're still seeing pain points. Something that was interesting to me hearing you talk about the different players involved is I'm thinking about what are the things that keeps investment out of Sub Saharan Africa, and how does... Maybe not Sub Saharan, maybe just all of the continent. I don't know how this affects players like Morocco, Egypt, all the sort of, like, corridor across the Sahara.

But how does this solve kind of the stability of currencies or companies wanting to invest here or just money movement between people, between companies and employees, governments that have sometimes had raking off of government funds? Like, how are we playing here? You know? Like, I've spent some time in various places, including very developed economies like South Africa that still have pretty big issues with some of this stuff in terms of their economic development.

And it feels like despite having amazing opportunities, abundant natural resources, so on and so forth, have sometimes... There's a hiccup in terms of development, which is we could get into all the, like, colonial history and all that yada yada. But, like, in terms of the moment, do you see this as something that can bring a lot more economic vitality to some of these countries

and perhaps, like, stability and opportunities in terms of global trade? There's a couple of questions in there. I think There are. Yeah. I I rambled a little bit too much, but please No. Take it down. It's it's it's all great, and I'll try and break it down as much as possible. I think on the VC aspects and like the funding aspect, there has been some significant investment that's gone into more The US corridors and subsequently the Latin American corridors.

Because there's obviously from like a time zone perspective and a corridor perspective, it it kind of makes the most sense. Right? And then in terms of investment that's gone into Africa, there hasn't necessarily previously been as much investment that's gone into Africa. And therefore, there hasn't necessarily been extraordinary outcomes that have come out of the back of that terms of like unicorns. But if there's not the investment going in, then there's not gonna be the unicorns that come out.

However, what I've seen more recently is that venture are kind of seeing opportunities in emerging markets. Because when you look specifically at stablecoins, you know, and payment infrastructure, like we said, European payment infrastructure pretty much works. American payment infrastructure is obviously being built, but again, like, works quite well. So the opportunities now are in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

So more recently, we've actually seen a lot more investment that's been going into the sub Saharan African region Absolutely. Which is very interesting. And when you think about the outcome, people speak about payment outcomes as this is the crypto bubble and this is what's happening in stablecoins. But I think you have to think about the outcomes as this is how much the banking system is making from their fees. If we look at JPMorgan, a lot of the other banks, they've had record profits year on year.

And I think neobanks, bespoke payment infrastructure is actually not gonna eat from each other, but start to eat into the fees and the revenues of the traditional banks. And that's why I think the huge opportunity is which could have a 10, 20, 30 x upside. So I think we're still very much early in that space in terms of outcomes, and I'm very, very, very excited about the opportunities for stablecoins and payment infrastructure. I feel like we live in a bit of an echo chamber in crypto. Right?

So everybody here in crypto understands stablecoins and how they work and what the infrastructure and what the payments look like. If you speak to the average person and you ask them, forget about stablecoins. What is Bitcoin? A lot of them don't even know that. Take it down to Solana. They don't have a clue. Talk about stable coins, the average person still doesn't know what it is. So it's still very much as early in my opinion in terms of the opportunities to build Yeah.

And the opportunities to have extraordinary outcomes. Now speaking more specifically about the dollarization of what will happen in a lot of these emerging markets economies. And I think fortunately or unfortunately, and maybe fortunately for the local participants, but maybe unfortunately for the governments, Stablecoins has pretty much enabled or accelerated rather the dollarization globally, right, for people to get access to the dollar. Everybody right now wants access to the dollar. Right?

People want to be paid in dollars. What we've been seeing by some of our conversations with central banks, ministers of finance, etcetera, is that they are trying to enforce people to still pay for things in local currency. Right? So whether that's even taxes, know, if you're going to pay for your taxes and stablecoins, there still needs to be an off ramp service that will change your stablecoins into local currency to make sure that your local currency stays within the economy.

