The real question is this: What if widespread crypto adoption is actually the least important requirement for becoming Africa’s crypto hub?

That sounds counterintuitive. After all, Nigeria consistently ranks among the world’s most active crypto markets.

Millions of young people use digital assets for payments, savings, remittances and investments. Venture capital continues to flow into blockchain-related businesses. Local talent is building products that serve users across multiple continents.

Yet history offers an uncomfortable lesson. The places that become industry hubs are rarely the places with the highest consumption. They are the places with the strongest systems.

Hollywood did not become the centre of global entertainment because Americans watched the most films. Silicon Valley did not emerge because Californians used the most computers. London did not become a financial powerhouse because Britons loved banking more than everyone else.

They became hubs because they built ecosystems. That distinction matters.

Many conversations about Nigeria’s crypto future focus on adoption metrics. How many users? How many wallets? How many transactions? How much trading volume?

Those numbers are impressive, but they can also be misleading. Consumption creates activity. Ecosystems create dominance.

If Nigeria truly wants to become Africa’s crypto hub, it must think beyond adoption and focus on what I call the “Hub Equation”: Talent + Capital + Regulation + Infrastructure.

Most countries succeed in one or two of these areas. Very few succeed in all four simultaneously.

Nigeria’s greatest advantage is talent. Across blockchain development, product design, cybersecurity, engineering and digital entrepreneurship, Nigerian professionals are increasingly visible on the global stage.

Many of the most innovative crypto products serving African users are being designed, built or scaled by Nigerians.

The second advantage is market depth. A large population, strong entrepreneurial culture and persistent demand for alternative financial solutions create conditions that are difficult to replicate elsewhere on the continent.

Markets matter because they provide the testing ground where products evolve from ideas into viable businesses.

However, talent and demand alone do not create hubs. The remaining two variables, regulation and infrastructure, often determine whether innovation stays, scales or leaves.

This is where the conversation becomes more nuanced. A common assumption is that innovation thrives when governments simply “stay out of the way”.

In reality, investors rarely commit significant capital to environments characterised by uncertainty.

The world’s leading innovation centres did not emerge from regulatory absence. They emerged from regulatory clarity.

The lesson is not that crypto should be heavily controlled. The lesson is that predictable rules attract serious builders. Founders can adapt to regulation. What they struggle to adapt to is unpredictability.

Infrastructure presents a similar challenge. Reliable digital identity systems, efficient payment rails, cybersecurity standards, institutional custody solutions and scalable internet connectivity are often less exciting than token launches or market rallies. Yet these foundations determine whether an industry can mature beyond speculation.

This reveals a useful way to think about Nigeria’s opportunity. The race to become Africa’s crypto hub is not a technology race. It is a coordination race. The winning country will not necessarily be the one with the most traders, the most social media conversations or even the most start-ups.

It will be the country that aligns entrepreneurs, regulators, investors and institutions around a shared vision of long-term value creation. Nigeria is arguably closer to that position than many observers realise. The talent exists. The demand exists. The entrepreneurial energy exists.

What remains is the deliberate construction of the systems that transform activity into leadership. The future of crypto in Africa will not be determined by who adopts the technology first. It will be determined by who builds the environment where innovation can compound.

And if Nigeria understands that distinction, it may discover that becoming Africa’s crypto hub is not primarily a crypto challenge, it is a nation-building challenge.

About the Author

Bidemi Oke is the Chief Executive Officer of FlashChange, a fintech platform focused on secure digital asset exchange. He is an entrepreneur and vibrant leader, recognised for driving innovation and redefining access in the financial technology industry.

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The company began the process on Wednesday morning, starting with staff in Asia.

Workers in Singapore received the first emails at around 4 a.m. local time, while employees in the United States and other regions are expected to hear later in the day.

People familiar with the plans said the notifications will roll out in stages across time zones.

Meta has asked many of those affected to work from home while the process continues. The cuts are part of a restructuring as the company moves more resources into artificial intelligence and reduces costs elsewhere in the business.

The reductions are expected to hit engineering and product teams the most. Some staff were told earlier that further changes could follow later in the year, depending on how the restructuring progresses.

At the same time, Meta has moved about 7,000 employees into newly formed teams focused on AI work, including product development and autonomous systems. The company ended March with just under 80,000 employees before these latest changes took effect.

In an internal memo, Meta’s Head of People, Janelle Gale, said the company is moving towards a flatter structure.

“We’re now at the stage where many orgs can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership.”

