Rach Finance, a Nigeria-headquartered stablecoin payments startup, launched in January 2026 with a four-product suite designed to close the gap between crypto ownership and real-world commerce across Sub-Saharan Africa. The company was co-founded by CEO Keji Pius and CTO Martins Chigoziem, former colleagues who built the concept around a problem Pius experienced firsthand: holding USDT while stranded in Lusaka, Zambia in December 2023 with no practical way to spend it.

The Problem It Is Trying to Solve

Stablecoin adoption in Africa has grown faster than anywhere else in the world. The continent leads globally in stablecoin adoption rate at 9.3%, with more than 54 million digital asset users, according to Transak's 2026 Africa Fintech and Stablecoin Report. Nigeria alone processed $22 billion in stablecoin inflows in the most recently measured period, representing 40% of the regional total. Yet the dominant use case remains holding, not spending. Merchants cannot route crypto to suppliers, settle rent in stablecoin, or pay taxes digitally, leaving the ecosystem structurally fiat-dependent even as on-chain balances grow.

Pius's Zambia experience illustrated this directly. Converting USDT into something spendable locally required a multi-step chain: USDT to Nigerian naira, then naira to Zambian kwacha. Each conversion added friction, cost, and time. Rach Finance's pitch is that this chain should not need to exist.

What Rach Finance Built

The company operates four products. Its payment gateway lets merchants accept USDT or USDC (the two dominant dollar-pegged stablecoins) and receive settlement in local fiat currency within seconds to 30 minutes. The wallets are non-custodial, meaning merchants control their own recovery phrases rather than trusting a third party with custody. This matters in a region where custodial failures represent a risk that has already materialized elsewhere in the crypto industry.

The second product is a decentralized exchange (DEX) for cross-chain stablecoin trading. The DEX is live, though no independently verifiable on-chain contract address or trading data was available at time of publication. Third is an OTC desk, which handles large-volume stablecoin-to-fiat conversions and is currently the company's highest-volume product. Fourth is a Wallet-as-a-Service API that lets other developers and platforms embed non-custodial wallet infrastructure under their own brand.

Since launch in January, Rach Finance has processed roughly $2 million through its OTC desk and around $250,000 through the payment gateway, across seven active merchants. The numbers are early-stage and come from self-reported figures; no independent on-chain verification of the OTC volume has been confirmed. The company charges approximately 0.06% per transaction, a fee structure it says is possible because most of the underlying infrastructure was built in-house.

"We don't even need up to 1% of the market; we just need maybe 0.5% to hit a unicorn," Pius told TechCabal.

The Market Context

Sub-Saharan Africa processed more than $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52% year-over-year increase, with stablecoins representing 43% of that total. Remittance costs remain a persistent structural pressure: sending $200 to the region costs an average of 7.9%, nearly double the global average and well above the UN's 3% target. Stablecoin-based transfers have cut those costs by up to 85% on some corridors, making the commercial case for better spending infrastructure compelling.

The competitive space is crowded but not saturated. Yellow Card, Africa's largest and first-licensed stablecoin on/off ramp, has partnered with both Mastercard and Visa. CoinCircuit operates a similar merchant gateway model. Zerocard in Lagos offers a stablecoin-linked card for point-of-sale payments. NALA, working alongside Noah on a pan-African stablecoin settlement network, is building out comparable regional infrastructure. For a five-month-old company with seven merchants, differentiation will likely need to come from speed of integration, fee competitiveness, and coverage of smaller markets that larger platforms have not yet prioritized, including Zambia and Francophone Africa.

Rach Finance explicitly acknowledges Lazerpay, a Nigerian crypto merchant payments startup that shut down in 2023 after failing to generate sufficient merchant demand, running into high conversion friction, and being unable to close the loop between crypto acceptance and fiat operations. The OTC-first revenue approach suggests the founders have structured their unit economics around volume that already exists, rather than waiting for merchant adoption to scale. That reading is an analytical inference: no direct founder statement in the available sourcing frames the OTC priority in precisely those terms, though the structure is consistent with it.

What Comes Next

Rach Finance is developing USSD-based offline payment functionality, a feature aimed at markets where smartphone penetration or reliable data access is limited. The company has also signaled interest in UAE licensing, pointing toward Gulf-to-Africa trade and remittance corridors as a longer-term target. Beyond Africa, the company has identified Brazil and Argentina as expansion markets, citing structural parallels between CFA franc and Argentine peso volatility and the naira instability that shaped its founding thesis.

Regulatory conditions are improving across key markets, though the environment remains uneven. Nigeria formally recognized digital assets under its ISA 2025 legislation, but an ongoing AML/CFT pilot means the VASP regulatory framework there is still in flux. Kenya passed its VASP Act in October 2025, and Ghana established its Virtual Assets Regulatory Office earlier this year. Zambia, which sits at the center of the company's founding story and remains an active target market, operates at the most regulatory-frontier end of the company's footprint, with no comparable framework yet in place.

No funding disclosures have been made publicly. Whether the company can scale its merchant base and maintain sub-0.1% fees against better-capitalized competitors will be the central question heading into the second half of 2026.