In a continent where currencies wobble and bank access is patchy, Busha is showing that crypto can be more than speculative hype — it can be practical, stable, and empowering for everyday Africans.
The Market Gap: Africa’s Financial Friction
Africa’s financial systems are a paradox. Millions of people own smartphones but lack stable access to banking. Currency depreciation erodes savings, and cross-border payments remain slow and expensive.
In Nigeria, for instance, the naira has lost 75% of its value since 2016, with inflation soaring to 24% in 2023. Africa received $96.4 billion in remittances in 2024, yet traditional transfers still cost up to 8% per transaction.
Busha entered this uncertainty with a bold premise: trust can be a product. The goal, as founder Michael Adeyeri often emphasizes, isn’t just to help Africans trade crypto — it’s to empower them to live with it.
They are doing this by designing products specific to the needs of Africans, including:
Busha EarnBusha SpendBusha BusinessBusha Connect
Product Architecture: Built for African Realities
Busha Earn was designed for the inflation-weary saver. By offering up to 7.5% annual yields on stablecoins, it provides a secure, transparent way to preserve wealth.
Busha’s stablecoin rails cut traditional remittance costs — from up to 8% per transaction down to 1–3%, making cross-border payments faster, cheaper, and transparent.
Busha Spend turns crypto into airtime, shopping vouchers, and cashback rewards — bringing digital money into everyday life.
Busha Business, the B2B arm, helps companies handling large volumes of digital transactions. Businesses can receive payments in crypto, instantly convert volatile assets into stablecoins, and manage treasury flows without worrying about price swings or chargeback fraud.
Busha Connect, the white-label infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), commercializes the regulatory and liquidity infrastructure Busha built for itself — allowing fintech startups, payment gateways, and remittance platforms to plug into Busha’s rails instead of building their own. That IaaS model signals a shift from consumer product to regional infrastructure provider — potentially the “Plaid for crypto” in Africa.
Everyday Impact: Stories from Busha Users
Take Chiamaka, a Lagos-based freelancer. Every month, she receives payments from clients abroad, but traditional remittances were costing her up to 7% per transfer. With Busha, she now converts her payments into stablecoins, earning modest yields with Busha Earn before using Busha Spend to pay for groceries and mobile data — all without losing a chunk to fees. “It feels like my money finally works for me,” she says.
Samuel, a small-scale online retailer in Accra, previously struggled to accept payments from customers across West Africa due to currency volatility. With Busha Business, Samuel can receive crypto payments, instantly convert them into stablecoins, and avoid losses from fluctuating exchange rates. “It’s like having a bank that actually understands the realities of African business,” he explains.
Even fintech startups are benefitting. A remittance app in Nairobi plugged into Busha Connect instead of building its own infrastructure, saving months of development time and navigating regulatory hurdles with ease. For the platform’s founders, it was a matter of “plug, play, and scale.”
These stories show Busha’s impact beyond numbers. Each user represents a microcosm of Africa’s financial friction — and how trust, delivered thoughtfully, can transform lives.
How Busha Is Redefining Financial Access for a Volatile Continent
When Busha’s founders started sketching ideas in 2019, Africa’s crypto scene was a frontier — bustling, chaotic, and deeply mistrustful. Speculative trading dominated conversations, but few were asking the harder questions: could digital assets solve real problems? Could they give ordinary people stability in economies where national currencies were anything but stable?
That question became Busha’s north star. Today, from its Lagos headquarters, Busha has grown from a retail trading app into one of Africa’s most trusted digital asset platforms — a regulated bridge between volatile crypto markets and everyday financial realities. With 800,000+ verified users, 8 million executed trades, and a provisional SEC license in Nigeria, Busha quietly defines responsible innovation in African crypto.
The Founding Journey: From E-Commerce to Financial Empowerment
Behind Busha’s steady ascent stand Michael Adeyeri and Moyo Sodipo, who spent a decade building Africa’s digital economy. Sodipo, an Electrical and Electronic Engineering graduate from the University of Lagos, was among early technologists at Jumia. There, he saw how technology could leapfrog broken infrastructure — but also how fragile digital trust could be in a cash-based economy.
After Jumia, Sodipo led product and business development at Suregifts, a digital voucher platform. These experiences became the blueprint for Busha. Together with Adeyeri, he set out not to create another speculative exchange but to design a platform where crypto would serve everyday functions — paying bills, saving money, managing inflation. In an ecosystem dominated by hype, Busha’s philosophy was radical in its simplicity: make crypto useful.
Funding and the Regulatory Moat
In November 2021, Busha raised $4.2 million in seed funding, led by Jump Capital and joined by Cadenza Ventures, Blockwall Capital, CMT Digital, Greenhouse Capital, and Raba Capital. Unlike most early-stage exchanges, these funds weren’t spent chasing user numbers. Busha invested heavily in regulatory compliance and security infrastructure — a move that would soon pay off.
When Nigeria’s SEC rolled out its Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) framework, Busha became one of the first to secure a provisional license, separating itself from the gray market that many competitors operated in. In a market where trust is scarce, regulatory clarity is currency. For institutional clients, fintech partners, and corporate treasuries, Busha’s compliance posture transformed it from just another exchange into a credible financial intermediary.
Turning Regulation Into Advantage
Africa’s crypto sector has long been defined by regulatory uncertainty. Central banks, wary of volatility, often restricted bank-crypto interactions. In Nigeria, the Central Bank’s 2021 directive froze out many exchanges from formal banking channels.
Busha chose a different path — rather than resist regulation, it embraced it. Aligning with the SEC’s framework early effectively de-risked the business. This compliance-first stance is what investors describe as Busha’s “regulatory moat” — a hard-to-replicate advantage attracting enterprise clients seeking licensed liquidity infrastructure in West Africa.
The Strategic Tensions Ahead
Yet this path introduces friction. The same compliance rigor that earns credibility also adds cost. Operating within formal, regulated channels makes fiat withdrawals expensive, frustrating retail users accustomed to informal routes. The challenge now is balancing institutional-grade trust with everyday accessibility. Busha is exploring more efficient fiat pathways and automation tools to reduce overhead while maintaining strict KYC/AML standards — an approach that mirrors previous successes in e-commerce and digital vouchers.
The Vision Ahead
Busha’s next chapter is about infrastructure and scale. The company is laying groundwork for expansion across East and West Africa, targeting countries with strong mobile penetration but unstable currencies. Its long-term ambition mirrors a continental dream: a stable, open financial network where Africans can save in dollars, transact in crypto, and settle instantly in local currency — all from one trusted platform.
Busha Connect positions the company as a critical layer in Africa’s emerging crypto-fintech infrastructure — the invisible engine powering compliant, digital liquidity behind the scenes.
As Africa’s economies modernize and regulation catches up, Busha’s quiet discipline — compliance, security, and real-world utility — will prove its greatest competitive edge. In a market flooded with noise, Busha’s message remains refreshingly clear: financial freedom isn’t a buzzword. It’s infrastructure.
Building Africa’s Trust Layer for Crypto was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.