If you swipe across the social media pages of Quidax, Yellow Card, and Busha—three prominent crypto startups operating in Nigeria—in recent months, you’d notice one common detail: they are heavily promoting their B2B crypto payments business. Yellow Card and Quidax have run paid promotional campaigns for their B2B application programming interfaces (APIs), targeting businesses and fintechs; Busha has mostly promoted this service organically.
The push toward businesses reflects a stronger focus on a part of their operations that has long been active but less visible. These crypto companies are now spotlighting their B2B payment solutions to meet growing demand from African fintechs that want to offer crypto payments without taking on regulatory burden. These startups prioritise B2B services to complement the retail side, as it offers a more stable and scalable way to grow their market share.
“There was a gap in the market,” said Tochy Emereole, marketing lead at Quidax API Business. “There’s been high crypto adoption, especially in Nigeria, and many people have been interested in building crypto products. But the talent gap has been a problem.”
According to a Hashed Emergent report, Africa lags behind other regions in blockchain talent. While Nigeria leads the continent in the number of Web3 developers, they still make up only 4% of the global developer workforce.
Building a traditional fintech and building in Web3 require different skill sets, like knowing how to work with blockchains, write smart contracts, and use new programming languages like Solidity, Rust, or Move. Handling the technology in Web3 is more technical and requires a steeper learning curve—something few engineers in Nigeria are willing to embrace, said Emereole.
Yet, the increasing adoption of cryptocurrencies across Africa’s big four—Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Ethiopia—has also pressured fintechs to integrate crypto and stablecoin payment rails to meet customer demand. Since 2023, African traditional fintechs, including Flutterwave, Chipper Cash, Onafriq, Grey, and Eversend, have integrated stablecoin payment rails for different reasons.
On the customer side, fintechs are looking to solve cross-border payment needs for their users, while businesses-serving fintechs are exploring crypto liquidity as a workaround for FX shortages. This makes stablecoins a practical choice for retail and enterprise use cases, hence why API providers are shifting toward this segment.
Their pitch is simple: crypto startups can build full-stack applications and digital asset exchanges by connecting to these APIs and riding on their technology. Traditional fintechs that want to offer stablecoin-to-fiat payments tap into this technology, bypassing the need to build these apps.
Building a digital asset exchange, the API way
To build a thriving digital asset exchange in Africa or anywhere else, startups need three key things: talent and technical knowledge to build great Web3 finance apps on the blockchain, liquidity, and regulatory clarity—or at least a reliable compliance partner to navigate shifting rules and keep the operations of clients above board.
Quidax, Yellow Card, and Busha are betting on the ease and simplicity they provide for startups, especially businesses just starting out.
With these APIs, developers only need to know how to make API calls, handle responses, and test their applications in sandbox environments provided by the crypto platforms. This makes it easier for traditional fintechs, mobile apps, and even neobanks to introduce crypto payments and trading features without overhauling their systems or hiring blockchain engineers.
These API providers either charge an integration or usage fee on an ongoing basis. To ensure compliance from their business clients, they perform due diligence before onboarding them. This includes checks for operational readiness, sufficient capital to support transaction volume, and adherence to compliance standards such as Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML), and transaction monitoring.
“Quidax doesn’t charge for API integrations,” said Emmanuel Onyo, CEO of Azawire, a crypto company still in its beta stage that uses Quidax’s API. “They charge for transactions of your customers after you get onboard and start using their products.”
Different businesses get different bills. They are charged depending on the crypto solutions they request, the number of customers they serve, and the size of transactions they process on their platforms.
Quidax offers Ramp by Quidax, an API suite that allows startups to build crypto exchanges, wallets, and on-ramp and off-ramp services, which it claims it built from the ground up. It is also testing Ramp by Telegram, an API product suite that allows businesses to offer merchant payment solutions on the social media platform.
“We provide wallet services and on-ramp and off-ramp solutions,” said Emereole. “The wallet services are for startups looking to build custodial wallets to allow their customers to hold crypto. Our on-ramp and off-ramp APIs allow businesses to enable their customers to convert crypto to naira [off-ramp] and naira back to crypto [on-ramp].”
This plug-and-play model lowers the barrier for innovation and is especially appealing in Africa, where development cycles need to be lean, fast, and compliant. While the APIs handle the heavy lifting, the startups plugging in still maintain full ownership of their customer experience and branding.
