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In Juja, a busy area in Kenya’s Kiambu County, Faith Mbinya, a local mom-and-pop trader, proudly displayed an orange-and-white banner bearing a quick response (QR) code that read “Bitcoin accepted here.”
Inside the household goods shop she runs, customers browse plastic buckets, cookware, electronics, toiletries, and cleaning supplies. Every so often, someone pays for a dustbin, toilet brush, or other household item with Bitcoin.
Mbinya began accepting the cryptocurrency in November 2025 after a friend introduced her to it. For her, the appeal has little to do with Bitcoin’s price and everything to do with the cost of moving money.
“I accept Bitcoin because it reduces the transaction cost, which is a very major problem when we go to our Kenyan local banks or local M-PESA,” Mbinya told TechCabal. “It helped me save on those little transactions.”
Most of her customers still pay in Kenyan Shillings. However, she says four or five customers—a handful of the foot traffic—each month ask to pay with Bitcoin.
One customer recently paid KES 6,000 ($46) in Bitcoin for household goods. Mbinya says most of the people who ask to pay this way are Bitcoin users (Bitcoiners) under 35, reflecting a growing community of young Kenyans already familiar with the cryptocurrency.
The Micro-Merchant Tax
Comparing verified Safaricom transfer tariffs against Fedi network routing.
Traders use the Fedi to handle community e-cash. They migrated to this app because it combines receiving Bitcoin, converting currencies, and spending into a single wallet, solving the storage strain on low-cost Android phones. Internal transfers inside a federation are free, while external outbound transfers across the Lightning Network carry a minor 21 basis points (0.21%) fee.
7 KES Flat Transfer Fee
0.21% External Routing
In Lagos, the appetite centres on stablecoins
Across Africa’s cryptocurrency hubs, a growing number of merchants are beginning to accept digital assets as payment. But while Mbinya embraces Bitcoin itself, some businesses in Lagos have adopted a different model.
Trib3 Lagos, a fine-dining restaurant in Victoria Island, an upscale part of Lagos, Nigeria, accepts cryptocurrency payments, although customers typically pay with stablecoins, digital tokens pegged to the value of fiat currencies. The restaurant, however, has no interest in holding digital assets after a transaction is complete.
“We are an all-inclusive restaurant, catering to mostly those in the formal sector, and quite a number of Nigerians, mostly young people who deal in crypto, want to pay with that, hence the reason,” Franklyn Obinna, business development manager for sales and events at Trib3 Lagos, told TechCabal. “We sell an experience, and that extends to how payments are made.”
Obinna said that although the restaurant accepts Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, USDT, and other digital assets, it converts every crypto payment into Naira immediately.
“We transact in our local currency [Naira] daily, so we always have to convert all crypto payments to local currency immediately,” Obinna said.
Mbinya and Trib3 represent two ends of the same spectrum. One accepts Bitcoin both as a means of payment and as a store of value. The other accepts digital assets only as a payment rail, converting every transaction into local currency.
The Crypto Payment Pipeline
Compare how crypto settles at checkout in Kenya vs. Nigeria.
System Insight: The Circular Economy
Mom-and-pop stores hold the native cryptocurrency. They absorb the exchange-rate risk directly, relying on community rebates if the asset’s price drops sharply.
Businesses like Trib3 accept cryptocurrency largely because customers increasingly expect that option. Their confidence comes from knowing they do not have to hold the assets themselves. Startups, including CoinCircuit and Mular, bridge that gap by receiving cryptocurrency from customers, converting it almost instantly, and settling merchants in local currency.
The model allows cryptocurrency holders to spend the assets they already own while enabling merchants to continue operating in the currencies they already use.
For years, cryptocurrency payments have struggled to move beyond speculation into everyday commerce. Bitcoin’s price volatility, network congestion, and tax treatment have discouraged many merchants from accepting it directly.
Stablecoins remove much of the volatility, but they do not solve another challenge. Most businesses still keep their accounts, pay suppliers, and settle taxes in local currency. Any payment system that expects merchants to hold cryptocurrency, therefore, requires them to change the financial infrastructure on which their businesses operate.
The startups and communities emerging across Nigeria and Kenya are betting on a different approach. Rather than asking merchants to become crypto businesses, they are building infrastructure that enables customers to spend digital assets while merchants continue receiving local currency.
