Nigeria has one of the largest crypto markets anywhere in the world. And an enormous amount of that trade goes through OTC desks and peer-to-peer networks rather than through the formal banking system. My next guest's company is trying to bring that infrastructure into the open. Welcome to the show, Abiola Shogbeni, Co-Founder and CEO of Shiga Digital.
Thank you. Good morning everybody. Good afternoon.
Let's kick off with what Shiga Digital is doing.
Shiga stands for access — and also a dialect from one of the biggest regions in Nigeria. Essentially what we are doing is building products and APIs to enable digital asset infrastructure to be embedded within financial services across Africa.
Your company is based in Abu Dhabi, but you are serving Nigeria. Why Abu Dhabi and not Lagos?
We are actually headquartered in Abu Dhabi. A big reason is global trade. Africa produces lots of different commodities — predominantly oil, cocoa, gas. The Middle East is a major trade route. Between the Middle East and Africa there is a huge trade corridor. We strategically looked at this and it made sense to have our hub here, just like many other big African commodity trading companies, and to build that trade route on the blockchain.
Can you give context on the movement of money in Nigeria and how stablecoins are changing it?
In emerging markets, and especially in Africa, commodities are dollar-denominated. So when you export your biggest export in dollars, that creates local dollar scarcity. If you go to a bank in Nigeria as a business, you lack access to dollars. What blockchain and stablecoins are providing is access to those dollars in the free market. Last year, Chainalysis captured $96 billion worth of stablecoin transactions in Nigeria. We believe the actual number is two or three times that. That signal is very clear — stablecoins and blockchain for financial services are needed. A simple example: a commodity trading company sells downstream goods locally, collects in naira, but has to buy back the same oil or goods in dollars. The banks do not have those dollars. So the market naturally buys from the free market. And right now, that market is stablecoins.
Walk us through what Shiga is actually building and how formalising this looks in practice.
The problem is not a technology problem — it is a financial services infrastructure problem. Shiga is building the infrastructure for the market to adopt this technology. We are doing it two ways. First, a simple user interface for the everyday individual or corporate to access financial solutions. People are using separate wallets for different things, and banks are seeing digital asset flows, but there is no actual regulated and scalable infrastructure behind it. We enable banks to adopt this technology, embed it within their existing user base, and scale it.
Let's talk about tokenised Nigerian T-bills. How could that change the country's ability to raise capital?
Currently, only domestic counterparties can purchase Nigerian T-bills in the traditional way. With tokenisation, you open them up to the rest of the world — just like US treasuries or Japanese government bonds are traded globally. African treasuries can now be traded globally through stablecoins and blockchain as the distribution channel. And when you look at commodities like gold — traditionally you needed a physical storage facility. Now tokenised gold can be issued locally. Everyday individuals anywhere in the world can access it from their local currency without holding physical gold. This opens things up to everybody.
Thank you so much for joining us today, Abiola.
Thank you so much.
