As in much of Africa, a business in Lagos can now settle a supplier payment overseas using stablecoins in minutes, without relying entirely on the traditional correspondent banking chain. A few years ago, that would have been difficult to imagine at scale.
This reflects an important shift in African crypto markets. The sector is becoming less defined by speculation and increasingly by utility. Earlier conversations centred on retail trading, access to Bitcoin and other digital assets, and rapid user adoption. Today, the conversation is broader, encompassing stablecoins, cross-border settlement, treasury management, payments and the integration of digital assets into existing financial infrastructure. Regulators, banks and large businesses are also engaging with the sector more seriously.
By almost any measure, adoption has progressed rapidly, and the sector is established. The question now is whether the infrastructure underpinning that growth is strong enough to support it at scale.
Across the continent, the systems supporting digital asset trading and settlement remain uneven. Liquidity, transaction limits and access to both reliable on- and off-ramps still differ significantly from one country to the next, making it harder for money to move efficiently across borders. Though these are technical challenges, customers experience them in very simple ways: Can I fund my account? Can I trade at a fair price? Can I withdraw when I need to? Is my money secure?
Answering those questions requires systems that are reliable across the entire customer journey, from payments and liquidity to custody, compliance and settlement.
Liquidity, for example, becomes much more important as customers and businesses become more sophisticated. People increasingly expect tight spreads, reliable pricing and the ability to execute larger transactions without significant price movement.
The same is true of regulation. As the market evolves, platforms need systems that can adapt to new reporting, compliance, and consumer-protection requirements without creating unnecessary friction for legitimate customers.
This is where I think the idea of “institutional-grade” is often misunderstood. At its core, institutional-grade means building infrastructure to a standard that can withstand scrutiny, volatility and failure. It is less about building products for institutions and more about building infrastructure that customers, regulators, banks, and professional investors can rely on, even in volatile markets or when things go wrong.
That encompasses security, custody, liquidity, governance, compliance, execution quality, operational resilience and transparency. These should not be treated as simple institutional concerns. The same standards that make a platform credible to a bank or asset manager should ultimately benefit the everyday customer as well.
The importance of those standards becomes even clearer as the industry moves beyond straightforward buying and selling into areas such as tokenised assets, staking, ETFs and other products.
Before these products can develop at scale, there needs to be clarity around regulation, custody, asset segregation, disclosure, suitability, market integrity and how risks are communicated to customers. Tokenisation, for example, becomes significantly more powerful when there are credible issuers, trusted custodians, clear legal rights attached to the underlying asset and efficient settlement infrastructure.
For Africa, this may ultimately be where some of the biggest opportunities lie: leveraging institutional-grade principles to improve the available rails for cross-border payments, settlement, treasury, foreign exchange and access to financial products, similar to what we are building at Luno with GTXN and Blocktower.
If the industry follows institutional-grade principles as it should, the next phase of the African crypto market should look very different from where it is today. Deeper liquidity would make larger transactions easier to execute. Reliable payment and settlement systems would make cross-border commerce faster and more efficient. Banks and financial institutions would have greater confidence to participate with stronger governance and compliance. With better risk controls, customers would experience greater protection, while clearer regulatory frameworks would give businesses more certainty to invest and build for the long term. The result would be a market where digital assets are not simply another financial product sitting alongside existing infrastructure, but an increasingly integrated part of how money moves, settles and is managed across the continent.
As with most things, there is a natural tendency to focus on the most visible layer of innovation. But the less visible infrastructure is often what determines whether that innovation can operate reliably over time. That is the shift African crypto needs to make now. We have spent years asking whether people will use digital assets. Now that they do, the more important question is whether the infrastructure can become reliable enough for people and businesses to depend on it.
If that happens, crypto becomes more than an asset people trade. It becomes part of the financial infrastructure through which Africa does business.
Ayotunde Alabi is the CEO of Luno Nigeria with over a decade of experience in finance and technology. He has previously held leadership positions at Spektra, ARM HoldCo, FBNQuest, and Heritage Bank Limited. He holds certifications from both the Chartered Institute of Stockbrokers in Nigeria and the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment in the United Kingdom.