Building the missing payment rail
Startups building crypto payment infrastructure across Africa argue that t persuading merchants to adopt cryptocurrency is the wrong way to think about the market. h Instead, they see the opportunity in serving consumers whose money is already on-chain.
Across Nigeria and much of Africa, stablecoins and other digital assets have become an increasingly common way for freelancers, remote workers, exporters, and crypto traders to receive cross-border payments. Spending that money, however, still typically requires converting it into local currency before making everyday purchases, often incurring conversion fees and withdrawal charges along the way.
Crypto payments infrastructure removes that additional step for consumers while allowing merchants to serve those customers without assuming exchange-rate risk or changing how they account for revenue.
The model also reflects a practical reality: few merchants want to operate their businesses in digital assets. Convincing them to hold Bitcoin or stablecoins would require changing far more than a payment method. It would require changing their financial operations.
Mular, a Nigerian crypto payment startup founded by Tomiwa Ogunmodede, Charles Eke, and Temi Olateru, reached that conclusion early.
“We realised the merchant isn’t actually the customer who needs convincing,” Ogunmodede, Mular’s co-founder and chief executive officer, told TechCabal. “The person who already holds crypto is the one looking for somewhere to spend it.”
Charles Eke, Mular’s co-founder and chief operating officer, said the idea cystallised after watching a relative struggle to pay for sports jerseys at The Palms, a shopping mall in Lekki, an upscale part of Lagos, despite having more than enough money in cryptocurrency. The funds already existed in on-chain; the problem was the final mile between the customer’s crypto wallet and the merchant’s bank account.
Both founders argue that the market has been misunderstood. In their view, merchants are beneficiaries of demand for cryptocurrency rather than the source of that demand.
Mular built software to bridge that gap. Customers pay in cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and stablecoins, while merchants receive Naira without ever handling the underlying digital assets. According to the company, the platform has processed about $500,000 in merchant payments. , Some of its largest merchant customers have individually processed between ₦85 million and ₦300 million ($62,000–$218,000) through the platform, Eke said.
The Checkout Simulator
Simulate a real crypto payment to see who bears the risk at checkout.
The Juja Model
The Lagos Model
Operational Reality: Stable Baseline
Both models settle the value successfully at the point of sale. Move the slider to change item values or click the volatility simulator to watch how risk redistribution fractures the underlying models.
The model is spreading beyond a single startup. Rach Finance, another Nigerian company building merchant payment infrastructure, said it counts businesses, including Spaghetti King, a food outlet in Yaba, Lagos, and Food’n’Vibes, a restaurant and lounge in Ilorin, a city in southwestern Nigeria, among merchants that accept cryptocurrency through its platform.
CoinCircuit, which provides payment infrastructure that enables businesses to integrate cryptocurrency payment gateways, said it has processed more than ₦700 million ($435,000) through its partners since launching in December 2025.
Measured against Africa’s broader payments industry, those figures remain modest. Card networks, bank transfers, and mobile money continue to process vastly greater transaction volumes each day.
In 2025, card payments in Kenya totalled KES 492.8 billion ($3.8 billion), while mobile money transactions reached KES 8.24 trillion ($63.8 billion), according to Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) data. In Nigeria, electronic payment channels—including bank transfers, card payments, and point-of-sale (PoS) transactions—processed ₦1.2 quadrillion ($871 billion) during the same period, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
Founders argue that this comparison misses the point. Their ambition is not to replace existing payment rails but to build infrastructure for money that already exists on-chain.
“I think there’s demand because stablecoin adoption is growing rapidly across this part of the world, especially in Nigeria,” Chidubem Ogbuefi, CoinCircuit’s founder and chief executive officer, said. “As adoption grows, businesses and fintechs need infrastructure that lets them accept and integrate crypto payments into their existing systems.”
Toluwani Folayan, Novacrust’s chief marketing officer, said the cross-border financial platform introduced crypto payments after users repeatedly requested the option.
“[The demand for crypto payments] came from our customers, not from us,” Folayan told TechCabal. “A lot of the people we serve, freelancers, creators, and remote workers across Africa and the Middle East, already get paid in stablecoins. Accepting crypto removed that friction. They pay us with the money they already hold, and we settle instantly.”
About half of Novacrust’s customers now pay with crypto, accounting for roughly $300,000 in monthly transaction volume, according to the company. Unlike businesses such as Trib3 Lagos, Novacrust prefers to receive and retain stablecoins, converting only the portion needed to meet local obligations while using the rest for payroll, supplier payments, and other cross-border expenses.
