Ife Johnson stepped onto the Moonshot by TechCabal stage in Lagos with a pointed observation: faster payments are not enough. The founder and chief executive of cross-border payments company Juicyway argued that Africa's real financing problem runs deeper than transaction speed. The continent, he said, has built category-winning companies without building the shared infrastructure those categories need to grow.
Johnson's proposed fix is something he calls the People's Exchange, a platform that would use tokenisation to create blockchain-based records of assets and securities, allowing businesses to raise money across markets. Juicyway has already received approval in principle from Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission to build it. The exchange's first priority would be financing liquidity, with later applications in mortgages, trade receivables, energy, commodities, and stakes in private companies.
The numbers behind his pitch are striking. Africa's unmet demand for trade finance sat between $74 billion and $92 billion in 2024, according to the African Development Bank's 2025 trade finance report. And between 2000 and 2024, African companies raised about $220 billion in equity on local stock markets, just 1 percent of the equity raised globally, per the OECD's Africa Capital Markets Report 2025. Johnson pointed out that even completing a standard payment at Juicyway requires pre-positioned funds in the right currency, in the right country, roughly 95 percent of the time.
His vision is to connect Africa's fragmented capital pools into a single, accessible market using tokenised investments and stablecoins to move and settle money across borders. "I don't think Africa needs 29 exchanges," he said. "I think it needs one market that connects them all." Whether regulators and investors across the continent will move fast enough to find out is the real question.
Originally published by TechCabal.