And also, what we've seen with a lot of the frameworks that have been going into place across West Africa and Central Africa is that taxation frameworks are coming in. Yeah. Right? So where there is more dollarization that comes in, the governments will make more money from taxation. So it's kind of like a balancing act, right, in terms of generating revenue versus having your currency devalued.

Are you hearing talk about issuing local stablecoins or stablecoins

tied to the local currencies here? Yeah. We have seen some, like, definitely. The main one in Africa now is CNGN, which is like the Nigerian Naira stablecoin. They don't have much volume. Yeah. But I think that is a story that is painted across all stablecoins. Right? US dollar stablecoins take up 99.6% of all volume globally. Yeah. Even the euro stable coin, which is like the second highest, hardly does any volume compared to other stable coins.

So I think there will be more local stable coins, but again, the problem will be liquidity. The problem will be on chain FX and how much liquidity is there. In the near future, if some of these economies are more dollarized,

obviously, there's ministers for finance folks in that local economy who might not be thrilled about that for some reason. Mhmm. What's the kind of pro con though, either from a consumer perspective or a more institutional perspective, if folks are transacting in USDC,

T, AUSD, etcetera? The pros probably like having more access to US dollars in your economy. Yeah. Because something that we've seen quite a lot and actually why there was initially like a use case is a lot of these countries don't necessarily have dollars in their banking system. Mhmm. Right? So they only have access to local currency. For example, it's happened to me. I've had dollars in my Nigerian bank account, not even much. Right? Like $50,000. And I've asked for it to be remitted.

And the bank manager says, hey. We don't have the dollars available right now. Give me like $3.04 days to get access to the dollars, and then I'm gonna send it out. It's gonna take a week to get sent out, and I'm gonna charge you 4%. So that is a common issue across Africa holistically anyway. So on the pro side, sort of integrations that we could do with banks, we could actually provide additional stablecoin liquidity in terms of dollars to banks.

I think the con side is almost every currency globally has been going downwards against the dollar. Right? I think Zambia has had one of the most positive currencies against the dollar for last year. Yeah. But the majority of currencies are, I mean, the dollar is going downwards against everything else. Right? So you see all this opportunity in these various economies. Roll out the roadmap for me a little bit though, like, where are you focused right now? You're working on this Mhmm. Off ramp, sticky technology.

Like, what's the focus for Zinto right now? Yeah. So the focus for Zinto is is like two pronged. Right? And I kind of think of every business in three different aspects, product distribution and finance. So on the product side, we're building our APIs. We already have our APIs for Nigeria Naira. We have virtual accounts coming out. Ghana CD is pretty much there as well in testing. XOF, XAF, and then we'll have a a bunch of other African currencies that will be coming out soon as well. Right?

And we work with a couple of providers that we will integrate into our API for USD, euros, pounds, etcetera. So we have like a full scope of like API access for anybody that wants to plug our APIs into their infrastructure with us. D5 protocols, you know, wallets, brick and mortars, other payment service providers, whatever. Right? On the distribution side, what we're working on is distribution via AVAP. So that is working to work with governments to to get regulation.

We see the big picture as us actually being able to provide globally high quality regulated infrastructure to people that wanna do payments intra or into Africa. Right? So, you know, global businesses that wanna do payments into Africa and local business that wanna pay from Ghana to Senegal, for example. Right? On the finance side, we're like very close to closing our fundraisers.

We're super excited about Conway to announce it once it's done and that's where we are and we're going to use that money to just accelerate faster. I think what we've done to date with the money we've had has been great, but yeah, we're just going to accelerate faster. I love it. We're getting in on the early days. But you're a super villain. So you have a plan for world domination, I assume. A plan for world domination. What does that look like? Can I tell you? Okay. This is the real alpha right here.

This is the real alpha right here. Is the real alpha right here. The plan for domination is to have strong payment regulated infrastructure in 20 African countries. Mhmm. And then to start moving to other emerging markets as well. We have some very interesting banking integrations that we're doing across Latin America as well, which is exciting. We have a couple of the large banks that are looking to integrate with us in Mexico and in Colombia as well. Mhmm. So the world domination is not just limited to Africa.

