Weekly Newsletter

A $72 million profit on $536 million in revenue isn't a rounding error — OPay has genuinely built a business that works.

The valuation jump — from $750 million to $2.1 billion — is real, and the Mubadala-led cheque is one of the largest ever written for an African-founded startup.

Incorporating Bridge Open Access is real. A legal entity can sign contracts, hire engineers, draw down financing. Yesterday it couldn't; today it can.

The headline figures look manageable until you read the order in which they hit. To raise institutional money, a Kenyan crypto startup needs a licence. To get the licence, it needs Sh100–300 million in paid-up capital first.

The intuition behind a rand-denominated or naira-denominated stablecoin is sound: give people a digital currency that doesn't bleed value into dollars.

Olatomiwa Idowu didn't disappear silently. He sent a written email on March 17 acknowledging $4.23 million still owed, naming the repayment account, and committing to tranches. Then he paid ₦140 million and went quiet.

MTN has held 49% of Irancell since long before sanctions froze the asset in 2018. It has collected zero dividends since then, can't sell the shares, and can't move the money. The impairment just makes the accounting match reality.

Egypt's regulator didn't plan this deal. But it made it almost inevitable.

Pricing shares in US dollars on the London Stock Exchange is genuinely unusual — London lists in pounds, almost without exception.

Strip away the headline number and the IFC's stated logic is specific: get 60,000 active sellers a year plugging into digital commerce who currently aren't.

Canal+ investing in its own billing layer was always a related-party story. But Sanlam — Africa's largest insurer, with no Canal+ connection — is publicly calling out a roadmap it's building with Moment.

Shoprite's South African stores added R15.2 billion in sales last year across nearly 2,800 outlets. Sixty60 — a single delivery app — added R6.6 billion on its own.

Nearly every internet user in Kenya using an AI tool every month sounds transformative. The uncomfortable question is whether "used at least one AI tool" means anything deep enough to matter.

The Chainalysis report isn't describing a future threat. These networks are already advertising — openly, on Telegram — to operators in Angola, Kenya, Mozambique, Madagascar, and Guinea-Bissau.

Only $25.5 million of July's $102 million was equity. The rest was debt — money that has to be paid back, regardless of whether the business is growing.

For nearly thirty years, South Africa's payment system ran on a self-regulatory model — banks and payment providers, through PASA, essentially governing themselves under a light central-bank blessing.

The screen-locking scareware topping Africa's threat list at 44.7% is mostly noise, according to ESET's own analysts. The organised ransomware groups sit quietly beneath it, picking specific, high-value targets.

With the CBN running its own parallel crypto sandbox and neither regulator having resolved who owns which turf, founders have been stuck choosing between two doors with no map.

The unification order was supposed to end this. One council, clear lanes.

Making crypto firms collect taxes on behalf of the government is a logical step. But Nigeria is now layering a tax-collection mandate on top of a licensing regime that still hasn't settled who's in charge.

The $1.66 billion headline sounds like momentum — and some of it is real.