Vivian Mbene, chief operating officer at Breet, stepped onto the Moonshot by TechCabal stage in Lagos on Wednesday with a straightforward argument: making crypto payments feel easy is just as hard as building the technology underneath them.
Breet was founded in 2019 and operates in Nigeria and Ghana, converting cryptocurrency into cash for individuals. The company also offers an API that lets businesses accept crypto payments and receive settlement in local currency, which means a merchant never has to touch a digital asset directly. Customers pay in crypto, businesses get paid in naira or cedis, and the heavy lifting happens behind the scenes.
That behind-the-scenes work is considerable. Monitoring transactions, routing deposits, and converting currencies all have to run together smoothly, without merchants needing to manage any single step themselves. Mbene summed up the company's guiding principle plainly: "We're just obsessed with simplicity."
The catch is that simplicity can work against you. When a product looks almost too clean, people start to wonder what they are missing. And when crypto is part of the picture, that hesitation tends to grow. "Sometimes simplicity brings suspicion, and when it's powered by crypto, the suspicion kind of doubles," Mbene said. Earning that trust, it turns out, may be the hardest product problem of all.
Originally published by TechCabal.