On a recent episode of TechCabal’s What’s Next for African Payments?, Flutterwave and Andela co-founder Iyin Aboyeji was asked a question many African crypto founders would have preferred he dodged: can Africa produce a blockchain unicorn within the next decade?
His answer was blunt. “Never.”
For an entrepreneur who helped build two of Africa’s most celebrated unicorns, it wasn’t the kind of prediction people expected. Yet the remark was less an attack on blockchain technology and more a critique of where founders are looking for value.
Aboyeji’s argument deserves attention because it challenges one of the longest-running assumptions in African tech: that because Africa has high crypto adoption, it will eventually produce a billion-dollar blockchain company.
What if that assumption is wrong? This echoes a sentiment that many have harboured for the longest time: that adoption doesn’t necessarily equate to environments that ensure business growth. What if Africa’s blockchain opportunity is real, but the unicorn emerges from somewhere entirely different?
The Uncomfortable Truth Behind Africa’s Crypto Enthusiasm
At first glance, Africa seems like the perfect place for a blockchain unicorn: there’s adoption, which means there’s actual utility, and as such, people can build businesses around it, so adoption could be leveraged to drive revenue.
Nigeria consistently ranks among the world’s largest crypto markets. Chainalysis ranked Nigeria sixth globally in its 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index.
The IMF reported that Nigeria received approximately $59 billion in crypto inflows between July 2023 and June 2024, accounting for roughly 60% of all stablecoin activity in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Those numbers sound enormous, but adoption and value creation are not the same thing, and most of that activity revolves around a narrow set of financial needs:
- Preserving value against naira depreciation
- Accessing dollars through stablecoins
- Cross-border payments
- Remittances
- P2P trading
- Arbitrage opportunities
Now these are meaningful use cases because they solve real problems, but they do not necessarily create billion-dollar software businesses, and that distinction sits at the heart of Aboyeji’s argument.
Stablecoins May Have Destroyed the Moat
For years, African Fintech startups have built businesses around payments infrastructure, creating APIs, switching networks, settlement systems, payment gateways, merchant acquiring products, and cross-border rails. Building those networks was difficult, which meant successful operators could earn attractive margins, and stablecoins seemingly ramped up how quickly these payment settlements occur.
Sending value internationally used to require multiple intermediaries, but today, a USDT transfer can settle across borders in minutes, and the result of that is that infrastructure itself becomes less valuable. If every company can access the same blockchain rails, then owning the rails no longer guarantees a competitive advantage, and Aboyeji’s criticism of becoming “the 100th stablecoin company” reflects this reality.
When settlement becomes cheap and widely accessible, margins collapse, and time and time again, history has offered many examples because the internet, cloud computing, and payments infrastructure have all increasingly become commoditized. The money rarely stays with the companies that merely move bits from Point A to Point B and usually flows toward companies that understand customers better than anyone else.
The Real Battleground Has Moved
Aboyeji’s argument becomes more interesting here in that he is not saying blockchain has no future; he is saying the future value will likely sit above the blockchain layer, which, if you think about what happened with internet businesses, the biggest winners were not the companies laying the fibre cables but the ones that thoroughly understood user behaviour.
Google understood search intent, Meta understood social relationships, Amazon understood purchasing behaviour, and their moat was not infrastructure; their moat was data and context. Aboyeji believes the same principle will apply to stablecoin-powered payments, where the winners will not simply move money but will understand what the money is doing; who is paying whom, why they are paying, what products are moving across borders, what financing needs to emerge from those transactions, and what risks exist within supply chains, and that information becomes more valuable than the payment itself.
His Relevance Test Exposes a Major Web3 Problem
In actuality, the most important point Aboyeji raised has little to do with technology; he argued that if a Web3 application does not help ordinary people accomplish everyday goals, it ultimately does not matter, and although that is a harsh standard, it is worth applying honestly. If you were to ask a typical Nigerian university graduate which apps they used yesterday, the list probably includes:
- OPay
- PalmPay
- Moniepoint
- Kuda
- GTBank
- Access Bank
- TikTok
Now ask how many blockchain applications they used; most people would struggle to name one, and even among crypto users, blockchain is often invisible. People use stablecoins to receive payments, they use exchanges to trade and wallets to store value, but very few interact with blockchain applications that solve daily non-financial problems, and that is not because blockchain is useless.
It is because most African blockchain startups have focused on infrastructure and speculation rather than everyday utility.
The Adoption Paradox Nobody Talks About
Nigeria presents a fascinating contradiction: the country is undeniably one of the world’s largest crypto markets and yet blockchain adoption outside finance remains limited. Supply chain applications remain niche, and blockchain identity systems have seen little mass adoption, same with NFT projects which largely disappeared after the speculative boom.