It's limited to the world.

I love it. I love it. But Africa has a strong case for being a place to play right now. Exactly. Yeah. And when you think about the competitive landscape here, does it feel like you have to sort of rush to market and solution all this? Or is it kind of, it's a very big pie, there's a lot of space to play.

Obviously, you want to move fast and get things out. But what's the competition like or what's that looking like? I think it's two pronged. You're always running and if you're not running then why aren't you running? Right? I don't even think just in payments but I think generally, it feels like everybody's shipping faster Yeah. Right, because of AI. But whether that's actually the case is to be told. Right? Because Yeah.

We see a lot of announcements, but when we've spoken to some people about doing integrations with them, they're not ready. So it gets a mix of running and making sure you're running fast, utilizing AI where you can to operationalize and speed up your dev operations, go to market sales, whatever it is. And I think AI is gonna continuously help us to do that. On the other side, there is a huge pie that is available. Right? And we want a very big slice of it.

So what we see and what we have seen actually is that there's... Especially in Web three and crypto, there's two types of companies. Companies with regulatory advantages and moats and companies without. Right? And somebody that I've seen outside of the payment space that has done really well in terms of having some of that governmental or like regulatory relationships relationships is Pudgy Penguins. Right? And for me, they've transcended crypto. They're not just a crypto brand. They're not just an NFT project.

They are a whole movement in the same way that Hello Kitty is. However, they have some very good governmental relationships to ensure that over time, they'll continue to grow and be able to expand as they want to expand, whether that's into trading, whether that's into prediction markets, whatever is into whatever. For us, we want to be on the side of regulation because we feel that specifically as AI started to develop, a lot of the most that existed previously don't necessarily exist anymore.

So first move advantage, you know, you can build something today and I can get my AI to copy it. I think the technology and software advantage is pretty much gone as well. A lot of the only advantages that are left are regulatory. So actually having, you know, that regulatory advance, which provides you some time, twelve to twenty four, maybe thirty six months, obviously depending on the region, but not an everlasting mode. Yeah. And I think the one that people still really under develop is is relationships.

Relationships obviously help with distribution. Relationships help with opening doors that you can't necessarily open yourself. And we're trying to leverage those and every unfair advantage that we can. That is legal, of course. Of course. Yeah. Sometimes we have these conversations

particularly with infrastructure, cross border, these sorts of solutions, they can start to blend together. A lot of things can start to seem the same, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reality. Yep. So how do you win? Maybe relationships and regulation. How do you actually distinguish yourselves from the field? How do you end up as the preferred partner for blank blank blank blank, large institutions Yep. Governments, etcetera.

If you have a warm relationship, if you have a way in, and if you've sort of gotten ahead of the regulatory curve, it's a good bet. Yeah. Good place to place your chips. Yeah. That's What do I know about you? No. No. We're excited for you. I mean, always fun when we get to talk to a builder who's still, like, somewhat early, but also experiencing a little bit of the traction where it's like, hey. Something big is kinda coming down the line.

I would love to go to your party in Lagos or Cape Town or wherever when we're Okay. When we're toasting your great success in the I coming love it. Your world domination. That's it. I'm sure it'll be a good one. Yeah. Maybe a yacht. We'll have it on the coast. Was gonna say we'll have it on a yacht. It has to be a yacht. Yeah. Gulf Of Guinea or down in the Cape Town, you know. We'll call the yacht CC connections. Hey. I love it. I love it. Well, this is great. Any final words?

Something we haven't talked about that's like, oh, we really should hit on this? Any final words? I would just say,

check our infrastructure out. Subshows. I

love it. I love it. CC connections. The yacht is coming as is, global payments extraordinaire. Yeah. We're really excited for you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate you.