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By Yolat
At Yolat, we are building the settlement infrastructure for cross-border payments in and out of Africa, with stablecoins as the underlying rail and fiat as the experience our customers actually touch. We offer four core products:
Remittances: International money transfers across our Africa–UK/Europe/Canada corridors. To the customer it is a simple fiat to fiat transfer, but underneath, every transaction settles on stablecoin rails, giving us faster settlement and better pricing than the correspondent banking routes incumbents rely on.
Global Supplier Payments. African businesses paying overseas suppliers give us local fiat, and we use our own liquidity network to settle their global invoices quickly and cheaply, removing the pre-funding and FX friction that normally traps working capital.
On-ramp / Off-ramp Infrastructure for B2B2C. A single integration that lets other businesses move money in and out of Africa, instead of stitching together fragmented local providers corridor by corridor.
Global Accounts. USD, GBP, and EUR accounts for African businesses, backed by stablecoins, giving companies stable, multi-currency holding and settlement without depending on scarce local foreign currency access.
The problem we solve across all four is the same: moving value into and out of Africa is slow, expensive, and starved of dollar liquidity. What makes us different is that most players only solve one slice of this and depend on others for the rest. Open-market on/off-ramps are price-takers buying liquidity at retail rates, traditional remittance companies are stuck on slow, expensive correspondent banking rails, and most fintechs moving money into Africa stitch together a different local partner for every corridor. We collapse all of that into one stack: we own our liquidity at wholesale prices through our merchant network, we settle on stablecoin rails instead of correspondent banking, and we offer a single integration across corridors rather than a patchwork. We are not reselling someone else's infrastructure. We are the liquidity and settlement layer ourselves.
$110.0K
Yolat has been live since September 2024 and is processing significant real volume today.
Volume and users. We have transacted over $250 million since launch in September 2024. We currently serve over 25,000 registered users and over 200 businesses across our corridors.
Regulatory licensing. Yolat operates as a fully licensed entity in its core markets: a PSP license from the Bank of Canada, an IMTO license from the Central Bank of Nigeria, and an MSB license registered with FINTRAC in Canada. This regulated footing is central to how we operate and a prerequisite for the institutional flows we facilitate.
Banking and corridor coverage. We hold banking partnerships covering the EU, UK, Canada, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, and India, giving us live collection and payout capability across these markets.
Liquidity network. We operate a closed network of over 200 vetted merchants supplying wholesale stablecoin liquidity, and we already supply liquidity to companies including Busha, Bitnob, and Kredete.
B2B partnerships. We are in advanced discussions with Afreximbank for direct PAPSS integration, positioning us among the first startups approved to connect into the system.
Product Demo: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zfuNnFIpnUpduzBIZzRzgbFHJg84Khhn/view?usp=sharing
Transaction evidence: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WIaUsqk_Y3bYPYgwZPSc_xXEwtWZ_rEdGuQrZJT-SS4/edit?usp=sharing
IMTO LICENSE BY Central Bank of Nigeria: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vdb7b7IKxzfwYYcNHWATtuvzUyMLTf75/view?usp=sharing
PSP Registry by Bank of Canada: https://www.bankofcanada.ca/regulatory-oversight/retail-payments/psp-registry/psp-registry-details/?account_id=f281a7fd-5f98-ef11-8a69-6045bd5e516b
MSB Registry by Fintrac: https://fintrac-canafe.canada.ca/msb-esm/reg-eng (Search Yolat in $ link)
Foundation and Anchor Platform integration.
Stand up Stellar infrastructure: testnet and mainnet accounts, key management, and the Stellar settlement module within Yolat's existing orchestration layer. Implement the foundation SEP standards (SEP-1, SEP-10, SEP-12) for anchor discovery, authentication, and KYC exchange. Deploy Anchor Platform and complete a working SEP-24 deposit and withdrawal flow on testnet for our UK to Nigeria corridor, settling in USDC on Stellar.
Note: Yolat already operates this corridor live today on our existing rails. This tranche builds the Stellar settlement path for it, not the corridor itself. Demonstrated to mentors
Tranche #1 (testnet, by 30 Aug):
Stellar volume target: testnet only. 0% live volume. Demonstrate end-to-end SEP-24 USDC settlement on the UK→Nigeria corridor on testnet. USDC -> NGN. USDC Funding for users who want to create cards. This tranche proves the settlement path, not volume.
Acceptance criteria
Stellar testnet transaction hashes for a complete SEP-24 deposit and withdrawal on the UK→Nigeria flow, each viewable on Stellar Explorer / Horizon.
Internal transaction IDs mapped 1:1 to the on-chain hashes.
A reconciliation report matching the testnet Stellar ledger against Yolat's internal ledger for the demo transactions.
Logs for the SEP-1/10/12 discovery, auth, and KYC-exchange steps.
