Many remarkable stories can trace their beginnings to the University of Oxford. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote much of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings there. Between 2021 and 2022, a conversation about stablecoins between two Master of Business Administration (MBA) students on the school’s basketball court sparked a story that would eventually become a startup.

At the time of the conversation, Prince Nnamdi Ekeh was the co-CEO of Konga Group following the merger with his online marketplace Yudala, giving him a front-row seat to the challenges of payments and foreign exchange. Zachary Schwartzman, the second of the courtside pair, had gotten interested in African tech after covering the initial public offerings (IPOs) of Jumia as a Wall Street analyst.

Their conversation circled the use of stablecoins and how they could solve real problems in markets like Nigeria and across Africa. Years later, they would start Stablyl, a fintech startup co-founded by Ekeh, Schwartzman, and Michael Anyi, a software engineer with over a decade of experience building financial infrastructure.

Emerging from stealth with a $2.7 million pre-seed investment led by Konga, the startup is a liquidity exchange for financial institutions and payment service providers, built to make foreign exchange liquidity easier to access and settlements nearly instantaneous.

Net foreign exchange inflow into Nigeria’s economy was $6.92 billion in February 2026, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s monthly economic report. Yet, the infrastructure through which that liquidity moves is fragmented, with payment service providers, banks and large institutions relying on multiple relationships to source foreign exchange.

“Our goal is to connect these participants on one platform, creating the deepest and most accessible liquidity pool on the continent,” Schwartzman said.

How Stabyl works

Stabyl is neither a consumer-facing app nor a cross-border payments platform. The problem it aims to solve lies at the point where financial institutions source foreign exchange before a payment can be made.

Ekeh illustrated this with the example of a large institution like Konga. He explained that when the e-commerce company needs foreign exchange, its treasury team typically reaches out to multiple banks, payment service providers, and liquidity providers to compare rates and source liquidity. By the time approvals are received and counterparties respond, market prices may already have shifted, forcing the process to begin again or settle at a less favourable rate.

Stabyyl’s solution is to replace those fragmented bilateral negotiations with a central limit order book (CLOB), in which buyers and sellers of foreign exchange can automatically post and match orders.

“Everybody on Stabyl can create a transaction, and that transaction gets matched and queued immediately, Anyi told TechCabal in an interview on Friday. “That entire process of having to make calls, hold transactions, figure out rates and do all this manual labour is completely removed.”

The startup said its liquidity is aggregated from participating payment service providers (PSPs) and financial institutions, and maintains its own liquidity reserves with unnamed selected partners to ensure liquidity remains available when demand exceeds natural market activity.

On Stabyl, settlement occurs across both traditional banking infrastructure and blockchain networks. For fiat transactions, Stabyl noted that it partnered with KongaPay as its official naira settlement partner. On the stablecoin settlement side, wallet infrastructure is provided by DFNS, a multi-party computation (MPC) wallet provider.

The company noted that it currently supports USDT (Tether) and USDC (USD Coin) stablecoins. Still, it maintained that its infrastructure is blockchain-agnostic, selecting networks based on cost, speed, settlement finality, and the needs of its institutional clients.

“Stabyl is connecting stablecoin rails with fiat banking rails because you can’t separate the two,” Ekeh noted. “Stablecoins are great, but they’re not great on their own. You still need to convert back to local currency.”

In practice, when a PSP deposits naira on Stabyl through KongaPay, it can then place an order at its preferred exchange rate or match one already available on the platform. Once the transaction is executed, participants can settle and withdraw in either fiat currency or stablecoins.

For institutions that want to integrate the infrastructure directly into their treasury systems, Stabyl also noted that it provides Application Programming Interface (APIs) that offer programmatic access to its liquidity pool.

The business of building the infrastructure

Many FX businesses in Nigeria make money by capitalising on the exchange rate spread, meaning they buy currencies at a low rate and sell them at a higher rate. Rather than holding inventory and earning a spread, Stabyl said it charges a take rate on each transaction processed through the platform.

The company did not disclose the figure but said it intentionally keeps it low to incentivise institutions to push more volume through the platform.

“What we want to do is grow the liquidity pot,” Schwartzman said. “That is where we see the opportunity: by growing liquidity for clients. We believe that will allow clients to provide more liquidity, do more trades, and be more successful.”

Stabyl’s emergence from stealth comes as Nigeria’s regulatory environment for digital assets has shifted considerably in its favour. The CBN lifted its ban on cryptocurrency transactions in 2023, and the Securities and Exchange Commission followed with its Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme, bringing virtual asset service providers into a formal compliance framework.

“The regulatory direction is clear,” Schwartzman said. “We would rather build this infrastructure correctly from the start, working hand-in-hand with regulators, than arrive late to a settled market.”

In the same space, companies like Onafriq, Yellow Card and Fincra are building payment infrastructure across Africa. Stabyl, however, maintained that these companies are its potential customers, not competitors.

“We’re trying to provide liquidity to other liquidity providers, foreign exchange companies, payment service providers and financial institutions,” Schwartzman said. “So, if we look at everything as a pie, we’re not trying to gain market share from this pie. We’re creating more dough to make this a bigger pie for everyone.”

The company stated that the pre-seed funding from Konga will be used for regulatory licensing, infrastructure build, and compliance. Beyond capital and being its naira settlement partner, Konga also serves as Stabyl’s first real-world test case.

“Konga’s vision is to be the engine of trade and commerce in Africa, and FX liquidity is the fuel that engine runs on,” Ekeh noted. “Stabyl’s infrastructure is critical to bring Konga’s vision to reality.”

For now, Stabyl noted that it currently focuses on the NGN/USD corridor, with plans to expand into additional African currency pairs as its regulatory footprint grows.

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