Juicyway pitches connected capital markets to finance African growth

Juicyway recieves approval from Nigerian SEC for exchange

Juicyway, a cross-border payments company, is building a platform connecting African assets with global investors, its founder and chief executive, Ife Johnson, said, arguing that faster payments alone cannot solve the continent’s financing problem.

Speaking at Moonshot by TechCabal in Lagos, Johnson outlined plans for the ‘People’s Exchange’, which would use tokenisation, creating blockchain-based records of assets and securities, to help businesses raise money across markets. Johnson said Juicyway has received approval in principle from Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to build the exchange.

“We’ve produced category winners without producing enough shared infrastructure for entire categories to grow,” he said. “Africa needs more shared infrastructure and fewer isolated winners.”

Juicyway deals with this every day. Software can send a payment instruction in seconds, but the money to complete that payment still has to be sitting in the right currency, in the right country.

“For roughly 95% of the transactions that we have to carry out, we have to perform settlements,” Johnson said. The exchange’s first focus would be financing that liquidity, he said, with later uses in mortgages, trade receivables, energy, commodities and stakes in private companies.

His argument is that the same shortage runs through the wider economy, as businesses hold receivables, projects need investment and households need long-term loans, but the capital to fund them is split across dozens of small markets.

Africa’s unmet demand for trade finance was between $74 billion and $92 billion in 2024, according to the African Development Bank’s 2025 trade finance report. African companies raised about $220 billion in equity on local stock markets between 2000 and 2024, just 1% of the equity raised worldwide, according to the OECD’s Africa Capital Markets Report 2025.

Johnson proposed tokenising investments to structure them, record who owns them and sell them across borders, with stablecoins moving and settling the money. “I don’t think Africa needs 29 exchanges,” he said. “I think it needs one market that connects them all.”

The aim is to let African businesses reach investors beyond their home markets. Making that work will take more than a shared technology platform: investors will need confidence in the underlying assets, in their ownership rights, and in how they get repaid or sell their stakes.

Johnson framed the exchange as a long-term project, citing his son. “I want his generation to inherit markets that finance the ambitions, rather than ambitions constrained by the absence of markets,” he said.

African creators can build a global audience from their first post, but getting that audience to pay them, reliably and across borders, is still hard. Payment infrastructure that works every time would fix it, the founders of Selar, Mainstack and Raenest said on a panel at Moonshot by TechCabal.

The panel focused on everyday creators, far from the top tier with millions of followers, and most of them earn little. The Nigerian Creator Economy Report 2025 found that 56.45% of Nigerian creators earn less than $100 a month from their work.

Ayobami Oyaleke, founder and CEO of Mainstack, which he described as a “commerce platform and financial back office for creators” operating in about 150 countries, said an audience is revenue waiting to be collected. “As much as you have the audience, there’s a revenue path for you,” he said.

The trouble is that most creators don’t know how to turn a following into income, or they hit a wall when they try to collect it. “Tools only give you the pipe,” Oyaleke said. “You’re still the one running the volume.” Mainstack’s approach is to treat every creator as global from the start so that a first $100 from a buyer abroad doesn’t get lost to payment failures.

Douglas Kendyson founded Selar in 2016 after fielding requests at Paystack from people who wanted to sell digital products online but faced ₦150,000 quotes for a website and unreliable payments. A decade later, Selar is bootstrapped and profitable and says it has paid out more than ₦18 billion ($12.9 million) to nearly 400,000 creators.

Kendyson was clear about what a platform should leave to creators: Selar does not find customers for them, which he called “a very tasking thing.” Its affiliate network, which lets marketers sell a creator’s product for a commission, now brings in more revenue than its subscriptions, he said.

Sodruldeen Mustapha, co-founder and CTO of Raenest, which helps African freelancers get paid from abroad, said the payment feature that matters most is control. Creators already export their talent, he argued, and their earnings should follow: collected from a client anywhere, in any currency, and under the creator’s control once they land.

The three founders agreed on the core problem. A creator in Lagos can have followers in Europe and the United States from day one, but the money struggles to make the same trip.

Kendyson, when asked what the next generation of creators needs, reached for nothing new. A decade in, he said, a new payment gateway seems to appear every week, “yet payments are still very fractured for a lot of us.” The infrastructure that fixes it, he said, “doesn’t even have to be particularly unique. It just has to work.”