Somewhere between the first quote of ₦1,400 per dollar and the tenth, something quietly goes wrong. That is the reality Temitayo Sadique, managing director of Obiex Business, put on the table at Moonshot by TechCabal. A company trying to fill a $1 million stablecoin order in Nigeria today often has to piece it together from multiple peer-to-peer traders, each selling a slice at a slightly higher rate. By the time the order is complete, the average price is worse than where it started.
Sadique says the market has improved dramatically since 2018 and 2019, when the spread between buying and selling a dollar of crypto in naira could run as wide as ₦20 to ₦30. Demand has genuinely scaled. He puts $19 billion worth of stablecoins entering Nigeria in 2025 alone, and a June IMF report found the country has absorbed about 60% of sub-Saharan Africa's stablecoin inflows since 2019. Cross-border trade, remittances, and a growing number of crypto exchanges have all pushed that number up. But supply, as Sadique put it plainly, "has remained scattered."
Obiex has been building toward that problem since it launched in 2016 as a crypto payment gateway called Paylot. It shifted early toward naira conversion when it became clear that was what users actually needed, and it has grown without venture funding. Today, Sadique says 105,000 merchants across Nigeria, Ghana, and Cameroon use the platform, alongside more than 100 businesses including exchanges, remittance companies, and fintechs. By his count, $1 of every $10 in stablecoins that moved through Nigeria last year passed through Obiex.
For Sadique, the whole conversation comes down to a simple but demanding question: can you fulfil your obligation when the customer needs it? Obiex's answer includes credit that lets clients access liquidity today and settle tomorrow, plus price locks that hold while crypto deposits are still confirming. As volumes across the continent keep climbing, the platforms that can fill large orders at one clean price may well be the ones that end up setting the terms for everyone else.
Originally published by TechCabal.