A community in Kenya is testing the opposite theory
Most startups interviewed by TechCabal are building around an assumption: merchants should not have to hold crypto to accept it. In Juja, Kenya, Linda Kariuki is testing the opposite proposition.
Through BitSavers Eduhub, a Bitcoin-focused education community for local merchants she founded, Kariuki is attempting to make them comfortable enough to receive and keep Bitcoin themselves. She believes the cryptocurrency only becomes useful when people have places to spend it.
Since its launch in 2024, the community has onboarded about seven merchants, including Mbinya, teaching them how to receive Bitcoin payments, securely self-custody their funds, and hold the asset over the long term.
“I don’t even tell them about Bitcoin,” Kariuki told TechCabal. “I tell them, imagine someone ordering things from [them], even from outside Kenya, and [they] can easily receive payment.”
Only after merchants buy into that proposition does Bitcoin education begin. The community teaches its community of merchants, all women with mom-and-pop stores, how to set up self-custodial wallets, safely store their seed phrases, and safely receive payments.
Community members remain in close contact after onboarding, holding regular meetups where merchants troubleshoot problems, test new products, and adapt to changes in the Bitcoin-based apps they rely on for accepting payments, such as Fedi, Machankura, and Tando.
The payment stack has also evolved. Members initially relied on separate apps for receiving Bitcoin, converting currencies, and spending funds, a setup Kariuki said quickly became cumbersome. The community has since migrated most merchants to Fedi, which combines those functions into a single wallet and reduces friction at checkout, according to her.
Building a circular economy, however, requires solving cryptocurrency problems and the infrastructure burden it inherits.
Price volatility is the biggest obstacle.
Kariuki said she visits merchants in her community whenever Bitcoin’s price falls sharply after a payment, verifies the loss through their wallets, and reimburses part of it out of her own pocket. Since the community’s launch in January 2024, she said she has spent about KES 4,000 ($31) on paying those rebates.
“Because I believe in what Satoshi [the enigmatic creator of Bitcoin] brought to us, I’m okay giving you [merchants] my money,” she said. “If you lose because of volatility, I will check the wallet first and compensate for part of the loss. One day I will recover it. As more merchants stay in the ecosystem and more people start using Bitcoin, the network becomes stronger.”
Kariuki sees the rebates as an investment in the network rather than charity. Merchants who remain confident in accepting Bitcoin create more places where it can actually circulate, drawing in new users who later become merchants themselves.
“In five years, I will still consider Bitcoin as a form of payment,” Mbinya said. “We hope that in the near future it will grow and more people will be using it. We hope it will benefit the pioneers like us.”
Internet connectivity presents another practical hurdle. Receiving Bitcoin requires merchants to stay online, something Kariuki said cannot always be assumed. BitSavers partnered with SataNet, a Bitcoin-powered Internet provider, allowing merchants to buy a full day’s connection for about $0.03 worth of Bitcoin.
Even smartphone storage became a problem. Running separate applications for wallets, conversions, and payments strained the low-cost Android phones that many of its merchants use. Consolidating those functions into one wallet removed another source of friction.
Taken together, the incentives amount to one of Kenya’s emerging circular Bitcoin economies, where communities are attempting to make Bitcoin spendable before persuading more people to own it.
Kariuki’s community in Juja inverts the logic driving Nigeria’s payment startups. Builders such as Mular begin with consumers who already own crypto and create tools that let merchants continue operating exactly as they always have. BitSavers begins with merchants, absorbing early risks in the hope that more places accepting Bitcoin eventually create more people willing to spend it.
Crypto payments in Africa will rise or fall with the number of people already earning, saving, and spending in Bitcoin or stablecoins. If that base remains small, crypto payments will likely stay a niche convenience for crypto-native customers. If it grows, payment providers could become the equivalent of card processors, converting digital assets into local currency while merchants continue operating as they always have. Crypto payments are unlikely to replace cash, bank transfers, or mobile money; they will exist alongside them.
Mbinya sees Bitcoin as a payment method that more customers will eventually use. Trib3 Lagos is already serving customers who pay that way.
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I am the CEO of 9JAGISTLAND.My name is Adedeji Timothy and my co-owner is Oyekola Damilare.This blog is born out of our passion to educating to people in all aspect of internet life.We are enthusiastic about writing posts and articles online.
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