The problem with moving money across Nigerian borders isn't exactly new—ask any importer waiting days for FX approvals, or any fintech executive who's watched settlement windows stretch into uncertainty. What's new, perhaps, is the infrastructure being built to fix it.
Stabyl, a Delaware-registered startup with roots in Nigeria's fintech ecosystem, has secured $2.7 million in pre-seed funding to do something decidedly unsexy: build the plumbing. Not another consumer app promising cheap remittances, but a central limit order book for banks and payment providers to trade foreign exchange and stablecoins without the usual rate-shopping scramble.
The round, led by Konga Group and announced between late June and early July, comes with a strategic sweetener. KongaPay—Konga's mobile money arm—will act as Stabyl's official naira settlement partner and its first live deployment. That's more than capital. It's distribution, regulatory cover, and a test case rolled into one.
Why institutional infrastructure matters now
At its core, Stabyl is solving a coordination problem. Banks, payment service providers, and licensed money service businesses currently shop for FX liquidity across multiple counterparties, manually negotiating rates in a fragmented market. Stabyl's platform automates the matching—think of it as a mini foreign exchange for institutions that need dollars (or stablecoins) right now, not tomorrow.
The initial focus is the NGN/USD corridor, though the company plans to add more African currency pairs as it secures the requisite regulatory approvals. At launch, the platform supports USDT and USDC, relying on DFNS for multi-party computation wallet infrastructure—a setup designed to balance security with the speed institutional clients demand. Settlements happen on both traditional banking rails and blockchain networks, with the latter chosen based on speed, cost, and finality.
It's a technical bet, but also a philosophical one. Co-founder and CEO Zachary Schwartzman, along with Chairman Prince Nnamdi Ekeh—who doubles as Group CEO of Konga and holds an Oxford MBA—are wagering that the future of African cross-border payments isn't consumer-facing. CTO Michael Anyi rounds out the founding team. Their pitch: be the infrastructure layer, not the app.
KongaPay's dual role
KongaPay's involvement is worth unpacking. As both lead investor and operational partner, it gives Stabyl immediate access to regulated payment infrastructure. KongaPay operates under a Central Bank of Nigeria mobile money license (acquired through its Zinternet subsidiary) and appears on the CBN's official roster of licensed payment system operators.
That matters in a regulatory environment that has, shall we say, evolved. The CBN issued guidelines in December 2023 allowing banks to serve registered virtual asset service providers—a quiet but significant reversal of earlier restrictions. The Securities and Exchange Commission followed up with its Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme for VASPs, with onboarding materials updated as recently as May of last year.
Timing, in fintech as in comedy, is everything. And Stabyl's emergence coincides with a period of unusual regulatory clarity—relative to the uncertainty that prevailed just a few years prior.
Follow the stablecoins
Nigeria's crypto activity offers a window into why institutional infrastructure might actually find product-market fit here. According to Chainalysis, Nigeria ranked second globally in its 2024 adoption index, with roughly $59 billion in crypto value received between July 2023 and June 2024. Much of that was stablecoins—the preferred vehicle for Nigerians hedging naira volatility or conducting cross-border commerce outside traditional banking channels.
The CBN reported net FX inflows of $6.92 billion in February 2026, a figure that underscores the sheer volume of cross-border capital moving through formal and informal channels. Stabyl isn't trying to capture retail remittance flows directly. Instead, it's positioning itself upstream—serving the institutions that facilitate those flows before they reach end users.
The revenue model reflects that positioning. Rather than earning spreads by marking up exchange rates, Stabyl charges a low take-rate per transaction. The idea is to deepen liquidity pools, not extract margin from price differences. Whether that approach scales profitably remains an open question, but it's designed to attract institutional participation rather than scare it off with fees.
What comes next
The fresh capital will fund the unglamorous work: licensing applications, compliance infrastructure, and onboarding institutional participants. According to LinkedIn data from last summer, Stabyl's San Francisco-based team numbered somewhere between two and ten employees—a skeleton crew for a company incorporated in 2026 and now attempting to thread multiple regulatory needles across jurisdictions.
The target customer list is precise: banks, payment service providers, fintechs, money service businesses, and corporate importers and exporters. Institutions handling FX before it reaches retail customers. That narrow focus might be a feature, not a bug—consumer fintech in Africa is crowded, often unprofitable, and littered with pivots.
Stabyl's bet is that the real opportunity lies in the boring middle layer. The infrastructure that no one sees but everyone needs. Whether $2.7 million is enough runway to prove that thesis—well, that's the next chapter.
For now, the company has a lead investor with skin in the game, a regulatory window that appears (for the moment) open, and a market where the demand for efficient FX settlement is measured not in hopes, but in billions of dollars moving across borders every month.
