Africa built fast digital finance on top of systems that never fully learned how to carry institutional money at scale, and now the strain is showing underneath the surface.
At the DeFi Summit during the just-concluded Africa Tech Summit, the VALR Stage was primed for another crypto pitch. Instead, Munachi Ogueke, CEO and Co-Founder of OneLiquidity, delivered something more pointed. His argument was not about tokens or price charts. It was about plumbing.
Africa, he said, does not lack liquidity. It does not lack developers or ambition. What it lacks is coordinated market infrastructure.
The distinction sounds academic until you place a $50 million institutional transaction at the center of it. Not a retail transfer. Not a remittance. A real trade involving factories, commodities, payroll, counterparties. Now imagine that transaction negotiated across fragmented chats, bilateral messaging, opaque pricing, and settlement rails that can freeze mid-flow. That is the friction Ogueke was describing.
Behind the noise of apps and dashboards, the real constraint is structural.
Africa’s digital asset adoption is no longer fringe. Stablecoins are already embedded in corporate settlement flows across multiple jurisdictions. Annual transaction volumes run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Some estimates push the figure higher when informal flows are counted.
Yet liquidity in isolation does not create a functioning market. Markets require price discovery that is visible, counterparty risk that is measurable, and settlement that is predictable. Without that architecture, spreads widen. Capital slows. Trust becomes personal rather than institutional.
Ogueke framed the problem bluntly. Execution in many high-value corridors still depends on bilateral negotiation. If settlement depends on direct messaging between counterparties, what enforces completion when compliance flags appear mid-transfer? What happens when payment rails fail during reconciliation? Operational risk accumulates in the gaps.
In London or New York, clearinghouses and coordinated exchanges absorb much of that uncertainty. Risk is centralized, netted, and monitored. Africa, in parts of its fintech evolution, skipped that layer and moved straight to digital interfaces. The front end improved. The back end remained fragmented.
It is a structural asymmetry.
The African fintech narrative has often celebrated speed. Faster onboarding. Faster payments. Faster FX quotes. Speed is visible and marketable. Infrastructure is not.
OneLiquidity’s pitch was almost anti-heroic in tone. The company does not want to be another interface competing for user downloads. It positions itself as a background layer, a coordinated liquidity engine built for African currencies and stable value digital settlement.
The architecture is modular. A wallet module that allows institutions to generate multiple crypto addresses tied to specific customers. A fiat module capable of issuing bank accounts and IBANs for collections and disbursements. A trading module offering RFQs, OTC execution, market and limit orders, and notional credit allocation.
Underneath that menu sits the more ambitious claim: a single verifiable layer where risk is priced and settlement is enforced.
There is an implicit critique here. Africa has plenty of platforms. What it lacks is a shared market spine.
The most revealing part of the presentation was not about trading mechanics. It was about credit.
In developed financial systems, institutional credit assessment is layered into the infrastructure. Risk scoring, collateral frameworks, clearing mechanisms. In much of Africa, formal credit data is thin, fragmented, or uneven across borders.
OneLiquidity’s lending model attempts to bridge that gap using digital asset collateral. Lock 1 BTC valued at $120,000 and receive 80% liquidity to execute a trade. Repay within a defined window, reclaim the underlying asset. The mechanics resemble collateralized lending desks in global crypto markets, but applied to cross-border trade and commodity flows.
There is a paradox here. Crypto, often framed as speculative, becomes the collateral layer in a system trying to stabilize trade finance.
Whether that model scales depends on volatility tolerance, regulatory clarity, and institutional appetite. A 20% buffer may hold in normal conditions. It looks thinner during a market drawdown. Risk engines matter more than marketing here.
It is tempting to treat infrastructure as a technical conversation. It is not. Settlement certainty is macroeconomic.
When capital slows because counterparties hesitate, inventory cycles stretch. Importers hedge more aggressively. FX spreads widen. Small distortions compound across supply chains.
In fragmented markets, trust tends to be relational. Traders rely on reputation and repeat interaction. That works within tight networks. It does not scale to continental liquidity corridors.
A coordinated Africa fintech infrastructure could alter that dynamic. If price discovery becomes visible and risk exposure netted across participants, liquidity pools deepen. The marginal cost of capital declines. That in turn affects how businesses plan inventory, payroll, and cross-border sourcing.
None of this is automatic. Infrastructure does not enforce prudence. It enforces rules. Those rules must be credible.
Any discussion of coordinated liquidity in Africa runs into regulatory fragmentation. FX controls in some markets. Capital mobility restrictions in others. Varying treatment of digital assets across jurisdictions.
If a liquidity layer spans multiple countries, it intersects with central banks, payment regulators, and financial intelligence units. Compliance modules, which OneLiquidity says are embedded in its stack, become as critical as trading engines.
The regulatory future will likely determine whether such platforms remain niche institutional tools or evolve into systemic components of regional finance. If authorities perceive them as shadow clearinghouses, scrutiny will intensify. If they view them as risk concentrators that improve transparency, engagement could follow.
There is no single continental stance. Policy coherence remains uneven.
The African fintech cycle has matured. Early years favored customer acquisition and interface innovation. Venture capital chased volume growth. Now margins are tighter. Compliance costs are rising. Liquidity depth is under examination.
In that environment, infrastructure becomes a competitive differentiator.
Firms that control settlement layers can influence spreads and credit allocation. They become nodes rather than endpoints. The power dynamic changes. Control of liquidity routing confers leverage over pricing and execution.
OneLiquidity is not alone in seeing that opening. Several pan-African payment processors and digital asset exchanges are building clearing-like functions behind their platforms. The race is not for app downloads. It is for institutional integration.
Whoever builds the deepest coordinated pool may define how Africa fintech infrastructure evolves over the next decade.
Ogueke was explicit on one point. This is not about crypto culture. It is about infrastructure.
That distinction matters. Crypto adoption in Africa has often been framed as a response to currency volatility or capital controls. Infrastructure, by contrast, addresses systemic coordination.
The difference is subtle but consequential. One narrative centers on escape. The other centers on construction.
If Africa develops its own coordinated liquidity rails, it reduces dependence on external clearing systems and correspondent banking bottlenecks. Cross-border trade could settle within regional frameworks rather than routing through distant financial centers.
The political economy implications are significant. Financial autonomy is not declared. It is built into pipes and protocols.
The core claim is bold: Africa does not lack liquidity. It lacks structure.
The next 3 to 5 years will test that thesis. If coordinated liquidity layers gain traction, spreads in major corridors should compress. Settlement times should stabilize. Institutional flows may consolidate onto shared engines.
If fragmentation persists, capital will remain agile but expensive. Informal trust networks will continue to dominate high-value corridors. Infrastructure will stay partial.
The deeper tension is cultural as much as technical. Markets accustomed to bilateral negotiation may resist centralized risk engines. Trust built on personal relationships does not migrate overnight to algorithmic scoring models.
Still, the conversation at the DeFi Summit felt less about speculative cycles and more about architecture. Less about price and more about plumbing.
For a continent with hundreds of billions of dollars moving through digital channels each year, that recalibration feels overdue.
