Nigeria’s Importers Are Desperate For Dollars—This Startup Says It Has The Answer

A particularly stressful episode involving some Nigerian car importers from a few years back was the encounter that radicalised Sheriff Adedokun, so to speak.

They had won the auction, beaten the competition, and secured the vehicle. The money was sitting in their naira accounts, and the supplier was waiting. The only thing standing between them and the deal was a payment that had to cross a border before a deadline.

“Watching businesses scramble to find alternative routes, rely on intermediaries or worry about whether a payment would arrive before the deadline made me realise how much unnecessary uncertainty had become part of international trade,” said Adedokun, founder and CEO of Clea, a Nigerian startup using stablecoins to help importers pay foreign suppliers. “It shouldn’t take that much effort for a legitimate business to pay a legitimate supplier.”

His frustration reflects a broader crisis. Cross-border payments into Sub-Saharan Africa cost an average of 8.78% for a USD 200.00 transfer in the first quarter of 2025, nearly three times the United Nations’ target of 3%.

In Nigeria, less than 50% of manufacturers could access foreign exchange from the official window in the third quarter of 2025, despite recent reforms. The manufacturing sector shed 18,935 jobs in the first half of 2025, up 74% from the second half of 2024. About 800 companies shut down last year.

Adedokun’s answer to this mess is Clea, a platform that lets Nigerian importers pay in naira and settle with international suppliers in US dollars within hours, using stablecoins as the settlement rail. Before Clea, Adedokun spent several years building businesses that served customers across different markets, so cross-border payments became part of the day-to-day experience.

“Over time, I realised that moving money internationally is never just about sending funds from one account to another. Every payment sits behind a commercial decision that someone is waiting on. It could be a supplier releasing goods, a business replenishing inventory or a customer expecting delivery,” he told WT.

Adedokun explained that working so closely to those transactions changed his thinking on cross-border payments. “I came to appreciate how much confidence businesses place in the financial system every time they agree to trade. When that confidence is shaken, the effects ripple through the entire business. That perspective has stayed with me and continues to shape how we think about building Clea.”

During its pilot phase, Clea processed over USD 4 M in cross-border transactions. The company is now expanding across all 36 Nigerian states, targeting importers trading with suppliers in the United States, China and the UAE.

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Clea is one of dozens of African fintechs betting that stablecoins—cryptocurrencies pegged to assets like the US dollar—can bypass a financial system that was never designed for Africa’s trade volumes.

The bet is not without evidence. Between July 2023 and June 2024, Nigeria processed nearly USD 22 B in stablecoin transactions, making it the continent’s largest market. Sub-Saharan Africa received USD 205 B in on-chain value between mid-2024 and mid-2025, a 52% increase from the prior year. Stablecoins now account for 43% of all crypto transaction volume in the region, while deposits in Nigeria have surged 9,000% between 2018 and 2025.

“What convinced me was that we were not looking at stablecoins as speculation. We were looking at them as settlement infrastructure,” Adedokun said. “A lot of the conversation around crypto has been about trading, hype, and price movement. That is not what interested me. What interested me was the ability to move value faster, more transparently, and across borders without waiting days for traditional rails to settle.”

The shift is being noticed at the highest levels. Nigeria’s Central Bank mentioned stablecoins at least 68 times in its newly released Payments System Vision 2028. In October 2025, Central Bank of Nigeria Governor Olayemi Cardoso announced the creation of a working group to study how the country could adopt stablecoins. The bank has since reaffirmed its commitment to shaping global regulatory frameworks for digital assets.

This marks a remarkable turn for a regulator that, in February 2021, ordered banks to close accounts associated with crypto transactions and, not that long ago, detained two executives of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.

But the path is not straightforward. Regulators remain cautious. South Africa’s central bank governor has warned that stablecoins could undermine monetary sovereignty by allowing users to effectively “manufacture” dollars outside traditional systems. In Central Africa, the regional bank has ruled out dollar-backed stablecoins entirely.

And then there are the banks. “The hardest ‘no’ usually comes from banking or infrastructure partners who see Africa, cross-border payments, and stablecoins in the same sentence and immediately assume the risk is too high,” Adedokun said. “Sometimes they do not even fully understand the use case at first. We are not trying to move anonymous funds. We are helping verified businesses pay verified suppliers, with documentation and audit trails.”

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That tension between innovation and institutional caution defines the space Clea is trying to occupy. The African Development Bank estimates unmet demand for trade finance in Africa ranged from USD 74 B to USD 92 B in 2024. With African imports exceeding USD 1 T annually, the gap between what businesses need and what the financial system provides is vast.

Adedokun believes the answer lies in treating stablecoins not as a destination but as infrastructure, a step in the evolution of how money moves. “If you look at Africa over the last twenty years, we’ve consistently adopted technologies that make commerce easier,” he said. “Mobile money wasn’t successful because people wanted digital wallets. It succeeded because it solved a real problem. I think stablecoins should be viewed through the same lens.”

The real test, however, is whether this works for the businesses that matter most; the SMEs that cannot afford to wait days for a payment to clear.

“For an importer, sending money abroad is emotional. It is not just a button in an app. It may represent their entire working capital,” Adedokun said. “They need more than a good rate. They need to believe the money will get there, the supplier will recognise it, the documentation will be correct, and someone will support them if there is an issue.”

The tech entrepreneur contends that the importers who sparked his thinking were not looking for a revolution but simply a payment that would arrive on time. Whether stablecoins can deliver that reliably, and whether the regulators and banks will let them, remains the open question.

What is no longer in doubt is that African businesses are already voting with their wallets. Nearly USD 22 B worth of stablecoin transactions in a single year suggests the infrastructure gap is too big to ignore.