“We believe this will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding,” she said.

Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has made artificial intelligence the company’s main priority.

Meta has committed more than $100 billion in capital spending this year on AI infrastructure and related projects, as it tries to keep pace with competitors including Google and OpenAI.

The company has already carried out several rounds of layoffs in recent years as part of an efficiency stimulation. It has also encouraged staff to use AI tools in daily work, including coding and internal systems automation.

Inside the company, the changes have created unease. Some employees have complained about job security and the direction of internal AI projects.

More than 1,000 staff members signed a petition asking the company to avoid extensive data collection from employee devices for AI training, including inputs such as keystrokes, mouse movement and screen activity.

“Automators like Meta risk no longer being an employer of choice as it’s being revealed that they will cut out the human when the opportunity presents itself,” said Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, professor of economics and behavioural science at University of Oxford.

“Doing so might well lead to short-term cost savings but risks longer-term growth potential by undermining employee wellbeing and engagement.”

Investor considerations have also grown around the scale of Meta’s AI spending and whether it will deliver returns.

While the company describes the job cuts as a way to offset the cost of its AI expansion and restructuring, analysts at Evercore estimate the layoffs could generate about $3 billion in savings for Meta.

That figure is small compared with its bigger investment plans, and capital expenditure could reach about $145 billion this year, with expectations of further heavy spending on AI infrastructure over the coming years.

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Murati’s recorded testimony was played on Wednesday in Oakland, California, during Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI.

Musk accuses the company of abandoning the nonprofit mission it started with and turning into a profit-driven business tied to Microsoft.

Speaking about Altman’s leadership, Murati said: “My concern was about Sam saying one thing to one person and completely the opposite to another person.” 

She added that he was “creating chaos” inside the company and, at times, was deceptive with her and other executives.

The testimony focused heavily on the leadership situation that shook OpenAI in November 2023. At the time, the board removed Sam Altman as chief executive before bringing him back just days later, while Mira Murati briefly served as interim CEO during that period.

She told the court she still wanted Altman to remain chief executive, although she pressed board members for clearer reasons behind the decision to remove him. At the same time, she warned that the company faced serious internal problems.

“OpenAI was at catastrophic risk of falling apart,” Murati said. “I was concerned about the company completely blowing up.”

Murati later left OpenAI in 2024 and went on to co-found Thinking Machines Lab.

Another former OpenAI board member, Shivon Zilis, also gave evidence in the case. Zilis said the board had “extreme concern” about the release of ChatGPT without proper communication with directors.

Asked whether concerns about Altman had been raised internally, Zilis replied: “There had been a couple of instances.”

Zilis now works at Elon Musk’s Neuralink and is also the mother of four of Musk’s children.

The lawsuit, filed by Musk in 2024, argues that OpenAI moved away from its original charitable purpose after receiving billions of dollars from Microsoft. Musk claims the company effectively became tied to Microsoft’s commercial interests instead of serving the public good.

Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019 and supplies the computing power behind products such as ChatGPT and Copilot through its Azure cloud platform.

Musk is seeking $150 billion in damages and wants the money directed to OpenAI’s charitable arm. He is also pushing for Altman’s removal and wants the company’s for-profit structure dissolved.

Court proceedings have also revealed challenges between OpenAI’s founders and executives over control of the company, its rapid growth and the race to develop artificial general intelligence, often called AGI.

Some witnesses told the court that the company reaching AGI first could gain enormous economic and political influence worldwide.

The case also reveals Musk’s competition with OpenAI. His own artificial intelligence company, xAI, has expanded rapidly and merged with SpaceX in 2026 in a deal that reportedly valued the combined business at about $250 billion.

During the trial, it also emerged that Musk tried to settle with OpenAI president Greg Brockman shortly before proceedings began. According to testimony, Musk warned that Altman and Brockman could become “the most hated men in America.”

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According to internal memos seen by Reuters, the tool is called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI). It will run on work-related apps and websites to gather examples of how staff use computers during their normal duties.

Meta said the aim is to improve its systems in tasks where AI still struggles, including using keyboard shortcuts, selecting options from drop-down menus and navigating software interfaces.

A company spokesperson said: “If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them, things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus.”

The spokesperson added: “There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose.”

Meta also said information collected through the tracking software would not be used for performance reviews or staff assessments.

This development is in line with a goal to place AI at the centre of daily work. Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth told employees in a separate memo that the company’s long-term goal is to build systems that can carry out most tasks while workers guide and review the results.

