Essays on African economies, mobile money, crypto rails and the craft of building financial software.
I spent four years building on Kenya's mobile-money rails before I understood what I was actually building on: not a payments company, but something much closer to a narrow bank.
The importers I know moving dollars on-chain are not avoiding banks. They are avoiding the queue for them.
Devaluation takes the headlines. The binding constraint is how long a tonne of fertiliser sits at Beira.
Every retry policy encodes a belief about who absorbs the cost of uncertainty. Usually it's the customer.
I asked everyone I met in Nairobi whether they used a crypto neobank. I could not find one person.
The compliance surface doesn't disappear when you change the rail. It moves to the edges, where nobody owns it.
Two currencies, one trade route, and a settlement lag that quietly taxes everyone using it.
Three rewrites later, here is the double-entry core I'd start every payments product with.