Nigerian stablecoin payments startup Daya closed a $2.4 million pre-seed round on June 24, 2026, with backing from Hivemind Capital, Lattice Fund, Alliance DAO, Globelink Investment, and the Aptos Foundation. Alliance DAO had previously invested $350,000 in Daya in 2025, making the firm a continuing backer in this round rather than a new entrant. The raise was oversubscribed. The company, founded in Lagos in October 2025, is building a stablecoin-native platform that lets businesses hold and move money across virtual USD, Hong Kong dollar, and Chinese yuan accounts, with settlement running on the Aptos Layer 1 blockchain.

The round lands at a moment when structured demand for dollar-backed stablecoins is growing sharply across the continent. According to IMF data published in June 2026, Nigeria pulled in $59 billion in total crypto-asset inflows between July 2023 and June 2024. Stablecoins represent roughly 43% of all crypto transaction volume in sub-Saharan Africa, a figure that reflects broad adoption across both retail and business users seeking alternatives to depreciating local currencies. The Nigerian naira lost approximately 40% of its value in 2023 after the Central Bank of Nigeria floated it, accelerating corporate adoption of dollar-pegged tokens as treasury tools rather than speculative instruments.

Co-founder Tomiwa Lasebikan, who previously co-founded Y Combinator-backed Helicarrier (formerly BuyCoins) and worked at Microsoft, described the round's outcome plainly: "The round was oversubscribed... heads down focused on building and shipping for our users." His co-founder Paul Joe, a former crypto analyst at Messari and co-builder of StableStats, laid out the competitive logic in broader terms. "The winners in this market will not just own the payment rails; they will own the workflows," Joe said in an interview with Unchained Crypto.

The platform charges between 0.1% and 0.3% per transaction, well below the 7.9% average fee that World Bank data for Q1 2026 shows consumers pay to send a $200 remittance to sub-Saharan Africa through conventional channels. That consumer remittance figure illustrates the structural cost gap the sector is working to close, even though Daya's fees apply to B2B transfers rather than retail remittances. According to industry estimates, stablecoin corridors generally bring that cost down to between 1.5% and 2.5%. Daya reported month-on-month growth above 40% through the first half of 2026. Beyond send-and-receive functionality, the product includes an AML-compliant over-the-counter off-ramp network, developer APIs, and multi-currency treasury management tools targeting businesses rather than retail users.

The most structurally notable development tied to the raise is a three-way pilot corridor announced on June 5, 2026 by Daya, the Aptos Foundation, and HashKey MENA, a Dubai-based virtual assets firm licensed by the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority. Under that arrangement, HashKey MENA handles stablecoin-to-fiat conversion on the Gulf side, Daya manages movement across African currencies starting with the Nigerian naira, and Aptos serves as the settlement layer. It is the first regulated institutional stablecoin corridor explicitly connecting the UAE and Nigeria. The business case for that geography is significant: Afreximbank data cited by Kent Cai of Globelink Investment, one of the round's backers, shows Africa exported $189.5 billion in goods to Asia in 2024, with Asia accounting for 28.5% of the continent's $769 billion in total imports. Daya's Chinese yuan virtual accounts are positioned directly for that trade flow, giving businesses on the Africa-China corridor a way to hold and settle in CNY without routing through intermediary currencies. Much of that trade currently settles through correspondent banking chains that carry well-documented time and cost penalties, a friction stablecoin infrastructure is designed to reduce.

Aptos's dual role in this deal, as both a strategic investor in Daya and the settlement infrastructure for the corridor, is worth noting for developers active in the ecosystem. The round's lead, Hivemind Capital, announced a $500 million real-world asset tokenization fund in January 2026, a mandate that makes Daya's stablecoin payment rails a strategically aligned investment rather than a purely opportunistic one. The chain's choice here stands in contrast to Tron, which dominates retail USDT volumes in Nigeria, reflecting a bifurcation between consumer-level stablecoin usage (which follows liquidity) and institutional B2B corridors (which are being built on newer Layer 1 networks with more compliance tooling baked in). Builders on Aptos should monitor how quickly transaction volume on this corridor grows; the Aptos Explorer will provide a visible on-chain signal of whether institutional adoption is materializing beyond the pilot stage.

Daya operates in an increasingly competitive field. Yellow Card now spans 34 countries, holds a Swiss AML approval secured in June 2026, and announced a Mastercard partnership in May 2026. Juicyway has processed over $1 billion in volume. Conduit is building API-first infrastructure for similar use cases. Daya's differentiation rests on the combination of virtual multi-currency accounts, its OTC off-ramp network, and its standing as the operator of the first regulated institutional stablecoin corridor explicitly connecting the UAE and Nigeria, a specific geographic distinction that none of its named peers have yet matched at that institutional level.

One regulatory headwind to track: a working note published by the IMF on June 16, 2026, authored by Axel Schimmelpfennig and Bo Zhao and titled "Stablecoins in Nigeria: A Growing Cross-Border Channel," flagged that widespread dollar-denominated stablecoin adoption in Nigeria resembles "digital dollarization," potentially weakening domestic monetary policy transmission. The note calls for clearer stablecoin issuer regulation, and analysts expect it to inform the Central Bank of Nigeria's next policy moves. Daya's specific regulatory authorization in Nigeria, including whether the company holds a CBN Virtual Asset Service Provider registration, had not been publicly confirmed at the time of publication. How the CBN responds in the second half of 2026 will shape operating conditions for every stablecoin infrastructure provider in the market, including Daya.