Nigerian stablecoin payments startup Daya opened a public testing phase for Daya Stocks on July 23, giving African users a way to buy tokenised shares of US-listed companies and ETFs at a minimum of $1 per trade and a flat 0.25% transaction fee. The product puts Daya in direct competition with Luno, Roqqu, NectarFi, and Blockchain.com in a fast-crowding segment of Nigeria's crypto market. Founded in October 2025, the company is roughly nine months old and already shipping its second major product while raising pre-seed capital.

Tokenised stocks are blockchain-based representations of real equity holdings. When a user buys a tokenised share through Daya, the underlying security is purchased via Alpaca, a US brokerage, and recorded at the Depository Trust Company (DTC), the central clearing body for US securities. Tokens are issued by Ondo Global Markets (BVI) Limited, a company backed by US-based Ondo Finance.

Daya maintains collateral reserves at 100.5% against outstanding tokens, meaning the value of held securities slightly exceeds the value of tokens in circulation. Dividends are reinvested automatically after withholding taxes, and stock splits flow through to token holders.

The fee structure is the sharpest point of differentiation at launch. Luno, which introduced a similar product in Nigeria in September 2025, charges 2% per transaction. At a $1,000 trade size, a Daya user saves roughly $17.50 compared to Luno.

Daya also offers 24-hour, seven-day trading, which matters more for African investors than the comparison might suggest. Nigerian Standard Time sits at UTC+1, meaning US market hours under Eastern Daylight Time, in effect during July, fall between 2:30 PM and 9:00 PM locally. That window shifts by one hour during the Eastern Standard Time period in winter.

Continuous trading removes the structural disadvantage of needing to trade outside normal working hours. One constraint noted at launch is that tokens initially cannot be transferred to external wallets, which limits their use in decentralised finance applications where tokenised assets can serve as collateral. Daya has not disclosed a timeline for enabling transfers.

Co-founder and CEO Tomiwa "Aleph" Lasebikan leads the company alongside co-founder Paul Joe, who framed the product in terms of the stablecoin analogy that has defined much of African crypto adoption. "Tokenised stocks are going to do to US stocks what stablecoins did to US dollars: make them more accessible," Joe said. Beyond retail access, Daya is targeting businesses through an API that lets other fintech platforms embed tokenised stock trading into their own products, opening potential applications in savings apps, wealth management tools, and corporate treasury management across the continent.

Daya's infrastructure sits on top of Ondo Finance, a detail worth noting because Ondo also powers Roqqu's tokenised equity product and Blockchain.com's Nigerian offering. Ondo Global Markets crossed $1 billion in total value locked less than eight months after launch and reports cumulative trading volume above $18 billion, with more than 70% market share in tokenised equities globally. That concentration creates a specific risk: if Ondo faces regulatory disruption, multiple Nigerian products could be affected at the same time. Ondo filed confidentially with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in February 2026; the nature of that filing and its outcome have not been publicly disclosed.

The regulatory picture in Nigeria is also unsettled. The Investment and Securities Act of 2025, signed in March of that year, formally recognised tokenised securities as regulated instruments under the oversight of the Securities and Exchange Commission Nigeria. That was the first time digital assets received statutory backing in the country, replacing guidelines from 2020 that carried no legislative authority. However, no confirmed SEC Nigeria approval for Daya Stocks appears in available reporting. Luno, a far more established player, has applied to join the SEC's incubation programme.

That pattern, new products reaching consumers before regulatory licensing is resolved, is a consistent feature of the current wave of Nigerian tokenised equity launches, and it carries real uncertainty for users and platforms alike.

Daya raised a $2.4 million pre-seed round in June 2026, led by Hivemind Capital, with participation from Alliance DAO, Lattice Fund, the Aptos Foundation, and Globelink Investment. The round was oversubscribed. The company has reported month-on-month growth above 40% during 2026. Daya also operates as the African leg of a payments corridor linking UAE-based HashKey MENA to Nigerian naira and other African currencies via the Aptos blockchain.

Looking further out, Daya says it plans to tokenise Nigerian-listed securities for international investors, a step that would reverse the current direction of capital flow entirely. Rather than routing African savings into US markets, the model would direct foreign investment into Nigerian equities through blockchain infrastructure. That ambition is subject to regulatory approval not yet publicly disclosed, but it signals how the company is thinking about its role well past the current testing phase.

The global market for tokenised real-world assets stood at roughly $27 billion in March 2026. McKinsey projects separately that tokenised financial assets broadly, a category that excludes cryptocurrencies and therefore covers a wider universe than the on-chain RWA market, could reach $2 trillion by 2030.