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I design economic models for new financial primitives on the blockchain
Articles by Njoku
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How Real life Use Cases Will Drive Mass Web3 Adoption in Africa
How Real life Use Cases Will Drive Mass Web3 Adoption in Africa
Introduction Web3 has been slow to gain traction outside of the crypto community. While there are many reasons for…
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Njoku Emmanuel reposted thisNjoku Emmanuel reposted thisBlockradar’s Global South bet is scaling. Fresh off crossing $1 billion in total transaction volume, the stablecoin wallet infrastructure company has extended its payment rails into Latin America—Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia. The move lets businesses across the region move freely between stablecoins and local fiat, trimming the cost and friction of cross-border payments. Built for fintechs, Blockradar handles the underlying blockchain infrastructure so its clients can offer stablecoin payments without building it themselves.
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Njoku Emmanuel reposted thisNjoku Emmanuel reposted thisNigeria today is not conducive for young people. Of any age. So I really don't understand why the few successful entrepreneurs berate them. When they can inspire, offer hope, help people dream of a brighter future?Young Nigerians already feel like they're not doing enough. Many of them carry responsibilities beyond their age. You'd never see successful Nigerian entrepreneurs point out that there are over 10 million children (of primary school age) out of school in the same country and ask what the government is going to do about it. Just always berating young people who haven't been given anything by their society. Poor education. Poor infrastructure. Poor healthcare. Nigeria is part of African Union agreements to increase its health and education budgets to match certain standards. The Nigerian government has never been able to do this. Since 2001!!!!! Yet each year it buys thousands of cars for elected and appointment officials. Every year. Without fail. You want young people to make something out of themselves from thin air!!!!!!! Just generally exhausted of narratives that don't have any empathy for young people. And it comes from those who are very privileged in society and grew up in a completely different time, when yes, things were not perfect but they were statistically much better! Comparing business people in the past, who received cheap loans by virtue of government patronage, to young people today is grossly unfair and ridiculous! The country is quite literally the worst place to be born in the world. What are we talking about here? You want young people to squeeze water out of sand? Because you're a successful entrepreneur out of millions of failed entrepreneurs? What is the government going to do for the millions of young people who are in dire need of a good education, healthcare and infrastructure? I don't see any plans and I honestly don't care if someone made money and funded political parties when he was 35. What did those parties do for the people? How can you leave behind a legacy of destruction?
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Njoku Emmanuel reposted thisNjoku Emmanuel reposted thisIf you’ve got a stack of bookmarked articles you keep saying you’ll read later, this is for you.Learning Is Not Supposed To Be Fun. The Primary Feeling Should Be That Of Effort.Learning Is Not Supposed To Be Fun. The Primary Feeling Should Be That Of Effort.
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Njoku Emmanuel reposted thisNjoku Emmanuel reposted thisI see a lot of crypto teams pivoting their entire product and GTM strategy to support institutions. That's a mistake. Yes institutions and enterprises are big, shiny customers with theoretically large budgets. Their logos look nice on your website. But crypto products will scale massively over the coming years. You will do well if you can sell to them and scale with them. Study Stripe, Twilio, Atlassian, etc Pivoting away from crypto teams today is the startup strategy version of selling the bottom.
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Njoku Emmanuel reposted thisNjoku Emmanuel reposted thisFor the last few years, fintechs have used stablecoins to do one thing extraordinarily well: move money. Settlement that used to take days now clears in seconds. Cross-border payments that used to leak value at every hop now move cleanly and cheaply. That was the first unlock, and it was a big one. But moving money is only half of what money does. The other half is making it work. For most of financial history, the ability to put idle balances to work belonged to a small group. Institutions with treasury desks. The well-banked. Whoever sat close enough to the center of the system to reach money markets and earn on cash overnight. Everyone else, including most of the businesses and people fintechs actually serve, just held cash and watched it sit still. That is the access that is changing. With Blockradar Earn, a fintech can now give their customers the ability to do more with their money than move it around. Idle stablecoin balances can earn continuously, non-custodially, through a regulated route or an established DeFi protocol, all through the same API they already build on. The capability that used to be reserved for a few is now something a fintech in Lagos, São Paulo, or Jakarta can offer their users by default. What excites me most is not the feature. It is what gets built on top of it. Savings products. Treasury tools. Earning experiences I have not thought of yet, designed by teams who understand their customers far better than I do. We built Blockradar to help fintechs move money. Now they can help their customers grow it. I cannot wait to see what they build with that.
