Africa’s crypto market has proved there is demand. Now it needs infrastructure

Africa’s crypto market still needs stronger infrastructure

As in much of Africa, a business in Lagos can now settle a supplier payment overseas using stablecoins in minutes, without relying entirely on the traditional correspondent banking chain. A few years ago, that would have been difficult to imagine at scale.

This reflects an important shift in African crypto markets. The sector is becoming less defined by speculation and increasingly by utility. Earlier conversations centred on retail trading, access to Bitcoin and other digital assets, and rapid user adoption. Today, the conversation is broader, encompassing stablecoins, cross-border settlement, treasury management, payments and the integration of digital assets into existing financial infrastructure. Regulators, banks and large businesses are also engaging with the sector more seriously.

By almost any measure, adoption has progressed rapidly, and the sector is established. The question now is whether the infrastructure underpinning that growth is strong enough to support it at scale.

Across the continent, the systems supporting digital asset trading and settlement remain uneven. Liquidity, transaction limits and access to both reliable on- and off-ramps still differ significantly from one country to the next, making it harder for money to move efficiently across borders. Though these are technical challenges, customers experience them in very simple ways: Can I fund my account? Can I trade at a fair price? Can I withdraw when I need to? Is my money secure?

Answering those questions requires systems that are reliable across the entire customer journey, from payments and liquidity to custody, compliance and settlement.

Liquidity, for example, becomes much more important as customers and businesses become more sophisticated. People increasingly expect tight spreads, reliable pricing and the ability to execute larger transactions without significant price movement.

The same is true of regulation. As the market evolves, platforms need systems that can adapt to new reporting, compliance, and consumer-protection requirements without creating unnecessary friction for legitimate customers.

This is where I think the idea of “institutional-grade” is often misunderstood. At its core, institutional-grade means building infrastructure to a standard that can withstand scrutiny, volatility and failure. It is less about building products for institutions and more about building infrastructure that customers, regulators, banks, and professional investors can rely on, even in volatile markets or when things go wrong.

That encompasses security, custody, liquidity, governance, compliance, execution quality, operational resilience and transparency. These should not be treated as simple institutional concerns. The same standards that make a platform credible to a bank or asset manager should ultimately benefit the everyday customer as well.

The importance of those standards becomes even clearer as the industry moves beyond straightforward buying and selling into areas such as tokenised assets, staking, ETFs and other products.

Before these products can develop at scale, there needs to be clarity around regulation, custody, asset segregation, disclosure, suitability, market integrity and how risks are communicated to customers. Tokenisation, for example, becomes significantly more powerful when there are credible issuers, trusted custodians, clear legal rights attached to the underlying asset and efficient settlement infrastructure.

For Africa, this may ultimately be where some of the biggest opportunities lie: leveraging institutional-grade principles to improve the available rails for cross-border payments, settlement, treasury, foreign exchange and access to financial products, similar to what we are building at Luno with GTXN and Blocktower.

If the industry follows institutional-grade principles as it should, the next phase of the African crypto market should look very different from where it is today. Deeper liquidity would make larger transactions easier to execute. Reliable payment and settlement systems would make cross-border commerce faster and more efficient. Banks and financial institutions would have greater confidence to participate with stronger governance and compliance. With better risk controls, customers would experience greater protection, while clearer regulatory frameworks would give businesses more certainty to invest and build for the long term. The result would be a market where digital assets are not simply another financial product sitting alongside existing infrastructure, but an increasingly integrated part of how money moves, settles and is managed across the continent.

As with most things, there is a natural tendency to focus on the most visible layer of innovation. But the less visible infrastructure is often what determines whether that innovation can operate reliably over time. That is the shift African crypto needs to make now. We have spent years asking whether people will use digital assets. Now that they do, the more important question is whether the infrastructure can become reliable enough for people and businesses to depend on it.

If that happens, crypto becomes more than an asset people trade. It becomes part of the financial infrastructure through which Africa does business.

Ayotunde Alabi is the CEO of Luno Nigeria with over a decade of experience in finance and technology. He has previously held leadership positions at Spektra, ARM HoldCo, FBNQuest, and Heritage Bank Limited. He holds certifications from both the Chartered Institute of Stockbrokers in Nigeria and the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment in the United Kingdom.

Technology has become part of how modern businesses operate. The more difficult question for business leaders is deciding where they can create meaningful value.

Every year brings new tools, platforms and applications that promise to make businesses faster, more efficient and more competitive. Keeping up with all of them is neither practical nor necessary. What matters is understanding the problems within the business that technology can genuinely help solve and having a clear way to measure whether it has made a difference.

That means technology decisions belong directly in executive and strategic discussions. They dictate how work gets done, how choices are framed, how capital and human resources are deployed, and how rapidly an organisation can pivot. While technical teams lead implementation, deployment decisions must remain tightly aligned with overall business priorities.

The most pragmatic starting point is operational diagnosis: Where is time being lost? Where are decisions constrained by limited data? Which processes introduce unnecessary friction or cost? Addressing these concrete pain points provides a far stronger foundation than selecting a technology and searching for a problem to solve.

This problem-first philosophy guides our digital strategy at UAC of Nigeria PLC and the 1879 Tech Hub. For instance, our deployment of SAP S/4HANA strengthens operational controls, enhances efficiency, and provides real-time visibility across the end-to-end supply chain. In 2025, we executed an upgrade and cloud migration that significantly reduced infrastructure costs and laid the groundwork to integrate CHI Limited’s enterprise platforms into our unified architecture.

At 1879 Tech Hub, that approach can mean building a solution when a specific business need calls for it, or harnessing existing technologies when they can address the problem effectively. We have developed tools including Legal Compass for legal operations, SalesUp for route-to-market visibility, Ops Shield for safety and compliance, and Proc360 for procurement. We also harness technologies such as computer vision and machine learning through Factory AI to give teams greater visibility across the production floor, helping them identify safety violations, quality defects and operational inefficiencies earlier and respond more quickly.

Successful adoption depends on more than the technology itself. Leadership needs to be clear about the business outcome, teams need to understand how a new system affects their work, and the organisation needs the skills and processes to sustain it. This becomes particularly important as AI and other advanced technologies become more widely used. A highly capable system has limited value if the people expected to use its output cannot understand it or apply it appropriately to the business context.

For organisations beginning their technology journey, this means resisting the pressure to do everything at once. A focused use case, a clear business objective and a way to measure the outcome provide a stronger foundation for scale. Once a solution has demonstrated value, the business has something tangible to build on, whether that means extending it to another production line, applying the learning to another function or addressing a different problem.

For African enterprises, this disciplined methodology is particularly urgent. Companies across the continent navigate unique operating environments characterised by fragmented supply networks, diverse consumer segments, and infrastructure variability—demanding targeted, highly scalable technology investments.

The pace of technological change will continue to increase. Business leaders will have to make decisions about AI, automation, data and other emerging technologies while balancing competing priorities and assessing which solutions are genuinely relevant to their businesses. The opportunity lies in building the discipline to first understand the problem, test technology against it, measure the outcome, and use what works to make the next decision. That is how technology moves from being another business investment to becoming a practical driver of better performance.

David Asama Dogeni is a technology executive and innovation leader with over 15 years of experience driving enterprise-wide digital transformation across diverse industries. He currently serves as Senior Vice President of Technology and Head of the 1879 Tech Hub at UAC of Nigeria PLC, where he leads strategic initiatives that embed technology at the core of business operations, enabling sustainable growth and long-term competitive advantage.