When Asset Chain, a Nigerian blockchain company, launched a money market product through its affiliate crypto investment app Xend Finance in May, it marked a shift in how stablecoins are used in Africa’s largest crypto economy. For years, digital tokens pegged to fiat currencies have been treated primarily as payment instruments. Now, Xend Finance is turning them into a channel for investment returns.
The company’s money market product is powered by the cNGN, the naira-backed stablecoin issued by WrappedCBDC. Users buy cNGN on Xend Finance’s app and commit it to licenced fund managers, who place the money in short-term instruments such as treasury bills and commercial paper. Returns are then credited back to users in cNGN.
“Our goal is to give everyday people access to the same regulated investment opportunities as large institutions,” said Xend Finance and Asset Chain CEO, Ugochukwu Aronu. “With as little as $5, anyone can start earning yields from Nigeria’s money markets.”
Yield through stablecoins
Xend Finance provides the platform for the cNGN-tied money market fund, with the stablecoin being accessible on its blockchain trading platform, Asset Chain. Retail investors can earn up to a 20.25% yield from investing in the cNGN money market fund. According to the company, about 8.8 million invested cNGN tokens were earning yield at annualised rates as of June, with the platform generating revenue from transaction fees.
Using the cNGN in a financial investment product shifts the digital asset’s role from payments to a speculative financial vehicle. Yet Aronu told that it presents an opportunity to incentivise adoption of the local stablecoin.
While WrappedCBDC issues the cNGN stablecoin, it has said that it does not oversee this investment side of its product. The issuer maintains that its role remains limited to maintaining a fiat naira peg, safeguarding its reserves to prevent depegging and mint-burn risk, and complying with all digital asset regulatory provisions in the Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Regulatory Incubation (RI) programme.
“It is important to distinguish between a stablecoin and an investment product,” the cNGN issuer told . “The cNGN is a payment instrument, a digital representation of cash. A money market fund offered by a third party is a different thing. We comply fully with the regulations that apply to us as an issuer of a payment instrument. Platforms and asset managers are responsible for their own products.”
This separation of duties is the global standard for payment infrastructure providers, including major stablecoin issuers and traditional banks, according to the cNGN issuer, alluding to global crypto firms Coinbase and Kraken, which offer yields to users for holding the USDC stablecoin. The cNGN issuer claims every token is backed one-for-one by naira held in Nigerian commercial banks, with independent reserve attestations published on its website.
At the time of this report, cNGN’s last published attestation report was in July 2025, showing that it held about 51.6% of its reserve assets in bank deposits and the rest in treasury bills and money market fund custodied by asset managers.
Yet if the cNGN stablecoin is used at scale for investment purposes, regulators could decide that the issuers themselves need to take on new obligations.
Xend Finance relies on licenced money market managers to generate the yield. Nigeria’s local money market rates are among the highest in Africa, with naira funds paying double digits in recent months.
Alongside the naira product, Xend Finance also offers a dollar-based savings option in partnership with Rise, a Nigerian wealth-tech company which also operates in Kenya. This allows users to hold naira- or dollar-backed savings inside the same app.
Regulatory questions ahead
Nigeria’s SEC has taken notice. In a paper released this week, SEC director general Emomotimi Agama warned that when stablecoins are structured to deliver yield, they start to resemble securities.
“From a policy standpoint, stablecoins pose challenges in areas such as legal clarity, governance, AML and CTF compliance, cybersecurity, consumer protection, data privacy, and tax enforcement,” Agama wrote in a paper released Wednesday. “Addressing these concerns requires coordinated regulatory responses and robust institutional frameworks.”
Agama argued that stablecoins have not yet demonstrated consistent price stability, raising questions about their reliability. He warned that when the purpose of holding them shifts from payments to financial returns, the risk profile changes. Payment use mainly affects users and infrastructure, while investment use introduces wider risks to lenders, borrowers, and protocol operators, heightening the chance of systemic contagion. When stablecoins are used in investment arrangements, Agama said the SEC must ensure they comply with securities laws.
Dollar-backed stablecoins, like the USDT, have already become vital in Nigeria as tools for retail payments, and corporate use in treasury and cross-border payments. By tying the cNGN—which is yet to receive the same adoption scale—to yields, Xend Finance has given it a broader financial role.
The question now becomes whether this is a pathway to financial inclusion or a source of regulatory tension. It will depend on how transparent the companies are about reserves and assets under management (AUM), and how Nigeria’s regulators classify stablecoins beyond simple payment instruments.
“Investor protection comes from our partners. These are SEC-approved, insured money market providers,” said Aronu. “Right now, we don’t see any regulatory risk. We stay within approved structures and work with licenced partners. That keeps us safe.”
Bigger tokenisation plans
The cNGN money market fund is only the starting point. Xend Finance’s broader ambition is to make Asset Chain a marketplace for tokenised assets, including real estate. Beyond equities, Aronu has said the blockchain will eventually host regulated investment products that can be broken down into smaller, more affordable units.
Assetbase, an alternative investment platform owned by Rise CEO Eke Urum and still in beta, plans to tokenise its real estate assets on Asset Chain. Urum said the goal is to “localise value” by putting Nigerian assets on a local blockchain infrastructure and opening them to a wide pool of investors.
The cNGN is expected to play a central role in this strategy. Since the stablecoin is already accessible on Asset Chain, where more than 134.5 million tokens have been minted, any expansion into tokenised equities or real estate would rely on the local stablecoin as the settlement layer.
The model could provide wider access to alternative investment options, greater transparency through on-chain records, and lower entry barriers—due to fractional ownership—for local and diaspora retail investors. Yet its success rests on the strength of the cNGN’s reserves and the credibility of its audits.
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