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Njoku Emmanuel reposted thisNjoku Emmanuel reposted thisToday we announced a partnership with Crossmint to bring multi-chain stablecoins infrastructure to Africa. It's a bi-directional bridge. Crossmint integrates Paga Engine's local fiat on- and off-ramps to extend its global enterprise payout network into Africa. In parallel, we're building on Crossmint's infrastructure to deploy next-generation stablecoins wallets for consumers and agents — bank-grade security, programmable controls, and an experience so seamless the blockchain is invisible to the user. Paga has always been about building the rails for the future of money, and that future is multi-blockchain and multi-stablecoins. In 2025 we processed over $11 billion across 169 million transactions; Crossmint natively supports 50+ blockchains. Together we're connecting the African economy to global finance — eliminating the tax of friction and giving African consumers and businesses the financial mobility they deserve. Excited to be building with Rodri Fernández Touza, Alfonso Gómez-Jordana Mañas and the Crossmint team. Lots more coming — we are building and shipping 🚀 Full announcement: https://lnkd.in/e9jTX385Paga Partners with Crossmint to Bring Stablecoin InfrastructurePaga Partners with Crossmint to Bring Stablecoin Infrastructure
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Njoku Emmanuel reposted thisNjoku Emmanuel reposted thisIn early March, we wound down Haraka. Two years of building stablecoin savings and credit products across Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana. Thousands loans issued on social reputation. A pivot to USD savings with Bondy. Partnerships with rockstars organisations. And then, the honest call: we hadn't found product-market fit, and we shut it down with the same care we started it with. For a few weeks after, I thought I was burned out from the mission. I wasn't. I was burned out from the direction. For 6 years I'd been trying to drag Web3 toward the real economy. Convincing institutions that crypto wasn't a science experiment. Hunting for mobile money partners who could actually move money the last mile; the corridors where the dollar gets too expensive, the bank rails give up, and the cash economy takes over. Most of the time, those partners didn't exist, didn't pick up, or weren't ready. Being a founder in Web3 when you operate in emerging markets is a specific kind of exhausting. You hold a vision and a spreadsheet at the same time. You translate between regulators who don't speak crypto and crypto people who don't speak compliance. You explain to investors why a TAM that looks small on a slide is enormous in real life. You ship a product and then spend six months stitching together infrastructure that should have existed before you started. The realization, when it finally landed, was this: I wasn’t tired of building for these markets. I was tired of trying to do it from the outside, as a startup waiting for the rails to catch up. The leverage has flipped. The most interesting work in payments right now isn’t Web3 trying to reach the real economy from the edges. It’s happening inside the companies that already move money at scale on the continent and that are now treating stablecoins as serious infrastructure, not a side bet. So here's the next chapter: I've joined PawaPay as Head of Crypto. The largest mobile money PSP on the continent. Building stablecoins as a tier-1 payment channel alongside mobile money and banking. The rails I spent five years wishing existed. Same mission. Different side of the table. A lot more leverage. Let's build.
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Njoku Emmanuel reposted thisNjoku Emmanuel reposted thisAnnouncing Paga × Sui: Building the Financial Rails for a Billion Africans — — — Fourteen years ago, on a Sunday night in Lagos, a friend of mine was T-boned in a car accident. She had a seizure on arrival at the hospital. The doctors stabilized her — and then refused to admit her until we paid. In cash. It was 9 PM. Five of us lined up at the ATM in the lobby, each withdrew our daily maximum, and pooled the cash. Then, and only then, did they treat her. In that moment, the thing standing between my friend and the care that could save her life… was cash. — — — That story is not unusual in Africa. The average Nigerian spends six weeks every year just paying bills. Cross-border transfers take three to five days at 6.4% in fees. Currency devaluation can erase a third of a schoolteacher's life savings in a single year. This is the tax of friction. And Africans have been paying it for generations. — — — At Paga, we have spent seventeen years building toward one mission: To make it simple for one billion people to access and use money. We did not set out to build an app. We set out to build the rails. Today: $1.5B processed every month. $42B moved cumulatively. 653M transactions. Real money, moving for real people — school fees paid, salaries received, a grandmother in a village receiving wages from her son in the city, instantly. — — — But the work is not done. Currency instability erodes wealth. Africans are locked out of global commerce. Cross-border payments remain slow and expensive. Tearing those walls down is not a job we can do alone. — — — Today, I am proud to announce that Paga is partnering with Sui. Together, we are building four things: 1. High-yield US dollar accounts powered by the Sui Dollar stablecoin — protecting savings from devaluation. 2. On and off ramps with deep liquidity across African markets. 3. Tokenized real-world assets on Sui — accessible to anyone with $100 to spare. 4. Global financial rails anchored on Sui — so Africans can transact across borders as easily as anyone else. Four products. Four walls coming down. — — — By 2050, Africa will be 2.5 billion people. We will be home to the largest middle class in the world. And forty percent of all young people on Earth will be African. We are not building for a market. We are building for the future of the world. — — — Africa's future is bright. We are building it today. Join us on the journey! Paga Group Ltd × Sui Foundation #Paga #Sui #AfricanFintech #FinancialFreedom
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Njoku Emmanuel reposted thisNjoku Emmanuel reposted thisWe just took over a former technical university. Empty lecture halls, labs, and chalkboards still covered in equations. We’re a group of dropouts who turned it into a real-life Hogwarts for people who want to build the future. We’re entering a world where safe career paths are starting to break. AI is rewriting the rules, and ideas that sounded unrealistic a few years ago are starting to look like the rational choice. Academia is slow and has lost scientific freedom. Companies optimize for traction and will automate your job anyway. Venture capital has become increasingly risk-averse. There hasn’t been a place for people who want to work on something too early, too weird, or too ambitious. So we created our own institution. We bring in a small group of people who are serious about building things that don’t yet make sense. You move in, live here, and work on your ideas full-time. We cover flights, food, and housing, and back you with the resources and early funding you need. No credentials required. No permission to seek. Applications for the next cohort are open. Link in the comments.
