In December 2023, Keji Pius was stranded in Lusaka, Zambia, with a crypto wallet full of USDT—a digital currency pegged to the US Dollar—and no way to spend it.
Pius, a Nigerian founder who earns in both Naira and stablecoins, said she ran out of the Zambian Kwacha she exchanged at the airport.
“I had a problem spending USDT because I couldn’t simply walk into a store, buy something, and pay with my stablecoin,” she recalled.
Left with no choice, Pius had to convert her USDT into a currency that Zambian merchants would accept. She opened an app on her phone, combed through peer-to-peer (P2P) cryptocurrency exchange apps, searching for a buyer willing to trade fiat for stablecoins.
She converted the stablecoins into Naira before finding a way to exchange the proceeds for Zambian Kwacha at a local currency booth.
That process, she said in an April interview with TechCabal, became a founding story for Rach Finance.
In January 2026, Pius and Martins Chigoziem, her former colleague and the startup’s chief technology officer (CTO), launched the startup to build crypto infrastructure that makes stablecoin spending as seamless as card payments.