Quidax, Busha, and Yellow Card provide liquidity pools
Liquidity shortage is a crisis for startups building digital asset exchanges. Thinner liquidity pools slow down operations. For example, when a user deposits a sum of money on a crypto platform to buy Bitcoin, they expect their trades to happen in real-time.
However, when there’s no crypto liquidity pool, the issuer (the exchange, which is typically counterparty to the trades) has to source the liquidity to give to the user.
Some startups either use market makers (bulk crypto liquidity providers) to cover trades, or they provide the liquidity themselves. Without the liquidity to back these trades, it delays how quickly these transactions go through, leading to frustration for users.
Quidax, Yellow Card, and Busha all provide liquidity as part of their API access. Quidax claims it provides an “unlimited” crypto liquidity pool for businesses and fintechs to offer on-ramp and off-ramp services.
“We have the right balance of market makers and market takers on our platform. Our order book is always filled up with transactions, so we have enough liquidity to serve our customers [businesses],” said Emereole.
Quidax’s competitor, Yellow Card, a multi-national crypto company spanning 20 African countries, supports multiple fiat currencies for trade settlements in the two markets where it holds licences: Botswana and South Africa.
Through its API product, Yellow Card serves global businesses that want to provide merchant crypto payments or integrate Yellow Card as a liquidity provider. It currently counts Coinbase, the largest US-owned crypto company, as one of its clients, after a partnership in 2024.
“There has always been a lot of red tape and high barriers to entry for global companies,” said Sean van Kerckhoven, director of partnerships at Yellow Card. “Well-known crypto businesses like Coinbase have users in Africa, but because of regulatory restrictions in certain countries, they can’t set up local entities, offer local payment methods, or open merchant accounts.”
All three crypto companies declined to name specific businesses using their APIs or how many clients they’re serving, citing client confidentiality clauses and non-disclosure agreements. But Quidax claims that its business clients make up a significant portion of their users.
Businesses want regulatory cover
In Nigeria, the crypto sector has slowly been inching closer to regulation. The country’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched the Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme (ARIP) in June 2024 to issue licences to crypto startups. While scores of companies applied to that programme—including some still waiting to apply—only Quidax and Busha received provisional crypto licences in August 2024.
With the newly signed Investments and Securities Act (2025), which mandates startups to register with the SEC, new startups planning to launch digital asset exchanges are stuck in regulatory limbo. To fast-track their operations, these companies flock to exchanges like Quidax and Busha to secure regulatory cover without getting on the regulator’s bad side.
The provisional crypto licences issued to Quidax and Busha served as a much-needed boost. It gave both startups the credibility and confidence to market their API offerings.
“The provisional crypto licence helped,” a spokesperson at Busha said. “But it’s not because businesses couldn’t partake in Busha’s B2B solutions in the past. The approval-in-principle allowed more businesses to become comfortable engaging in crypto-forward payment solutions than in the past.”
Quidax has a dedicated team of about 20 people working on the business side. However, some of them, including product designers and developers, split their time between the retail and B2B businesses. The crypto startup has been operating a B2B API payments business since 2022, but it started marketing the product intently when it secured its licence.
“In the first year, we pushed it only to a specific number of people,” said Emereole. “We did not want to scale too fast. We started actively pushing the API in January 2024, and by mid-year, it started to gain traction, and by then, we were confident of what we were building.”
While Yellow Card does not currently hold a licence in Nigeria, it operates under regulatory approvals in Botswana and South Africa. This allows it to open its API products to global businesses seeking to provide merchant payment services in these countries.
For businesses and fintechs flocking to these API providers, there’s one perk: they can offer crypto and stablecoin payment rails without registering for the ARIP. Quidax and Busha provide a regulatory cover for this.
All-in on the business side
The relationship between crypto API providers and the businesses that use their tools is mutually beneficial. For platforms like Quidax, Yellow Card, and Busha, B2B clients offer more stable revenue than retail traders, whose transaction volumes tend to drop during market downturns. Once a business is onboarded, it pays a steady service fee, making B2B a more predictable and sustainable income stream.
Still, none of these companies is abandoning its retail roots. While B2B is a growing focus, all three exchanges say they remain committed to serving individual users.
As more fintechs and businesses look to embed crypto features—like wallets, on-ramps, stablecoin-to-fiat off-ramps, or trading—into their products, API providers are stepping in to meet that need. Yet, some exchanges may find it faster and more efficient to plug into ready-made infrastructure than build everything from scratch.
