This investment aims to empower people and businesses in Africa by allowing easy access to digital assets and lowering barriers to global financial participation.

Kotani Pay has established itself as a name in the African financial technology landscape, with a growing network and the ability to deliver solutions tailored to local market needs.

Its infrastructure aligns with Tether’s broader mission to expand blockchain use cases, such as cross-border payments and digital asset management, provide extensive access to financial tools, and create systems that empower underserved communities to participate in the global economy.

By leveraging blockchain technology, Kotani Pay enables enterprises to manage international operations efficiently, offering businesses and individuals practical solutions to access global liquidity and transact with ease.

This investment will make access to digital assets and cross-border payment systems seamless, addressing long-standing challenges faced by SMEs and corporates in emerging markets such as high transaction costs, long settlement times, and limited access to global financial networks.

Businesses and individuals previously excluded from the international financial system will gain direct access to the global economy, supported by blockchain-powered solutions that deliver stability, security, and efficiency.

According to the Chainalysis regional report, Sub-Saharan Africa remains the smallest crypto economy.

Still, its usage patterns reveal significant insights into grassroots usage and the increasing role of crypto in everyday financial activity.

Africa is witnessing a profound shift in how people access, use, and trust financial tools, with cryptocurrency becoming increasingly central to this transformation.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, on-chain crypto transaction volume exceeded US$205 billion between July 2024 and June 2025, marking a 52% year-on-year increase, driven by retail usage and remittances.

Key markets such as Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Ethiopia lead the expansion in users and use cases. This reflects more than speculative interest that emerges from real needs in regions with high inflation, currency volatility, limited banking infrastructure, and large populations that are unbanked or underbanked.

“At Tether, we believe that blockchain technology plays a critical role in unlocking financial freedom,” said Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether. “Kotani Pay’s vision and strong regional presence make it the right fit to drive our shared goals in Africa. Together, we aim to provide businesses and individuals with access to digital assets for their global operations, reduce friction in cross-border transactions, and build a more inclusive financial future while promoting the informed use of digital assets.

“At Kotani Pay, we have been fortunate to witness and build on the rising usage of blockchain technology on the continent across a variety of use cases. This strategic investment from Tether better positions us to continue our work as a bridge to the on-chain economy, connecting millions of Africans to the global financial system. We are excited to be part of the Tether Ecosystem and to leverage the shared knowledge to advance the goals of building tools of wealth creation for African individuals and businesses,” Felix Macharia, CEO and Co-founder at Kotani Pay.

Tether and Kotani Pay are both committed to advancing the financial future of Africa by scaling access to blockchain-based tools that drive efficiency, transparency, and inclusion.

This investment sets a new benchmark for how blockchain technology can transform individual daily life and business operations across the continent. Together, we aim to shape a more resilient and inclusive digital economy for Africa.

=========================================================

[Risk Disclaimer: The information provided in this article regarding cryptocurrencies does not constitute investment advice. Given the highly volatile nature of the cryptocurrency market, investors are encouraged to carefully assess market fluctuations, the fundamentals of projects, and potential financial risks before making any trading decisions].

The post Tether Invests in Kotani Pay to Revolutionize Africa’s Digital Asset Infrastructure, Cross-Border Payments appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

The financing round, which includes both equity and debt, was co-led by Polymorphic Capital with participation from other investors, including Octerra Capital, Faculty Group, and Trive Digital.

The funding will enable the company to expand its operations into Latin America and Southeast Asia, regions facing similar liquidity issues.

MANSA focuses on improving cash flow for payment providers by offering real-time liquidity solutions. Instead of traditional lending methods that require collateral, the company underwrites loans using transaction data, providing a more flexible and efficient approach.

“Our partnership with Tether is so consequential and why we’re working very closely together to make it the primary stablecoin in emerging markets,” said MANSA’s CEO, Mouloukou Sanoh.

Founded by Sanoh and Nkiru Uwaje, MANSA has quickly grown in the payments sector. Sanoh, an experienced investor in African fintechs, previously worked at web3 VC firm Adaverse, while Uwaje was formerly an innovation manager at SWIFT and led blockchain strategy for Dell in the UK and Ireland.

The startup’s model is particularly relevant in emerging markets where payment providers often struggle with liquidity shortages, leading to delayed transactions and increased costs. 