He said: “The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve.”

Meta has also encouraged staff to use AI tools for coding and other work, even where it may slow productivity in the short term.

The company has reportedly introduced a job label known as “AI builder” and created a new Applied AI engineering team to strengthen coding tools and develop workplace agents.

The latest changes come as Meta Platforms prepares to cut 10% of its global workforce from May 20, with more reductions expected later this year, according to the Reuters report.

Labour and privacy experts have raised concerns over the practice.

Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor and scholar of workplace surveillance said monitoring tools have usually been used to detect misconduct, but logging keystrokes pushes surveillance further by exposing office workers to close real-time monitoring once more common among delivery and gig workers.

She said: “On the U.S. side, federally, there is no limit on worker surveillance.”

Valerio De Stefano said similar monitoring would likely face legal limitations in Europe under privacy and labour laws, including the General Data Protection Regulation.

He also warned that awareness of constant monitoring can shift workplace power further towards employers.

The post Meta Installs Employee Tracking Software to Train AI Models, Report Reveals appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

Details shared with investors, and reported by Axios, outline a strong growth path. The company expects ad revenue to reach $11 billion in 2027, then $25 billion in 2028, and $53 billion in 2029.

These figures depend on one key assumption where OpenAI believes its products could reach 2.75 billion weekly users by the end of the decade.

Early this year, OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT for some users in the United States. The test focused on people using the free tier and the lower-priced Go plan.

Within six weeks, the pilot crossed $100 million in annualised revenue. By March, more than 600 advertisers had signed up.

That early traction gives a clearer picture of where the company is heading. Ad is no longer an experiment but an indispensable part of how OpenAI plans to make more revenue, alongside subscriptions and enterprise deals.

The market is large but crowded. Alphabet reported $294.69 billion in advertising revenue in 2025, while Meta posted $196.18 billion.

OpenAI is trying to take a share of that ad market by using a different advantage, ultimately boosting revenue. In chat-based systems, users usually state exactly what they want, which could make adverts more precise.

Still, there are issues. Some analysts have warned that showing ads inside ChatGPT could affect how people trust the service but OpenAI says it has not seen that so far.

The company reports low dismissal rates and no drop in its trust metrics since the pilot began.

Not everyone is taking the same route. Competitor Anthropic has said its Claude chatbot will remain ad-free, drawing a line between the two approaches.

Meanwhile, advertising is expected to carry a large share of OpenAI’s revenue as it tries to keep up with the high cost of building and running its AI systems.

The company is also strengthening itself as a business that can scale in the same way as the largest internet platforms, with ads being a big part of that plan.

The post OpenAI Targets $100bn Ad Revenue by 2030 as ChatGPT Ads Gain Early Traction appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

Yuhuai (Tony) Wu announced late on Monday night that he was leaving the company. “It’s time for my next chapter,” Wu wrote in a post on X. 

“It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”

Less than 24 hours later, Jimmy Ba followed. In his own post on Tuesday afternoon, Ba thanked Musk and said he would remain close to the company. 

“Enormous thanks to @elonmusk for bringing us together on this incredible journey. So proud of what the xAI team has done and will continue to stay close as a friend of the team,” the post read in part.

Neither Wu nor Ba explained their reasons for leaving or outlined their next steps. Both departures were publicly cordial. Ba, who reported directly to Musk, did not respond to a request for comment sent via X messaging.

The exits mean six of xAI’s original 12 co-founders have now left the company since 2024. Infrastructure lead Kyle Kosic departed for OpenAI in mid-2024. 

He was followed by former Google researcher Christian Szegedy in February 2025. Igor Babuschkin left in August to start a venture firm, while Greg Yang, previously at Microsoft, stepped down last month due to health reasons.

The Financial Times reported that Ba’s resignation followed challenges within xAI’s technical team over demands to improve the performance of its Grok chatbot, as Musk pushes to close the gap with competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

We were unable to independently confirm those internal discussions.

The co-founders’ departures come days after SpaceX announced it would acquire xAI in a deal that values the combined company at $1.25 trillion, with plans to list later this year. 

The transaction is part of Musk’s goal to expand computing capacity, including proposals to place data centres in orbit to support future workloads.

xAI’s flagship product, Grok, has faced complaints in recent months for erratic behaviour and signs of internal tampering. 

Separate changes to the company’s image-generation tools also led to a surge in deepfake pornography on the platform, triggering legal and regulatory attention.

