Stablecoins are hard to spend. This startup wants to make it easy.

In December 2023, Keji Pius was stranded in Lusaka, Zambia, with a crypto wallet full of USDT—a digital currency pegged to the US Dollar—and no way to spend it.

Pius, a Nigerian founder who earns in both Naira and stablecoins, said she ran out of the Zambian Kwacha she exchanged at the airport.

“I had a problem spending USDT because I couldn’t simply walk into a store, buy something, and pay with my stablecoin,” she recalled.

Left with no choice, Pius had to convert her USDT into a currency that Zambian merchants would accept. She opened an app on her phone, combed through peer-to-peer (P2P) cryptocurrency exchange apps, searching for a buyer willing to trade fiat for stablecoins.

She converted the stablecoins into Naira before finding a way to exchange the proceeds for Zambian Kwacha at a local currency booth.

That process, she said in an April interview with TechCabal, became a founding story for Rach Finance.

In January 2026, Pius and Martins Chigoziem, her former colleague and the startup’s chief technology officer (CTO), launched the startup to build crypto infrastructure that makes stablecoin spending as seamless as card payments.

“There are already people holding USDT and USDC in their wallets,” Pius said. “But every time they want to spend money, they first have to convert those stablecoins into Naira before they can actually use them.”

Building for a narrow but growing market

Stablecoin adoption is accelerating in parts of Africa, driven partly by regulatory progress in several markets.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, stablecoins accounted for 43% of all crypto transaction volume in 2024, with the region receiving over $205 billion in transactions sent on blockchains between July 2024 and June 2025, increasing by 52% year-over-year, according to data from Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics firm.

Businesses and merchants—Rach Finance’s primary targets—are holding and moving stablecoins for everyday operations.

In February 2026, McKinsey, a global consulting firm, and Artemis, a Web3 analytics company, jointly published a report estimating that business-to-business (B2B) stablecoin payments account for roughly $226 billion annually, representing 58% of monthly digital currency transaction value but just 0.01% of total B2B payments globally.

The report cited use cases in supply chain payments and liquidity management, especially for small and medium-sized businesses.

In Africa, that reality is already visible. Shiga Digital, a Nigerian stablecoin neobank, told TechCabal in September 2025 that it already serves corporate clients in oil and gas and fintech.

Rach Finance operates in a similar space, positioning itself as a stablecoin liquidity provider for businesses that want to hedge against currency volatility.

Yet, building crypto payment infrastructure in Africa has historically been difficult. Earlier startups struggled with weak merchant adoption, compliance hurdles, and the cost of maintaining payment rails. Nigerian crypto payment gateway Lazerpay shut down in 2023 after failing to secure funding.

Pius said the startup is trying to learn from those failures, and is careful not to overstate the market it is chasing.

Rach Finance is joining emerging startups like CoinCircuit in providing a way for crypto adopters to pay directly to merchants using crypto, while the merchant receives digital or local currency in their wallet.

“It’s not for everybody,” she said. “There are businesses that don’t need it, and there are businesses that do. We are positioning it as an alternative payment option, not as the only option.”

Part of the challenge has always been scale. The number of consumers who both hold crypto and actively want to spend it remains relatively small compared with the broader payments market.

Volatility has also made many cryptocurrencies impractical as everyday money. Rach Finance is trying to avoid that problem by focusing entirely on stablecoins, specifically USD Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC), stablecoins whose values are pegged to the US dollar.

Pius said that demand already exists but remains invisible: merchants rarely advertise that they accept crypto, so customers who hold stablecoins never think to ask.

Pius and Chigoziem said they have already seen this play out. At an estate in Lagos where Chigoziem lives, a local food vendor placed a Rach Finance sticker on the outside of his shop. Long-time customers of the food vendor immediately asked whether they could pay in USDT, said Chigoziem.

“These were not new customers,” he added. “They’d already been buying from him but had no idea he accepted crypto until they saw the flyer. When they saw it, they asked, realised they could pay, and just opened their wallets.”

The customers were already there. The payment option simply was not visible.

Turning stablecoins into spendable money

Rach Finance’s core product is a payment gateway that lets merchants accept stablecoins and receive settlement in local currency.

Merchants generate a payment link or QR code. Customers pay using USDT or USDC across supported blockchain networks, including Tron, Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, and Binance Smart Chain.

Rach Finance converts the payment and settles into local currencies, including Naira, Kenyan Shillings, Ghanaian Cedis, and Zambian Kwacha. Transactions confirm in seconds, said Chigoziem; bank settlement takes anywhere from instant to about 30 minutes, depending on the local banking system.

Rach Finance’s payment gateway currently serves seven merchants and has processed about $250,000 in transactions, according to Pius.

Its current merchant base spans food delivery, healthcare, and entertainment. The startup charges roughly 0.06% per transaction, earning higher revenue as its payment volumes scale, according to Pius.

The platform is also non-custodial: merchants retain control of their wallets and recovery phrases.

“Centralised systems give you simplicity, but there’s always a trade-off,” Chigoziem said. “You don’t really control your funds anymore.”

Making this work at low cost required building most of the infrastructure in-house rather than relying on third-party providers, a decision that keeps transaction fees down across multiple blockchain networks.

“From the outside, it sounds simple,” Chigoziem said. “But once you start building it, you realise how complex it actually is.”

The startup is also in discussions with merchant aggregators about white-label partnerships that would bundle crypto payments into existing checkout flows, Pius said.

Beyond merchant payments

Merchant payments are only one part of Rach Finance’s business.

The startup also runs three additional products: a decentralised exchange (DEX) for trading stablecoins across blockchain networks; an over-the-counter (OTC) desk for businesses moving large volumes between African currencies and stablecoins; and a Wallet-as-a-Service product that allows fintech startups to embed non-custodial wallet infrastructure through an application programming interface (API) for a flat annual fee.

Its OTC desk has driven the highest transaction volumes so far, said Pius.

“In the OTC economy, a lot of business owners would rather do their off-ramp and on-ramp with USDT because it’s faster and instant,” Pius said. “If you make a payment via SWIFT, it’s T+1 or T+2. With USDT, it is completely instant.”

Since its launch, Rach Finance has processed about $2 million via its OTC desk, driven by large liquidity demand, according to Pius.

Rach Finance has already expanded into parts of Francophone Africa and South America, including Brazil and Argentina, and is exploring licencing opportunities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), said Pius.

It is also working on offline crypto payments designed to work similarly to USSD mobile money, a feature that could meaningfully expand reach in markets with patchy Internet connectivity.

Pius is not pitching stablecoins as a replacement for e-payment options that power Nigeria’s retail economy. Her argument is narrower: a growing number of Africans already hold digital currencies, and spending them should not require a multi-step conversion process.

“We don’t even need up to 1% of the market; we just need maybe 0.5% to hit a unicorn,” said Pius. “If we don’t start now, we’ll be late. By the time every merchant starts accepting it [crypto], we would have missed the window.”