How BitPowr built a $1 billion African blockchain infrastructure and scaled it globally

In emerging markets, infrastructure is rarely glamorous. It is often messy, fragmented and unforgiving. Yet it is precisely in those conditions that the strongest financial systems are forged. For BitPowr, that chaos became a training ground.

Founded by Oyetoke Toby, CEO and CTO, and Amarachi Amaechi, COO, the Nigerian fintech provides blockchain infrastructure for businesses. Its stack includes wallet infrastructure, digital asset management and API-driven tools that allow companies to move value across networks securely.

Today, BitPowr has scaled from $200 million to over $1 billion in transaction volume, serving customers across Africa and Southeast Asia.

But the journey did not begin with infrastructure.

The company’s original idea was straightforward: make crypto payments easy; enable businesses to accept digital assets.

“We quickly learned that adoption at the retail level was not moving at the pace needed for that model to scale the way we wanted,” Toby says. “That forced an early pivot.”

The shift was deliberate. “We recognised that the real pain was sitting one layer deeper,” he continues. “Fintechs and financial businesses needed infrastructure to build wallets, manage funds, move value across networks, and do it securely.”

That pivot raised the stakes.

“In payments, you can sometimes iterate with a simpler architecture while you learn,” Toby says. “In wallet infrastructure, you are custodial-adjacent, you are handling sensitive transaction flows, and you are dealing with high stakes. Security and correctness become foundational.”

The hardest early moment, he recalls, was recognising that distribution would never scale without first scaling trust. “We could not scale distribution if we did not first scale trust and security inside the system.”

Also read: A chat with Akin Adegoke and Ayokunle Ilesanmi about trust in the age of Autonomous Finance

BitPowr is building for real conditions

To address that, BitPowr made a critical architectural choice. Instead of relying on centralised private key management, it adopted a distributed approach using multi-party computation (MPC).

“In simple terms, MPC allowed us to reduce single points of failure around signing and key management,” Toby explains. “It was not the easiest path, and it required intense focus while we were still early, but it made the platform stronger in ways that mattered later when we started serving larger and more demanding customers.”

That decision proved formative.

“When you can handle security, reliability, spikes, and operational complexity in one environment, you develop the muscle to handle it elsewhere,” he says. “When we later expanded into Southeast Asia, the core expectations were the same: the infrastructure had to be secure, stable, and fast enough to support real-world business operations.”

Amaechi offers a complementary perspective. “People often assume that going global means rewriting your product per country,” she says. “Infrastructure for digital assets behaves differently. A well-designed wallet and transaction infrastructure can serve customers across many markets without being rebuilt from scratch.”

Oyetoke Toby, CEO and CTO at BitPowr

The constraints, she argues, are rarely purely technical. “The biggest constraints are not always technical. The constraints typically relate to compliance requirements, enterprise trust, and operating posture for each market. That is where maturity shows.”

From the outset, BitPowr was not building for one geography. It was built for “real conditions”.

Why BitPowr scaled faster in Asia

In February 2024, BitPowr revealed that Asian customers were contributing more to transaction volume than its initial market. The inflexion looked sudden. It was not.

“There was a very clear inflexion point,” Toby says. “It looked sudden in the data, but it was the result of fundamentals we had been building.”

The company onboarded a high-volume customer in Asia whose production ramped quickly. “The usage came in strong enough that it became a stress test of the platform,” he recalls. “It pushed us to tighten infrastructure capacity, improve how we handled throughput, and upgrade certain security workflows around how integrations received sensitive transaction events.”

The moment validated the system.

“In infrastructure, credibility comes from production performance, not from claims,” Toby says. “After that, growth accelerated organically. We did not pay for that distribution. We earned it because the system worked under real volume.”

Amaechi frames it more simply. “When you build a product that solves a painful operational problem, and it holds up under pressure, your customers become your distribution. Especially in markets where builders talk to each other, reliability travels fast.”

Operational similarities between Africa and Southeast Asia helped. “In both regions, you have fast-moving fintech operators building in high-growth environments,” Amaechi says. “They want to launch quickly, test quickly, and scale quickly. They also want reliability, because outages and slow settlement visibility are not ‘bugs’; they directly affect user trust and revenue.”

Distribution, too, was relationship-driven. “Referrals matter a lot,” she adds. “Once a serious operator sees the platform working, they introduce it to partners and adjacent companies.”

Amarachi Amaechi, COO at Bitpowr

There were differences, however. “Some customers in Asia were more willing to prioritise speed-to-market and buy the plan tier they needed without long cycles,” Toby says. “In Africa, many teams are more cost-sensitive and take longer to align internally.”

The value proposition remained consistent. BitPowr claims its infrastructure can cut development timelines by four to five months.

“The value proposition is consistent: shorten build time, reduce operational risk, and give teams a reliable foundation they can ship on,” Amaechi says.

Yet motivations vary. “In Africa, many customers optimise heavily for cost,” she explains. “In parts of Asia, we saw a stronger bias toward speed-to-market. If the opportunity is time-sensitive, the question becomes, ‘Can this partner help us ship quickly and safely?’”

Scaling from $200 million to $1 billion in transaction volume across jurisdictions such as Hong Kong, Thailand, the Philippines and Nigeria demands more than code.

“Regulatory complexity in digital assets is often misunderstood,” Toby says. “First, we are infrastructure. Our job is to build secure, reliable systems that businesses can use to power their operations.”

As the company scaled, it invested more deeply in what he calls the “trust layer”: stronger security governance, internal controls and recognised assurance patterns.

“The hardest moments are not usually a single dramatic event,” Toby says. “The hard part is building an operating posture that can stand up in multiple markets: documentation discipline, audit readiness, system integrity, and security maturity.”

Amaechi agrees. “Expansion is not only ‘Do you have a product that works?’ It is ‘Can institutions trust you?’ For global infrastructure, trust is built through how you run your company: security posture, transparency, responsiveness, and operational maturity.”

Exporting hardened infrastructure

Most African startups expand as consumer apps. BitPowr is exporting B2B blockchain infrastructure.

“I believe Africa needs both, but infrastructure is a major part of the next wave,” Amaechi says. “Consumer products can scale fast, but infrastructure compounds. If you build foundational rails, you enable many businesses, not just one.”

BitPowr

In digital assets, she argues, infrastructure is leverage. Exchanges, fintechs, stablecoin platforms and cross-border products all depend on reliable wallet and transaction rails.

“What many people underestimate about building global infrastructure is that reliability is the product,” she says. “It is not enough to have features. You need operational excellence: uptime, security, incident response maturity, monitoring, and the ability to handle spikes without breaking customer experience.”

The lesson from $1 billion in transaction volume is direct. “Credibility is earned in production,” Amaechi says. “Marketing can open doors, but only performance keeps them open.”

Also read: Optasia believes ‘Privacy by Design’ is Nigeria’s only path to sustainable AI-driven finance

Toby adds a final note of caution. “Global products require you to understand behavioural differences without overfitting your system to one market,” he says. “The foundation should stay stable, but the wrapper, onboarding, and customer experience may need to adapt.”

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