Blockchain gaming has struggled to gain mainstream traction; meanwhile, traditional Fintech apps continue processing millions of daily transactions, and in all this, the average Nigerian is not choosing between a banking app and a blockchain app; they are choosing between Opay and Palmpay, Moniepoint and Kuda, between GTBank and Access. This distinction is important because unicorns often emerge from mass adoption and not niche enthusiasm.
Why Fintech Succeeded Where Web3 Struggled
African Fintech succeeded because it solved obvious problems like Africa being shut out of the global money transfer market for the longest time; those who were able to solve that problem have succeeded at building profitable companies. The value proposition was immediate, but in blockchain, many projects have struggled because they often ask users to learn entirely new concepts before experiencing benefits. Wallet management, gas fees, private keys, network bridges, token economics, etc. These were not features; these were barriers because the most successful technologies should disappear into the background.
Users care about outcomes and not so much architecture; when you think about it, no one chooses Uber because it uses cloud computing or Spotify for its distributed servers. Similarly, future blockchain winners may succeed precisely because users never realize blockchain is involved.
ALSO READ: Forget Wallet Addresses, Korbit Wants You To Send Crypto Like a Text Message
Is “Never” Too Strong?
Probably, history has always had a habit of humiliating predictions that include absolute words. When you think about it, the internet was supposedly a fad, mobile payments were supposedly impossible in Africa, streaming was supposedly unprofitable, artificial intelligence was supposedly decades away and although the stronger version of Aboyeji’s argument may not be that Africa will never produce a blockchain unicorn, it may be that Africa will never produce a unicorn whose primary advantage is blockchain infrastructure alone, which is a more defensible claim.
What Would an African Blockchain Unicorn Actually Look Like?
If Aboyeji is right, future winners will likely combine blockchain rails with unique customer intelligence, and several sectors stand out;
Cross-border trade
Africa’s fragmented markets create enormous friction for businesses importing and exporting goods. A company that combines stablecoin settlement, trade financing, logistics intelligence, supplier verification, and credit underwriting could build a significant advantage where the blockchain becomes infrastructure and value comes from understanding the commerce.
Supply chain finance
Many African businesses struggle to access affordable credit. When you have a platform that understands transaction flows and supplier relationships, it could offer financing more effectively than traditional lenders, but again, the blockchain is not the product; it is the plumbing.
Identity and reputation systems
Credit histories remain fragmented across much of Africa. Digital identity infrastructure tied to transaction histories could unlock lending opportunities for millions of individuals and businesses.
Embedded financial services
Companies that understand merchants deeply may be able to offer loans, insurance, inventory financing, and payment solutions through a single platform where the data becomes the moat.
Which Companies are Closest Today?
Several companies are moving in directions that resemble Aboyeji’s framework. Yellow Card has built significant stablecoin infrastructure across Africa, Grey focuses on cross-border financial services, Moniepoint has evolved from payments into business banking, credit, and operational infrastructure, and Flutterwave, which Aboyeji himself co-founded, continues expanding beyond payments into broader merchant services.
While these companies are not pure blockchain startups, that may actually support Aboyeji’s thesis; the closer a company gets to customer context, the more valuable it becomes. The blockchain component becomes increasingly invisible.
The Lesson Founders Should Take Away
The easiest interpretation of Aboyeji’s comments is that blockchain in Africa is doomed, but that would be a wrong conclusion. A better interpretation would be that blockchain alone is insufficient, and because we know that technology rarely creates value by itself, value often comes when technology solves meaningful problems.
African founders should ask a simple question: What becomes possible because blockchain exists? And not: How can I build another blockchain company? One mindset starts with technology while the other starts with customer needs, and history has consistently rewarded the second group.
The irony is that Africa may eventually produce a blockchain unicorn in exactly the way that disproves Aboyeji’s literal prediction while vindicating the argument underneath it. Imagine a company worth $5 billion: it uses stablecoins extensively, its settlement runs on blockchain rails, its financing products leverage tokenized assets, and its identity systems incorporate decentralized verification, and yet customers barely notice.
They use it because it helps them finance inventory, pay suppliers, access credit, receive payments, or manage trade operations. In that world, blockchain remains essential, but it is not the reason the company became valuable. The reason is context, it is understanding, it is solving real problems, and that is what Aboyeji appears to have been getting at. The future African unicorn may very well use blockchain but may not be a blockchain company, and if that happens, his prediction will look simultaneously wrong and correct at the same time.
Disclaimer: This article is intended solely for informational purposes and should not be considered trading or investment advice. Nothing herein should be construed as financial, legal, or tax advice. Trading or investing in cryptocurrencies carries a considerable risk of financial loss. Always conduct due diligence.
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