Raenest wants users to earn from their money

Raenest, a Nigerian cross-border payments fintech, wants users to do more than receive money from abroad, its co-founder and chief executive officer, Richard Oyome, said at Moonshot 2026 in Lagos on Thursday.

Oyome traced the company’s strategy to the evolution of Africa’s fintech market, which moved from expanding access to digital banking and lending to helping people receive payments from international clients as remote work grew during the COVID-19 pandemic. As more Africans began working for foreign companies and serving customers abroad, he said, the need for financial services that connect them to global markets grew.

At Raenest Exchange 2026 on October 21, the company announced new products and features, including Raenest Vaults, a savings product offering annual yields of up to 16% on naira balances and 7% on dollar and stablecoin balances. It also expanded its USDT and USDC payment capabilities, improved its invoicing and payment links, and introduced new card options. The announcements extend the company’s services beyond cross-border payments.

“We were focused on receiving, but then again, receiving is just the beginning, not the end,” Oyome said at Moonshot. “The end is after receiving. When we started raenest, we focused on receiving not the end. Now, we’ve solved spending, now we’re focusing on the problem of earning.”

Founded in 2022, Raenest helps individuals, freelancers, creators, and businesses receive, send, store, and spend money across borders. The company says it has more than 1.5 million customers and has processed about $3 billion since inception.

Oyome said Raenest was built to help people overcome barriers to participating in the global economy by providing accounts in their own names that connect them to international markets. The company initially focused on helping users receive international payments. Its newer products are intended to address how users store their money and earn returns on it.

“Without the ability to earn or connect to global banking industries across the world, there is no opportunity to earn,” he said.

Oyome also said that the environment for companies operating in the crypto industry was also changing, with governments across Africa becoming more open to discussions about digital assets.

In July, Nigeria signed a Virtual Assets Coordination prder that established a framework to coordinate oversight among financial, revenue, and capital markets agencies. The order also provided for a regulatory sandbox in which eligible virtual-asset businesses can test products under supervision. Ghana has also introduced its Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, 2025, which provides for the licensing and supervision of businesses operating in the sector.

“Today, the governments across Africa are adopting. I think governments are happy to have conversations about crypto. It’s a success because we are coming from a very different time” Oyome said. “It’s a good time for people playing in the stablecoin space.”

The growing use of stablecoins presents an opportunity for Raenest to improve its payment operations. Oyome said stablecoins help Raenest settle payments faster.

“What we’ve seen as the biggest value is speed,” Oyome said. He explained that stablecoins allow the company to collect and settle funds faster, improving its cash flow and giving it quicker access to money that would otherwise take days to arrive.

As Raenest combines traditional currencies with stablecoins, Oyome said the company wants to shield customers from the technical complexity behind moving money across different networks.

“It can feel complicated. We don’t want it to be complicated. We have a blend of fiat and stablecoins,” he said.

He expects financial services to evolve towards a model in which users can move money without having to understand the underlying payment infrastructure or distinguish between different stablecoins.

Acecore, a Nigerian startup that builds home energy storage systems, won TC Battlefield 2026 at Moonshot by TechCabal in Lagos on Thursday, October 29, taking home the $10,000 grand prize. Supplya, which gives informal retailers stock on credit, came second and won $5,000. Navidyn, a maritime robotics startup, came third with $2,500.

Caleb Iwuoha, Acecore’s founder and chief executive, told the judges at Wednesday’s final that the system’s casing and battery management software were “all built here in Nigeria by our very own hands.” Acecore sells a home battery system and a smart socket that lets users control their appliances. It says its system costs more than 20% less than comparable products, and a partner bank lets customers pay in instalments

Acecore is building locally in a market that imports most of its power hardware. Nigeria imported 1,721 megawatts of solar panels from China in the 12 months to June 2025, making it Africa’s second-largest importer after South Africa, according to the energy think tank Ember.