According to MANSA, cross-border payments are projected to reach $290.2 trillion annually by 2030, and inefficiencies in the system could result in huge financial losses for businesses.

Beyond Africa, where MANSA has been primarily active, the company is now targeting Latin America and Southeast Asia, aiming to provide the same liquidity solutions to businesses facing similar challenges. 

To support this expansion, it has secured $7 million in liquidity funding from institutions, including corporate investors, quantitative funds, and hedge funds.

MANSA reports strong growth since its launch in August 2024. The company’s transaction volume surged from $1.6 million in its first month to $11 million in January 2025, with a compounded monthly growth rate of 37.5%.

So far, MANSA has processed nearly $31 million in transactions and expects to reach a $1 billion total payment volume run rate this year.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that the stablecoin provider is “proud to collaborate with MANSA and support their efforts to reshape global payment infrastructure.”

In addition to its liquidity solutions, MANSA is investing in regulatory compliance. The company has brought on industry veterans, including the former head of HSBC North Asia and the chief legal officer of Franklin Templeton, to strengthen its oversight. 

MANSA’s compliance measures include AML checks, sanction screening, KYC, KYB, transaction monitoring, and blockchain analytics tools.

Moving forward, the company plans to expand beyond liquidity provision. “We’re starting by being the primary liquidity provider to the biggest payment companies across emerging markets,” Sanoh explained.

“From there, we can handle payouts and also offer additional services like foreign exchange. The goal is to create a one-stop payment platform where they can finance their payments, settle transactions instantly, and access foreign currency seamlessly—all in one place.”

With a growing client base that includes B2B payment platforms, virtual card providers, stablecoin infrastructure companies, forex platforms, and remittance firms, MANSA’s impact on the global payments landscape is expected to deepen.

The company claims that clients using its solutions have already seen a 30% increase in transaction volumes and a 10% boost in revenue.

Vitaly Spassky, managing partner, Polymorphic Capital, said Mansa is here to disrupt a massive traditional market with blockchain and the Web3 paradigm. “Polymorphic supports extraordinary founders. The Mansa team is up to this incredible challenge.”

Ashim Egunjobi, managing partner, Octerra Capital, also stated: “We invested in MANSA because of their bold, diverse, high-calibre team of visionary founders addressing critical challenges faced by payments companies in Emerging Markets. We firmly believe that decentralized finance and asset tokenization are game-changing frontier technologies. With immense market potential in emerging economies, MANSA is uniquely positioned to drive transformative impact and bridge the credit gap across Africa.”

“We are incredibly excited to have been the first investor in Mansa. Our decision to invest was driven primarily by our strong confidence in the leadership team, and we are certain they will continue to validate our belief. Additionally, we are thrilled about the future of crypto payments and Mansa’s potential to make transactions in emerging markets faster, cheaper, and more efficient,” Sebastian Cheek, head of Investment, Faculty Group

Shawn Tan, general partner, TRIVE Digital, commented that MANSA addresses a fundamental liquidity challenge in cross-border payments, leveraging stablecoins to create more efficient and accessible financial rails. “TRIVE Digital backs visionary founders building the future of Web3, and we are excited to support the MANSA team as they drive transformative impact in the global payments industry.”

The post MANSA Raises $10 Million to Tackle Liquidity Challenges in Cross-Border Payments appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

Can you tell me about the main features of the Keet app?

Keet is a free, fully-encrypted chat application that utilises peer-to-peer connections to facilitate real-time audio/video calls, text chat and file sharing. It is powered by an innovative stack of distributed technology, including DHT distributed databases, that allows users to find and connect to each other to form a swarm, on real-world home and office networks.

This technique is called Distributed Holepunching and allows users to locate and connect to each other using only cryptographic key pairs upon authorization. 

Keet accomplishes all of this while eliminating the risks of a central point of failure and over reliance on third-party platforms.

Unlike traditional video chat apps, which use cloud-based software or outside servers as intermediaries to connect two or more people, Keet users can initiate a high-quality call directly to another individual’s device. This allows for video chatting to take place without a central server or company operating the network.