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The message, shared internally and seen by CNBC, said the company is also getting ready to release “an updated Chat model” this week. 

ChatGPT now has more than 800 million people using it every week and competition is getting tougher. 

Google’s Gemini app passed 750 million monthly users at the end of last year, while Anthropic has gained ground, especially among software developers.

The pressure is being felt most in coding tools. In his note to staff, Altman said OpenAI’s own coding product, Codex, had grown by about 50% in just one week. 

Codex goes head-to-head with Anthropic’s Claude Code, which has seen fast uptake over the past year.

OpenAI released a new version of Codex, called GPT-5.3-Codex, last week. Altman described the recent momentum as “insane” and added: “This was a great week.”

The company’s push comes after a period of concern about slowing growth. In December, OpenAI shifted staff and resources to improve ChatGPT as competitors closed in, both in growth and other areas.

Since then, the focus has been on keeping users engaged while expanding paid and business services.

OpenAI is also moving ahead with plans to show adverts inside ChatGPT for some users in the United States. The company has said the ads will be clearly marked, appear at the bottom of responses and will not affect what the chatbot says.

Behind the scenes, Altman and finance chief Sarah Friar have been briefing investors on OpenAI’s performance as the company seeks to complete a large funding round. 

CNBC has reported that discussions involve several major technology firms and could be finalised in stages. The figures and structure are still under discussion and may change.

For now, the message to ChatGPT staff was that growth in usage is here again, new products are rolling out, and OpenAI believes it has regained momentum in a crowded market.

The post Altman Tells Staff ChatGPT Growth is Back Above 10% as OpenAI Prepares New Model appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

From the Spring 2026 batch, startups accepted into YC can choose to take the standard $500,000 seed investment in USDC instead of traditional bank transfers. 

The funds can be sent over Ethereum, Solana or Base, according to Nemil Dalal, a visiting partner at Y Combinator who focuses on crypto.

YC’s core deal remains $500,000 for 7% equity, but what changes is the rail the money travels on.

For founders operating outside the United States, especially in markets where they face banking delays and foreign exchange friction, the option is a big win. 

Stablecoin transfers settle almost instantly and cost a fraction of traditional wires. In some cases, the difference between waiting days and receiving funds in seconds can affect how quickly a young company gets off the ground.

Dalal said the appeal is strongest in emerging markets, where founders find cross-border payments stressful. Stablecoins remove many of those limitations without changing the economics of the deal.

Inside YC circles, the decision has also led to talks about risk. Founders are usually advised to keep operations predictable wherever possible. 

Build boldly, yes, but do not gamble with payroll, compliance or treasury management. Your startup is already risky enough.

That is still part of YC’s thinking. The accelerator is not asking founders to speculate or hold volatile assets. USDC is designed to track the US dollar, and YC is not encouraging startups to manage crypto portfolios. The option is about transfer speed and access, not financial experimentation.

“Stablecoins are one of the key pillars for us,” Dalal said. “So we just want to live and breathe that as well.”

This is the first time a top-tier accelerator has formally offered stablecoins as a default funding option. While crypto-focused venture firms have used similar methods for years, most established investors have stayed with bank wires. 

Dalal said he was not aware of any legacy venture capital firms that provide founders with this choice.

“We’re excited for a world where, in the future, we think a lot of startups will eventually start raising capital on-chain,” he said.

In July 2025, President Donald Trump signed a bill that set out regulations for crypto assets in the United States, giving stablecoins a defined legal footing. 

That clarity has changed how large institutions view digital dollars, moving them from the edges of finance into day-to-day infrastructure.

Responding to this, technology firms like Stripe completed a $1.1 billion acquisition of stablecoin startup Bridge in February 2025 and later backed its own blockchain built for stablecoin payments. 

Cloudflare announced plans to launch a stablecoin in September, while Klarna introduced a payments token in November.

These came during a period when crypto prices were increasing. Since then, the market has cooled. Bitcoin and other major tokens have slid towards multi-month lows, dampening enthusiasm in some corners of the industry.

Dalal argues that the slowdown has not affected interest in stablecoins.

“The excitement on stablecoins is just growing,” he said. “It’s actually agnostic of prices.”

Unlike speculative tokens, stablecoins are now used as plumbing, a way to move money quickly, cheaply and across borders without relying on correspondent banks. 

For startups, especially those hiring internationally or paying suppliers in different currencies, the utility is immediate.