Supplya receives the first runner-up prize. Image source: Chukwuebuka Mgbojikwe/TechCabal

The three winners were chosen from 10 finalists that also included Growwr, Kuraway, Fertitude, Lena, QiqiFarms, Riwe and Swiftway Shippers. The judges were Folakemi Osho, general manager of HoaQ; Elijah Shokenu, head of ventures at SWIT; Kosen Kenta, principal at Antler; and Adeniyi Adebayo, chief business officer of Yango Group, which sponsored the competition.

Acecore faced the toughest questions on price. One judge pointed out that imported Chinese systems land in Nigeria at a price similar to Acecore’s, which starts at about $5,250, and pressed Iwuoha on his unit economics. He said the company runs a 62% margin.

Navidyn, which builds underwater robots to inspect offshore oil and gas sites, made the broader case for hardware. “So far, Africa has invested in fintech, logtech, agritech, edtech. Now it’s time to invest in advanced AI and robotics,” its co-founders told the judges. The startup says a Sahara Group representative brought it a $5,000 inspection job before its product was ready.

Supplya, the runner-up, says it has extended more than $150,000 in credit to small shops since October 2024, and that 98% has been repaid.

Navidyn and Supplya, along with the women’s health app Fertitude, also won places in Antler’s residency programme, where they can raise up to $250,000 in pre-seed investment.

Two of this year’s three podium spots went to startups building physical products in Nigeria, a slower and costlier path than software. If Acecore and Navidyn can hold their margins against imports, they will show investors that hardware made in Nigeria can compete on price as well as on story.

Obiex says Nigeria’s stablecoin market is far more efficient than it was in 2018 and 2019, when the gap between buying and selling a dollar of crypto in naira ran as wide as ₦20 to ₦30. Demand has scaled since, but the supply behind it is still spread across many small sellers.

That’s the current state of Nigeria’s stablecoin market, according to Temitayo Sadique, managing director of Obiex Business, the business arm of Nigerian crypto exchange Obiex.

“Because of the exceptional need for stablecoins from cross-border trade and remittances, and crypto exchanges cropping up every day, we’ve seen demand scale,” Sadique said at Moonshot by TechCabal. “But supply, on the other hand, has remained scattered.”

Sadique said $19 billion in stablecoins came into Nigeria in 2025. The country has taken about 60% of sub-Saharan Africa’s stablecoin inflows since 2019, according to a June report by the International Monetary Fund.

Scattered supply makes that volume expensive to move. A company filling a $1 million order might deal with 10 peer-to-peer (P2P) traders, Sadique said, each selling a slice at a slightly higher rate: ₦1,400 per dollar, then ₦1,402, then ₦1,403. By the end, its average price is worse than the first quote. As volumes grow, he argued, platforms that can fill large orders at one price will set the terms for everyone else.

Obiex has built its business on that bet. It began in 2016 as Paylot, a crypto payment gateway, before shifting to converting crypto into naira when it saw that was what users wanted. It has never raised venture funding.

Sadique said 105,000 merchants in Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon now trade on Obiex, alongside more than 100 businesses, from exchanges and remittance companies to fintechs. By his count, $1 of every $10 in stablecoins that moved through Nigeria last year went through Obiex.

For Sadique, liquidity means delivering money on time. Promising someone $100 next week means little if the money isn’t there when the week comes, he said. “It’s kind of like a supply-chain question, where you’re answering: can I fulfil this obligation now, when the customer needs it?” Obiex’s answer includes credit that lets clients take liquidity today and settle tomorrow, and price locks while crypto deposits are still confirming.

For large trades, Obiex offers a quote system that fixes the rate on orders of $1 million to $10 million. “We don’t just give you an average price to execute your transaction; we give you a quote and lock in that price for you,” Sadique said.

Regulation is already pushing the market toward bigger players. Since January, Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission has required crypto exchanges and custodians to hold ₦2 billion in minimum capital, up from ₦500 million, a bar many smaller platforms will struggle to clear.

In Sadique’s view, an efficient stablecoin market is one where a $1 million order clears at a single price, and that depends on who can supply liquidity when it is needed.