Additionally, Keet has a peer-to-peer payment built-in feature that allows for Bitcoin and USDt micropayments . By integrating payments through the Lightning network, our goal is for content creators to be able to monetize the amazing content they create without being dependent on third parties, from the people who consume the content directly to the creators. Keet ALPHA for Windows and Keet Mobile IOS & Android are now officially available.

What was the biggest technical challenge you faced during the development process?

We are a fully peer-to-peer company. We never compromise that idea. We do that because we believe privacy is one of the most important things in this day and age.

This also means we have no shortage of technical challenges, as basically every other communication app out there uses centralised servers. Making devices connect directly with each other, even on home networks, has been something we’ve been working on perfecting for multiple years before launching Keet and was definitely not an easy task.

The same goes for making scalable peer-to-peer data structures that allows the app to query just a subset of the data it needs to display chats, or stream terabytes of file data between users – all encrypted.

One thing we love about solving these problems though, is that once we solved them for Keet, we solved them for any other app out there that wants to build a scalable peer-to-peer app. That’s one of the really exciting things about working at Holepunch – once we solve for one we solve for all.

How did you ensure the security and privacy of users’ messages and data

What sets Keet apart from other chat apps, particularly other video chat apps, is the fact it is purely peer-to-peer. There has, rightfully, been growing concern over user privacy and users giving up control of their data.

That’s why we at Tether and Bitfinex chose to participate in the development of Holepunch together with the Hypercore team, the framework that Keet itself was built on..  Through Holepunch, Keet can establish a more efficient and decentralised connection between peers, while maintaining a high level of security and privacy through encryption.

Both Holepunch and Keet were founded to unlock global communications and empower freedom of speech, access to information and combat censorship around the world. Allowing users to be in control of their own data and communication channels are fundamental to breaking free from technology monopolies.

What are the unique selling points of Keet? 

Keet is a free, first-of-its-kind peer-to-peer chat app built on the Holepunch framework and uniquely integrated with Bitcoin payment features.

Unlike other chat apps on the market, Keet is a private and secured peer-to-peer chat app that allows high-quality and real-time audio-video calls and streams as well as the exchange of heavy chunks of files without the norm of a centralised server or any third party.

With Keet, millions of people will be empowered with the freedom of speech, easier access to information as well as having full control of their data and communication channel without worrying about the risk of leakages, hacking, or censorship, because Keet will never ask for users’ data. Keet believes that freedom of choice, communication and finances are the lifeblood of the future, and anything that will enhance those freedoms is worth amplifying. 

How did you approach user experience and user interface design?

We are a communications app. That means that there is a certain UX that users expect from similar apps. However, being a peer-to-peer app there have been so many things in UI we have had to rethink which has been a fun challenge. Since there are no servers, the app is never actually unavailable. Messages are stored locally and replicated with peers in your chat as they appear.

This means that when you enter a chat, it’s instant and just shows your latest replicated messages, unlike other centralised apps. As an example, in our recent versions, we worked on the UX around these kinds of things. The app now shows a small indicator when it is looking for new data, which helps users get a sense of what’s happening.

In fact, great UX is one of our biggest priorities in the company. We never want Keet to just be “a peer-to-peer chat app” – we want it to be “the best chat app”. That means having UX that takes advantage of all the power peer-to-peer offers, but by giving it to users in ways where it’s all about the features it provides. Right now I think file sharing in Keet especially reflects this. You can drop any file and it’s instantly shared. Other peers can see the files immediately, and start streaming them immediately. No technobabble needed.

One of the things we love about building Keet, is that it’s an app we use extensively everyday to communicate with the team and friends. That means we are heavy users and get to provide our own feedback both to the internal roadmap but also in terms of what needs improvement or fixing.

As most other companies, we also have a dedicated Q/A team that helps make sure the app has no regressions and tracks whatever bugs appear. Testing peer-to-peer apps is a bit different than testing centralised apps. Since the app is all you need, testing fully end-to-end is a lot easier than normal deployments. We just swarm a prerelease app to our network and have our team test that. Once the testing period is over, we simply update the release app – all over the peer-to-peer network obviously!

Can you tell me about any unique or innovative solutions you implemented in your app

This is a hard question as the entire app is unique and innovative behind the scenes. Similar to how we describe the UX, one of the things we keep loving about Keet is how it presents a really simple interface on top of an extremely novel and innovative engine. Some things that always stand out to us as technical people, is how the entire app itself is distributed peer-to-peer as well.

