A Nigerian business can send an email to a supplier in China in seconds. But paying that supplier can take days.
Tomiwa “Aleph” Lasebikan encountered that disconnect repeatedly as the head of product at Y Combinator-backed crypto startup Helicarrier, which he co-founded after leaving Microsoft in 2018. Customers who came to the company for crypto services often had a more practical problem: receiving dollars, paying overseas suppliers, and moving money across borders.
Now Lasebikan is betting stablecoins can help solve it. His new startup, Daya, is building a payments platform that helps businesses access dollar liquidity, settle international transactions, and move money across borders using dollar-backed digital currencies. It raised $350,000 from Alliance DAO, a US-based crypto accelerator, in 2025.
The startup is part of a growing list of companies building financial infrastructure around stablecoins, arguing that blockchain-based settlement can do for cross-border payments what the Internet did for communication: help businesses move money more quickly across borders.
Stablecoin as an alternative rail for businesses
Stablecoins as a financial rail for businesses are gaining traction.
In 2024, stablecoins settled $15.6 trillion in transactions globally, according to US-based investment manager Ark Invest, a volume comparable to Visa’s and nearly double Mastercard’s. By 2025, that figure grew 79% to $28 trillion, according to blockchain research firm Chainalysis.
Most of the transaction activities driving stablecoin use cases are economic, including business-to-business (B2B) payments, treasury management, and remittances, according to Chainalysis.
Daya is building a business-focused payments platform that connects traditional banking systems with blockchain networks. It provides businesses with dollar-denominated accounts, converts incoming payments into stablecoins for settlement, and allows firms to move funds across borders or convert them into local currency for withdrawal in Nigeria.
Founded by Lasebikan and Paul Joe in October 2025, Daya is seeking to capture a share in the global commercial B2B payments market.
In 2024, the global B2B cross-border payments market was worth $31.7 trillion and was projected to reach $47.8 trillion by 2032, according to US-based research firm FXC Intelligence, dwarfing consumer remittances. By comparison, consumer remittances totalled $905 billion globally in 2024, according to the World Bank.
Businesses move far more money than individuals, yet much of that activity still depends on correspondent banking infrastructure.
“The world we’re born into is one where communication across borders is incredibly fast,” Lasebikan said. “But sending money across borders is horrendous.”
How Daya’s model works
When a business signs up on Daya, it completes know-your-customer (KYC) and know-your-business (KYB) checks, including director-level verification and validation against Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) registry, according to the startup.
Once approved, the business receives a dollar-denominated account provided through regulated financial partners in the United States.
When a customer abroad sends dollars to that account, the funds are converted into stablecoins and credited to the business’s Daya wallet. From there, businesses can hold stablecoins as dollar-equivalent balances, pay international suppliers, or convert funds into Naira for withdrawal into local bank accounts.
To handle currency conversion, Daya aggregates a network of professional over-the-counter (OTC) traders under anti-money laundering (AML)-compliant terms, rather than relying on a single off-ramp partner. The startup charges 0.1%–0.3% per transaction, according to Lasebikan.
The model relies on stablecoins as a settlement layer, while regulated banks and payment partners handle fiat onboarding and withdrawals.
“The USD account is an account in the US,” Lasebikan said. “Whoever wants to send you money sends funds into this account managed by our partners—reputable, licenced partners in the US. They settle us in stablecoins. So now the user has stablecoins: this is your global money, so to speak. Businesses can hold the stablecoins or convert them to Naira straight into their bank account.”
According to Lasebikan, the company is positioning stablecoins as backend infrastructure, with customers primarily focused on receiving payments, accessing dollar accounts, or moving money across borders rather than interacting directly with blockchain technology.
Similar approaches are already being used in global payments infrastructure. Bridge, the stablecoin company Stripe acquired in 2025, has built banking-linked settlement rails using stablecoins. Stripe, the payments giant, said in its 2025 annual letter that Bridge’s transaction volume grew more than fourfold.
Visa and Mastercard have also expanded stablecoin settlement pilots; companies such as BVNK, the UK-based stablecoin neobank that Mastercard agreed to acquire, are building payment infrastructure around stablecoin rails globally.
In Africa, players including Yellow Card, Juicyway, and Conduit are building similar infrastructure for businesses, focusing on cross-border payments and treasury flows. Daya operates in this same category: infrastructure for business payments using stablecoins.
A problem older than crypto
African banks have historically relied on correspondent banking relationships (CBRs), partnerships that allow local institutions to access the global financial system, clear international payments, and settle foreign currency transactions.
But those relationships have been shrinking for years.
A 2016 International Finance Corporation (IFC) report warned that African financial institutions were losing correspondent banking relationships as global banks withdrew from markets perceived as higher risk.
Compliance costs, anti-money laundering (AML) requirements, and regulatory scrutiny made many relationships economically unattractive.
For businesses, the effects are often indirect but significant.
Fewer correspondent banking relationships mean fewer payment corridors, more intermediaries, longer settlement times, and higher costs. International transfers that appear simple on the surface often move through multiple institutions before reaching their destination.
Since then, the decline of correspondent banking networks has persisted across emerging markets.
Stablecoins, especially dollar-backed digital currencies, are increasingly being pitched to fill that gap for businesses in that region, especially in Africa.
Why Daya is betting on stablecoin infrastructure
For Lasebikan, Daya reflects how much the infrastructure layer around crypto has changed since his first foray into building his former startup and personal projects.
He said that early attempts to build crypto products in Africa often meant assembling large parts of the technical stack manually while building in unclear regulatory markets and fragmented banking access.
That has shifted.
When Lasebikan first entered crypto, startups often had to build large portions of the underlying infrastructure themselves, from blockchain integrations to custody systems. Today, many of those services are provided by specialised vendors, allowing companies to focus on products rather than core crypto infrastructure, he noted.
“[What used to take] three months before would take two days [to build] today,” Lasebikan said. “When we’re building and trying to support all different [blockchains], we just outsourced that problem to people who’ve built commoditised crypto infrastructure around it.”
For Joe, the opportunity comes from watching stablecoins move beyond trading use cases into payments and treasury management for businesses operating across borders. Before Daya, he worked as a crypto analyst at Messari, a Web3 analytics firm, and later at Helicarrier alongside Lasebikan. He also built StableStats, a directory tracking companies in the stablecoin ecosystem.
Yet, Daya is operating in a market where better-funded competitors are testing the thesis. Startups such as Yellow Card and Juicyway are building similar enterprise-focused payment rails across Africa, while infrastructure providers like Conduit offer application programming interfaces (APIs) for stablecoin-based cross-border settlement.
Having raised $350,000 from Alliance DAO, Daya has critical early backing, but its runway is still limited compared to more established players.
For both founders, the real test is whether stablecoins move from being an efficiency upgrade used by a subset of businesses to becoming a default rail for cross-border payments and dollar liquidity across more African markets.
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