Nigerians moved an estimated $92.1 billion in cryptocurrency between July 2024 and June 2025, ranking the country sixth globally by on-chain value received, according to Chainalysis. Stablecoins carried the largest share of that volume. The naira’s collapse from roughly ₦460 to the dollar in 2022 to more than ₦1,500 by 2025 turned dollar-pegged tokens into everyday financial infrastructure for freelancers, importers, and small traders who have never opened a centralized exchange chart.
That shift did not happen by accident. It happened because a specific group of Nigerian founders, operators, and executives spent the past three years building the rails, the licenses, and the liquidity that made stablecoins usable rather than theoretical. Here are ten of them, ranked by the weight of what they have actually shipped.
1. Adedeji Owonibi — Founder, Convexity; Director, cNGN
Owonibi is the closest thing Nigeria’s stablecoin market has to a founding architect. As founder of blockchain consultancy Convexity and a director at WrappedCBDC, the entity issuing the naira-pegged stablecoin cNGN, he spent two years pushing the token through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s regulatory incubation program, including smart contract audits and a reserve framework split between bank deposits and short-term securities. “cNGN’s real innovation isn’t about the token, it’s the payment plumbing it creates,” Owonibi has said, describing a model where value moves from naira to cNGN to dollar stablecoins and into a bank account within seconds.
2. Uyoyo Ogedegbe — Managing Director, WrappedCBDC
Ogedegbe runs cNGN day to day, and has been explicit that the token’s slow rollout was deliberate. His team engaged regulators early, commissioned independent audits, and built attestation infrastructure before launch rather than after a crisis forced the issue. That patience paid off: cNGN listed on Busha in February 2025 and later on Quidax, becoming Nigeria’s first SEC-recognized naira-backed stablecoin at a moment when the central bank’s own eNaira had struggled for users years after its 2021 debut.
3. Obi Emetarom — Co-founder and CEO, Zone
Emetarom spent nearly two decades building banking software before pivoting his company, Zone, into what he describes as Africa’s first regulated layer-1 blockchain for payments. The network carries a Central Bank of Nigeria switching license and processes transactions for more than 15 commercial banks, with a stablecoin-based cross-border settlement product now in development. Emetarom has argued publicly that decentralized finance will never reach mass adoption in Nigeria without regulation wrapped around it, a position that puts him at odds with crypto’s libertarian roots but in step with where Nigerian policy has actually moved.
4. Moyo Sodipo — COO and Co-founder, Busha
Sodipo helps run one of only two exchanges holding a provisional license from Nigeria’s SEC under the Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme. He has told Chainalysis researchers that stablecoins now power “everyday activities like bill payments, mobile phone credit top-ups, and retail purchases” for Busha’s users — a claim the data backs up, since roughly 85% of Nigerian crypto transfer values sit below $1 million, confirming this is a retail-driven market rather than an institutional one.
5. Tochy Emereole — Marketing Lead, Quidax
Emereole has pushed the narrative that Nigerian stablecoin demand is dominated by savers rather than speculators, citing a 2025 company report showing 67% of Quidax users hold digital assets as a store of value against just 14% who trade actively. That framing has shaped Quidax’s product roadmap, prioritizing instant swaps, recurring buys, and B2B liquidity APIs over the derivatives and margin products favored on international platforms.
6. Mbah Casmir — Founder and CEO, Monica Cash
Casmir built Monica Cash to solve the part of the stablecoin journey most platforms ignore: converting digital dollars back into spendable naira quickly and cheaply. He argues that framing stablecoins as a threat to the naira misses what is actually happening on the ground, since Nigerian founders raised $43 million for Web3 startups in 2025, more than double the prior year, much of it chasing exactly the conversion problem his platform was built to solve.
7. Chinazam Umezinwa — COO, Monica Cash
Umezinwa runs the operational side of that conversion layer, and has repeatedly pointed to a shift in user intent — fewer people chasing crypto gains, more entrepreneurs protecting margins and remote workers receiving international payments who simply need speed and predictability. That mirrors what Ghanaian platform Hurupay has built toward with its virtual dollar accounts for remote workers, suggesting the off-ramp problem is regional even if Nigerian founders are solving it fastest.
8. Mercy Emmanuel — Stablecoin and Blockchain Commercial Lead, Flutterwave
Emmanuel represents stablecoins moving out of crypto-native startups and into mainstream African fintech. At Flutterwave, one of the continent’s largest payment companies, she has argued the conversation has shifted “from narrative to infrastructure,” as enterprise clients ask for execution rather than pitch decks. Her role signals that mainstream fintechs are now building stablecoin settlement directly into products used by merchants who may never open a crypto app.
9. Opeyemi Awoyemi — General Partner, Fast Forward Venture Studio
Awoyemi backed cNGN with an early $100,000 check, framing the investment around demand creation for the naira rather than pure crypto speculation. A trading partner abroad, he has noted, can now hold naira through cNGN without opening a Nigerian bank account — a use case that shaped how his fund thinks about the entire local-stablecoin category, not just this one token.
10. Yele Bademosi — Co-founder and CEO, Nestcoin
Bademosi has spent years building consumer-facing crypto access in Nigeria, first through Bundle Africa and now through Nestcoin’s Onboard self-custody wallet. His bet is that ordinary Nigerians want to hold and move stablecoins without depending on a centralized exchange at all. Kredete has built a competing thesis around stablecoin-backed credit for the Nigerian diaspora, and Paris-based Kulipa is now issuing stablecoin spending cards into the Nigerian market, evidence that global capital now treats the self-custody bet Bademosi is making as investable rather than fringe.
None of this erases the harder questions. The Central Bank of Nigeria formed a task force this year to study stablecoin adoption after years of flip-flopping between restriction and tolerance, and the same officials who now court innovation once froze bank accounts tied to unlicensed platforms. Dollarization risk is real: every naira that flows into USDT is a naira the central bank cannot easily influence through interest rate policy. And the off-ramp market Casmir and Umezinwa operate in remains crowded with platforms — Breet, Bitnob, Roqqu, Bitmama — competing on thin margins and unproven compliance depth, meaning consolidation or failures are likely before the sector settles. Whether Nigeria’s regulators let all ten of these people keep building at the current pace is the question the rest of 2026 will answer.
