Nigeria’s developing cryptocurrency space is encountering increasing difficulties in cross-border payments and tax compliance as increasing acceptance of digital currencies is exposing the cracks in the infrastructure needed to facilitate their wider usage in the economy.
This has led fintech entrepreneurs and digital asset companies to look beyond bitcoin trading to developing payment and compliance solutions that can help businesses and consumers functioning in an increasingly regulated environment.
The Guardian adds that one of those pushing the transition is Opeyemi Akinremi, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Ivorypay, a fintech business developing stablecoin-based payment infrastructure for African markets.
Akinremi’s journey has moved from financial education to payments and more recently regulatory technologies, highlighting some of the fundamental difficulties facing the continent’s fast-growing digital asset sector.
Africa is one of the fastest growing areas for cryptocurrency adoption in the world, in part due to currency volatility, limited access to formal financial institutions and the high cost and difficulty of conventional cross border transactions.
But the rise in use has also exposed the inadequacies in infrastructure needed to make electronic assets viable for daily trade, particularly for companies that need to receive, exchange and transmit money across the African continent.
Ivorypay has attempted to fill this gap by creating payment rails that enable businesses to tap into stablecoins while connecting transactions to local payment systems.
Akinremi has been in the field long before blockchain. He is an alumni of Rome Business School and before to this he started his career at the African Center of Excellence at Obafemi Awolowo University where he focused on research, financial education and financial aptitude.
That experience made him believe that financial inclusion requires not just products, but the knowledge, infrastructure and instruments that allow people to join in formal financial institutions.
In 2019, he established Finance Bridge Academy, a digital financial literacy program that taught African youth with practical knowledge of trading, financial markets and online income opportunities.
The platform garnered international interest, and was acquired by Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange Cryptolocally in April 2021.
The acquisition was a turning point in Akinremi’s career, shifting his focus from financial education to constructing infrastructure for participation in the financial system.
Later in 2022, he co-founded Ivorypay to address the practical problems that companies have when conducting cross-border payments, especially in countries where traditional systems can be slow, expensive or hard to reach.
Ivorypay has concentrated on stable coinage as a payment method rather than cryptocurrency trading and speculation. This allows businesses to accept, convert, hold and move digital value while interfacing with local payment systems.
Since then, the company has grown its infrastructure across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa, handling hundreds of millions of dollars in transaction volume.
Its development has also drawn investment backing from investors such Crypto Valley Venture Capital and Hedera as well as relationships with industry actors such as Tether and Telegram.
In 2025, the firm expanded its consumer offering with the development of Duffle, an app that lets consumers in Nigeria to pay for goods and services with stablecoins.
But while payment infrastructure overcomes one of the fundamental limits in the market, the rise of online assets has generated another difficulty, which is compliance.
As regulators across Africa, including Nigeria, build clearer frameworks around virtual assets and taxation, bitcoin businesses and consumers increasingly need tools to understand and meet their commitments.
Against this context, Ivorypay introduced Caesar.africa, an artificial intelligence-powered tool to help individuals, cryptocurrency exchanges, Web3 wallet providers, and other digital asset enterprises assess and compute their tax responsibilities.
Akinremi has also entered the fray on the larger discussion on taxation of Bitcoin in Nigeria. In an interview with TechCabal in August 2026, he spoke on the changing tax legislation in the country and what it means for bitcoin traders and enterprises. GeographicReference
The development of Caesar.africa is therefore another step in the growth of Akinremi’s efforts, from the knowledge gap created by Finance Bridge Academy, to payment infrastructure with Ivorypay, consumer access with Duffle and now compliance through Caesar.africa.
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