Once you get the initial installer from the web site, it’s all data swarming between you and the peers. This is truly powerful, as updates are just signed by us, but run directly between users, giving them even more privacy and resilience. This is the same internal engine, Hypercore, that runs chat replication, file replication and more, and this just shows the power of peer-to-peer. We solved general data replication once, and now every aspect of our app is using it.

Bringing the entire peer-to-peer stack to mobile, also required a lot of innovation. In the end we have to develop a completely new runtime for running Javascript based apps on mobile with the capabilities we needed for peer-to-peer, such as networking, file system apis, even timers.

We actually JUST released the latest version of this engine to our mobile app, and it is super exciting to watch that develop and mature.

What are your future plans for the development and improvement of your Keet instant messenger app

Keet is currently in ALPHA, but since the release of Keet mobile we’ve been heavily iterating it and we are getting ready to release the BETA version that incorporates a lot of feedback we’ve been getting from users. BETA runs on a fully new chat engine that we are calling Big Rooms. It allows for chat rooms with hundreds of thousands of users inside, still all fully peer-to-peer. This also includes features like emoji reactions, moderator roles and more. We are super excited to start rolling this out to users soon.

Additionally, we are implementing blind mirroring on top of the Big Rooms engine. Blind mirroring allows any peer to host a fully encrypted live copy of a chat room. With blind mirroring you can have fully private rooms, but you can offline the uptime of the rooms to peers in the network – with no loss of privacy. This is especially exciting for Keet mobile, as it allows you to offload your mobile rooms to other Keet peers, making it really easy to host mobile-only rooms.

We are also expanding our payments options in the app, integrating USDt payments and more. 2023 will definitely be a great year for Keet.

The post Paolo Ardoino Speaks on Keet App’s Revolutionary Bitcoin-Infused Chat Platform appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

Initial blockchain support will include Ethereum, TechEconomy.ng can report.

GBP₮ will join four other fiat-currency pegged tokens Tether has in the market: the U.S. dollar-pegged USD₮, the Euro-pegged EUR₮, the offshore Chinese Yuan-pegged CNH₮, as well as the recently launched MXN₮, the Mexican Peso-pegged stablecoin.

In April of this year, The UK Treasury announced plans to make the country a global crypto hub. According to its website, the government will also make moves to see stablecoins recognized as a valid form of payment.

This initiative, paired with hundreds of millions of people using crypto around the world, makes the United Kingdom a prime location for the next wave of industry innovation.

GBP₮ will be a stable digital asset that is pegged 1:1 to the British Pound Sterling. GBP₮ will be built by the trusted team of developers behind Tether USD₮ and operate under tether.to. The creation of GBP₮ will put British Pounds on the blockchain and provide a faster, less costly option for asset transfers.

“We believe that the United Kingdom is the next frontier for blockchain innovation and the wider implementation of cryptocurrency for financial markets. We hope to help lead this innovation by providing cryptocurrency users worldwide with access to a GBP-denominated stablecoin issued by the largest stablecoin issuer,” said Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Tether. “Tether is ready and willing to work with UK regulators to make this goal a reality and looks forward to the continued adoption of Tether stablecoins”.

The launch of GBP₮ represents Tether’s dedication to pioneering stablecoin technology and bringing the largest and most liquid stablecoins to global markets everywhere. GBP₮ will reinforce GBP as one of the most dominant currencies across the globe and introduce an FX opportunity for USD₮ and EUR₮. It will also act as an on-ramp to the decentralized finance ecosystem.

Tether is the largest stablecoin by market capitalization and a champion for financial freedom. Created in October 2014, Tether has grown to become the most traded cryptocurrency and is widely used globally to bank the unbanked.

Tether is disrupting the legacy financial system by offering a more modern approach to money.

By introducing fiat currency-digital cash to the bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, Liquid Network, Omni, Tron, Algorand, and Solana blockchains, Tether makes a significant contribution to a more connected ecosystem.

Tether combines digital currency benefits, such as instant global transactions, with traditional currency benefits, such as price stability.

With a commitment to transparency and compliance, Tether is a fast and low-cost way to transact with money.

The post Tether To Launch GBP₮, Tether Tokens Pegged to the British Pound Sterling appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.