YC’s move also aligns with its recent drive to attract more blockchain-focused founders. Last year, the accelerator partnered with Base and Coinbase Ventures to encourage startups building crypto-related products. 

Offering funding through the same rails those companies work on brings practice closer to principle.

For now, Y Combinator says the stablecoins funding option is voluntary. Founders who prefer traditional banking can stick with it. 

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From what has emerged so far, Nvidia is weighing the largest cheque. The chipmaker, already central to OpenAI’s operations, is considering an investment of up to $30 billion. 

Microsoft, which has backed OpenAI from the start, is discussing a much smaller top-up of under $10 billion. Amazon, entering the picture for the first time, could commit well above $10 billion and possibly exceed $20 billion.

The discussions are said to be advanced. Term sheets are close, implying the talks have moved beyond early signalling into concrete commitments. None of the companies has confirmed the details. 

Amazon and Microsoft declined to comment, while Nvidia and OpenAI did not respond outside normal business hours.

This would form the core of a funding round that could reach $100 billion. That figure alone changes the scale of the story. At that level, OpenAI’s valuation would rise to around $830 billion, placing it ahead of every private company globally and within touching distance of the largest names on the S&P 500.

SoftBank is also circling. The Japanese group is reportedly in discussions to add up to $30 billion of its own, which would further tilt the round into record territory. 

Nvidia’s involvement helps lock in demand for its chips, which remain essential for training and running large models. Amazon’s interest goes beyond a simple equity stake. 

Its investment is tied to separate negotiations, including a possible expansion of OpenAI’s use of Amazon’s cloud servers and a commercial deal that would see OpenAI’s products sold through Amazon’s enterprise channels. 

For Microsoft, any fresh funding would strengthen an already tight integration between OpenAI’s technology and its own software and cloud services, even as regulators watch.

Behind the OpenAI funding round, the cost of training and operating large models keeps climbing, running into billions of dollars each year. Competition is also strengthening. 

Alphabet is pushing hard with its own systems, and competitors are striking partnerships to close the gap. 

The capital would give OpenAI room to expand and invest aggressively, but it also accentuates how much cash the business burns to stay at the frontier. 

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The deal values Manus at between $2 billion and $3 billion, although Meta has chosen not to disclose financial terms. Manus, now based in Singapore, did not respond to requests for comment at the time of writing.

The acquisition gives Meta full control of Manus’s technology, which it plans to operate, sell and embed across its consumer and business products, including Meta AI. 

This will help to secure what many in the industry now see as the most valuable layer in AI development, the execution layer, where software agents go beyond conversation to carry out complex tasks on their own.

Manus rose quickly into the global spotlight earlier this year after releasing what it described as a general AI agent. Unlike standard chatbots, the system was designed to make decisions and complete tasks with minimal prompting. 

The product went viral on X and was soon compared to DeepResearch, a benchmark tool in the sector. The company has claimed its agent outperforms that system, helping to drive both attention and controversy.

Behind the attention was rapid commercial growth. Manus became the fastest startup to cross $100 million in annual recurring revenue, reaching a $125 million run rate in under eight months. 

In 2025 alone, its systems processed 147 trillion tokens and powered around 80 million virtual computers, figures that point to unusual scale for a company so young. That pace made Manus one of the most talked-about AI agent startups globally.

Meta’s interest shows a change in strategy. While the company has spent years building open-source foundation models such as Llama, this deal reveals a goal to own proprietary systems that sit on top of those models and actually do the work. 

Autonomous agents that can research, write code and analyse data are now the next battleground, and competition is increasing fast.

The acquisition comes after a year of heavy spending by Meta, including its investment in Scale AI, a deal that valued the data-labelling firm at $29 billion. 

Competitors are not standing still. Microsoft is expanding Copilot, Google is pushing Gemini, and OpenAI is developing DeepResearch.

Manus’s background also adds a geopolitical edge to the deal. Founded in China and backed by its parent company, Beijing Butterfly Effect Technology, the startup was once described as China’s next DeepSeek. 

It later relocated to Singapore, joining a growing number of Chinese tech firms seeking to reduce exposure to Sino-US tensions. Singapore’s neutral stance and trade-friendly policies have made it a preferred base for global expansion.

Beijing had shown interest in supporting Manus, and the company maintains a strategic partnership with Alibaba to collaborate on AI models. 

Meta’s acquisition changes ownership firmly to a U.S. technology giant, a development that is likely to be closely watched in both Washington and Beijing.

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