Budget
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LLC8rAgnZUd7uY3Cfem2r71jL39bPAx1kVGLnqahVo8/edit?usp=sharing
Mainnet B2B settlement & consumer wallet
Migrate live settlement onto Stellar mainnet and ship the consumer USDC wallet.
Implement SEP-31 via Anchor Platform for programmatic B2B cross-border payments, and integrate the Stellar Disbursement Platform (SDP) for bulk payouts. Connect the Yolat Liquidity Network to the Stellar settlement path so our routing engine can select between our existing merchant liquidity and anchor liquidity. Route live UK to Nigeria volume through the Stellar settlement path on mainnet, capped to start. In parallel, integrate Stellar Wallets Kit to ship a consumer-facing native USDC wallet, enabling diaspora and retail users to hold USDC and fund via XLM.
Because this corridor is already carrying real transactions, this tranche puts genuine settlement volume onto Stellar from the outset rather than test flows.
Deliverable evidence: live mainnet transactions from real corridor activity settling on Stellar through both the B2B (SEP-31) and disbursement (SDP) flows, reconciled against Yolat's internal ledger; and a live consumer USDC wallet.
Acceptance criteria
Mainnet transaction hashes (Stellar Explorer links) for live UK→Nigeria, USDC -> NGN, USDC Funding, settlements via SEP-31, and for SDP bulk payouts.
A reconciliation report (mainnet Stellar ledger vs. internal ledger) covering the capped live volume, with any breaks and resolutions listed.
A monitoring dashboard showing settlement volume, success/failure rate, and settlement time on the Stellar path.
Consumer wallet metrics: count of USDC wallets created and funded via Stellar Wallets Kit.
Stellar volume target:
Route the USDC→NGN flow onto Stellar starting at ~$250k settled during the tranche window (≈25% of the eventual run-rate), plus the first live UK→NGN mainnet transactions.
USDC→NGN - Existing flow, ~10% of our transactions today, migrating onto Stellar. Full target: ~$1M/month settled on Stellar.
UK→NGN -> newer corridor, ~$250k/month current volume, target 10% = ~$25k/month on Stellar (projection).
Combined demo-day run-rate: ~$1.025M/month settling on Stellar.
DeFi yield on Global Accounts & corridor expansion
Add yield-bearing balances to Global Accounts via DeFi, and extend Stellar settlement to a second corridor.
The DeFindex yield feature is a tightly-scoped, additive pilot, deliberately kept off the critical path of the core settlement migration. It is limited to eligible Global Accounts business customers only, in permitted jurisdictions, with a capped pilot cohort, and is compliance-gated with framing developed alongside program mentors. It is explicitly a secondary Tranche 3 objective; the settlement migration and second-corridor launch take priority, and the pilot will not consume engineering time reserved for those.
Deliverable evidence: a live DeFindex-powered yield feature piloted with eligible Global Accounts customers; a second corridor settling on Stellar; and a Demo Day metrics dashboard showing total volume settled on Stellar, balances earning yield, cost saving versus existing rails, and settlement-time improvement.
Acceptance criteria
A Demo Day metrics dashboard (live link) showing: total volume settled on Stellar, % of UK→Nigeria corridor migrated, second-corridor volume, balances earning DeFindex yield, cost-per-transaction vs. existing rails, and settlement-time improvement.
Transaction IDs / Explorer links for the second corridor's first mainnet settlements.
DeFindex pilot report: number of eligible accounts enrolled, balances deployed, yield accrued.
Scale to run-rate. ~$1M/month
USDC→NGN and ~$25k/month UK→NGN (projection) settling on Stellar.
Yolat is led by two founders with a combined track record building remittance and payments infrastructure across Africa's highest-volume rails.
Toyosi Abolarin - Co-founder & CEO. Toyosi has spent his career building African payments and remittance products. As Head of Product at Venture Garden Group, he built a remittance aggregation platform powering flows for Wise (TransferWise), Sendwave, and GloCurrency etc. He went on to serve as Head of Product at Africhange, one of Africa's fastest-growing remittance companies, and later Head of Products at Qrios, Nigeria's largest USSD aggregator, serving roughly 70% of the country's banks.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toyosi-abolarin-798b6942/
Ekene Egonu - Co-founder & CTO. Ekene brings deep engineering leadership in the same domain. He was Head of Engineering on the remittance aggregation platform serving Wise, Sendwave, and GloCurrency etc, then CTO at Africhange, where he scaled the technical infrastructure of one of Africa's fastest-growing remittance companies. He began his career as a software engineer at First Bank, one of Nigeria's largest financial institutions.
Together, we have built and scaled the exact category Yolat operates in, cross-border payments and remittance infrastructure with direct, hands-on experience of both the product and engineering challenges of moving money across corridors at scale.
Toyosi Abolarin
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