The number that decides whether this company exists.

The number

What share of real inbound international payment volume to Nigerian businesses arrives through an asset or network their settlement provider cannot use?

Everything follows from that. Not the technology, not the partnerships, not the pricing. If the answer is small, there is no routing product here, and the honest thing is to find out in thirty conversations rather than after a year of building.

Frequency is the wrong question on its own

This is the part we got wrong the first time we wrote it down. Counting how often a mismatch happens tells you almost nothing without the amounts attached.

A 20% mismatch rate on $2,000 payments is irrelevant. A 5% rate on $500,000 payments could be an excellent business.

So the measurement is problematic volume divided by total inbound volume, multiplied by what the problem actually costs — bridge and swap fees, spread, gas, employee time, delays, failed payments, and the customers lost to friction.

What each answer would mean

Fewer than 5 of 30 businesses. Not a business. The routing product does not get built, and we would keep whatever is left of the account idea and reconsider. We are writing that down before we know, precisely so it is harder to talk ourselves out of later.

30% or more, on material volume. Worth building — provided the businesses currently solve it by hand, ask for a permanent receiving identity, and at least three agree to actually use it.

The evidence, in both directions

McKinsey and Artemis estimate roughly $390bn of genuine stablecoin payment activity in 2025 once trading, internal transfers and other non-payment flows are filtered out. B2B was the largest category at around $226bn. So the rail is real and it is mostly business payments.

Nigeria specifically: the IMF estimates around $59bn of crypto-asset inflows between July 2023 and June 2024, with stablecoins more than 65% of crypto inflows in 2024, and notes that Nigerian SMEs increasingly use stablecoins to pay overseas suppliers while larger firms experiment with them for trade settlement.

That establishes the rail exists. It does not establish the size of our addressable receiving-account market, and we are not going to let a large adjacent number stand in for the one we actually need.

The uncomfortable version

Inflows are not the same as business receipts. A great deal of Nigerian crypto activity is trading, savings and person-to-person transfer — different markets that happen to use the same rails. And if most businesses simply receive USDT on Tron and their provider already handles it, the routing value is close to zero even with tens of billions flowing.

We notice that the optimistic reading is the more comfortable one, which is a reason to distrust our own preference for it.

How we intend to find out

Twenty to thirty interviews. The questions that matter:

• How do your foreign customers pay you today, in what assets, on what networks?
• How often, what is the average payment, what is the largest?
• Have you ever received something unsupported — and what did you do, how long did it take, what did it cost?
• Have you ever asked a customer to resend, or lost one over it?
• Would you give customers one permanent payment account, and would you pay for it?

Then three to five concierge customers and twenty-plus real payments, run manually, to see whether the answers survive contact with actual money.

The question behind the question

Even a clean mismatch number does not settle it. The behaviour we need is not “would you use this” — it is a business telling its own customer “pay my Nomapay account”. If that never happens, the account abstraction is not the right experience, whatever the mismatch rate turns out to be.

Tell us how your customers pay you, and we will publish what we learn either way — including the version where the answer ends this.