Sending an email from Lagos to a supplier in Shanghai takes seconds. Sending the payment to match it can take days. That gap is exactly what Tomiwa "Aleph" Lasebikan kept running into while leading product at Helicarrier, the Y Combinator-backed crypto startup he co-founded after leaving Microsoft in 2018. Customers came looking for crypto services and kept arriving with a far more grounded frustration: how to receive dollars, pay overseas suppliers, and move money across borders without the friction.
His answer is Daya, a new payments platform built around stablecoins. The startup gives businesses dollar-denominated accounts, converts incoming payments into dollar-backed digital currencies for settlement, and lets companies move funds internationally or cash out into local currency in Nigeria. In 2025, Daya raised $350,000 from Alliance DAO, a US-based crypto accelerator.
The timing is hard to argue with. In 2024, stablecoins settled $15.6 trillion in transactions globally, a volume comparable to Visa's and nearly double Mastercard's, according to investment manager Ark Invest. By 2025, that figure had grown 79% to $28 trillion, per blockchain research firm Chainalysis. The bulk of that activity is economic and practical: business-to-business payments, treasury management, remittances.
Daya sits inside a growing wave of startups building financial infrastructure on that foundation. The argument they are all making is a familiar one by now: that blockchain-based settlement can do for cross-border money movement what the internet did for communication. Whether businesses across the continent will agree is the real question worth watching.
Originally published by TechCabal.