The off ramp is the product
Everyone wants to talk about the blockchain. The hard part is the bank account at the other end.
Anyone who has built a payments product for Africa in the last five years has had a version of the same conversation with a partner from outside the continent. The partner has a wallet, or a stablecoin, or a payments network, and would like it to work in Nigeria. They have thought carefully about the on chain part. They have not thought about how a naira ends up in a customer’s bank account on a Sunday evening.
That last step is called the off ramp, and after eight years as a cofounder of a licensed exchange in Nigeria I have come to think it is the whole product. Everything else can be bought.
What an off ramp actually is
An off ramp converts a digital dollar into local currency and delivers it to a bank or mobile money account. Described that way it sounds like plumbing. In practice it is a licence with the securities regulator and a relationship with the central bank, a set of banking partners who will hold your accounts and clear your payments, a treasury desk that manages local currency liquidity across the day, a compliance team that can answer a regulator’s question by close of business, and customer support that speaks to the person whose money has not arrived. The blockchain is the easy part. The blockchain does not have a Monday morning.
The money agrees. The largest cheques in this market over the past eighteen months went to companies that hold licences and bank relationships rather than to protocols: Stripe paid about $1.1bn for Bridge, Mastercard agreed up to $1.8bn for BVNK, and Ripple took a stake in Flutterwave. In Africa the pattern has been the same, with the stablecoin funding announced across 2025 and 2026 favouring companies that sell settlement to other businesses over consumer apps. Some in the industry say the future is banks settling with each other on chain without intermediaries. Perhaps. Until then the intermediary that holds the licence and the bank accounts is the part that cannot be skipped.
Why regulators matter more than protocols
Nigeria brought digital assets under the Securities and Exchange Commission with the Investments and Securities Act in 2025, the SEC sets minimum capital for exchanges, and the country came off the FATF grey list in October. Kenya gazetted its virtual asset regulations in July, with the central bank supervising stablecoin issuers and fiat conversion. Ghana passed its bill in December. This is the most important thing to have happened to African payments in a decade, and it has very little to do with technology.
It matters because a global partner who wants to reach Nigerian or Kenyan customers now has a clear question to ask: who holds the licence at the point where digital dollars become local money? The answer is a small number of companies, and the ones that have spent years building relationships with regulators and banks are not easily replaced by a protocol.
What good partners ask about
The partners who succeed in Africa ask a different set of questions from the ones who do not. They ask about settlement times into specific banks rather than about chain confirmations. They ask how liquidity is managed when the naira moves during the day. They ask what happens when a transaction is flagged, who calls the customer and how quickly. They ask to see the licence.
The proposition I put to partners on behalf of the exchange I cofounded is an off ramp for Nigeria, Kenya and the wider region, rather than a place to trade. That is a deliberate choice of emphasis. Retail trading is a real business but it is not what global payments companies need from Africa. What they need is a counterparty that can turn a stablecoin into a salary, a school fee or a supplier payment, reliably and inside the rules.
That is the product. The rest is a means of getting there.