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1y
Congrats Maya!!
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Njoku Emmanuel reacted on thisNjoku Emmanuel reacted on this900+ projects have been submitted to the Arc Hackathon - but numbers like that can make you forget there are actual people behind them. On Wednesday we brought London's corner of the Arc community together on the Encode Hub rooftop, alongside the Blockradar team, one of Arc's Day 1 partners! Soundtracking it all: a b2b DJ set from our own Giles Mallinson and Blockradar's cofounder Abdulfatai Suleiman 🎶
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Njoku Emmanuel liked thisNjoku Emmanuel liked thisYour traders found the opportunity. Your approval process killed it. Traders move fast. Risk and compliance teams don't have the onchain context to keep up. The result: delayed approvals, missed windows, and a team that's frustrated on both sides of the table. Hypernative gives approvers full visibility into every transaction. Simulating outcomes in real time, surfacing hidden risks, and flagging anomalous behaviour before anything is signed. Policy-driven automation ensures safe transactions are approved instantly, while risky ones are blocked or escalated. No delays. No blind signing. No missed opportunities.
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Njoku Emmanuel reacted on thisNjoku Emmanuel reacted on thisPersonal update: I started a company and I'm taking time off college. For the last 18 months I've been surrounded by generational talent, from people building defense companies at 19 to others building cheaper manufacturing for oil discovery. All of them got there for the same reason: they decided to swing for the fences and follow their dreams. This post comes at a strange time. As I only have 1 year left of college the pressure to graduate is real. All of my close friends are graduating (congrats to all of you), and I feel a little out of place. But the truth is that I told myself last year that I don't see myself walking the graduation stage at this point in my life, because I have a calling to start the company now. When you start, three things matter: the market, the timing, and the people. My company is AgentWeb, where we believe the internet needs to be designed for agents, starting with commerce. The future of work is agents, and they need a reliable way to see and understand which parts of a business they can actually use. One human can have a thousand agents working at once, and we're already seeing traffic to our design partners grow more than 500% week over week. The market is now. Working at a startup in 2023 that helped businesses build their own agents showed me that autonomous agents are the future of labor. Agents make people more efficient than ever, and I take it as my responsibility to make sure you don't burn thousands of dollars on token spend per week to get there. The people: I'm starting this company with my best friend of 20 years, Egor Kuzmichev, and funnily enough we were born in the same hospital 8 days apart. Egor, there's nobody else I'd rather be doing this with. p.s. It's time to expand the team, so we're also hiring (GTM, media, engineering). Reach out in our DMs if you want to be part of a generational journey and help shape how we operate as a company. I also want to thank every single person that has been on this incredible journey the last 18 months. Mom, dad, thanks for supporting me and always believing in me, even when you don't say it out loud. Thank you to Santa Clara University, to all of the friends I've made along the way, the faculty involved and everyone else. To the SCU Bronco Venture Accelerator, thank you for the exposure to the venture world. To Cynthia Cooper, for constantly supporting me with resources. To Christopher Norris for your advice. To Ryan Pool and Lauren Jisser for being awesome soundboards on fundraising. And to all of our investors, thank you. Being in the Bay has been the best thing that's ever happened to me, and I promise you, I'll be back. But for now, back to work.
Experience & Education
Projects
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MyOrange
See projectMyorange is a non-custodial multi-chain crypto wallet that enables users to store, send and receive cryptocurrencies across Solana, Bitcoin and EVM-compatible blockchains.
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Quidraise
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See projectQuidraise is a decentralised investment DAO with a focus on blockchain projects with huge market potential for success.
The vision of the quid protocol is to create a truly decentralised ecosystem devoid of the need to place trust in any entity during the fundraising procedures of blockchain companies or traditional companies looking to the blockchain ecosystem for funding. -
Duplates
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See projectDuplates is an NFT marketplace that allows users to buy, sell and trade exclusive music tracks from the world's most exciting artists/
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