Across Sub-Saharan Africa, cryptocurrency has quietly moved from the margins to the mainstream. Between July 2024 and June 2025, the region recorded more than $205 billion in on-chain transaction volume, a 52 percent year-on-year increase.
Behind that growth is a mix of currency instability, cross-border work, informal trade, and a generation of users who have learned to move seamlessly between crypto and local fiat.
For African crypto companies, the question is no longer whether to expand, but where and how. Increasingly, the answer is shaped not just by user demand, but by regulatory signals, liquidity realities, and the ability to build trust in markets that have seen platforms come and go.
This is the context in which Obiex, a Nigeria-based crypto trading and fintech platform, is preparing to expand into Ghana. The move is the company’s most deliberate step yet in a broader pan-African strategy and a case study in how crypto firms are learning to read Africa’s regulatory and behavioral landscape.
From Nigeria to the Continent
Founded in Nigeria in 2021, Obiex has grown into a platform built primarily for high-volume traders and users who need speed, liquidity, and tight pricing. Since launch, the company has processed close to $20 billion in gross transaction value across the continent, largely by focusing on stablecoin–fiat flows and crypto-to-crypto trading.
That scale has given the team something many early-stage crypto startups lack: real, longitudinal data on how Africans actually use crypto.
Rather than expanding aggressively into multiple countries at once, Obiex has taken a quieter approach allowing organic user activity to surface first, then following the data. Ghana has been on their radar for years, with users from the country already trading on the platform since 2021.
“Once activity in a market crosses a certain internal threshold in terms of active users, transaction volumes, and usage patterns, that’s when we start paying closer attention,” the team explains.
Why Ghana Stands Out
Ghana’s crypto ecosystem, like Nigeria’s, has seen repeated cycles of excitement followed by disappointment: platforms launch loudly, attract early users, then struggle with liquidity, slow settlements, or abrupt shutdowns when regulatory pressure mounts. The result is a cautious user base that defaults to familiar names, even when pricing or service quality is suboptimal.
On paper, Ghana is already one of Africa’s most active crypto markets. With more than three million crypto users, the country consistently ranks among the top five African nations by transaction volume, alongside Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Ethiopia, according to Chainalysis.
But Obiex’s interest goes beyond headline numbers.
For Obiex, trust is less about brand visibility and more about operational reliability. The company’s leadership describes trust as something earned through consistency across three areas: pricing integrity, settlement reliability, and longevity.
Internally, the company looks at the shape of demand. In some markets, users primarily want to move fiat into crypto. In others, the pressure is on converting crypto back into local currency. Ghana, Obiex found, leans heavily toward off-ramping users earning, trading, or receiving crypto and needing reliable, fairly priced ways to settle into Cedis.
That insight matters, because Obiex’s model depends on managing both sides of the market. By acting as both maker and taker in stablecoin–fiat trades, and by building relationships with liquidity providers who want to move between fiat and stablecoins, the platform aims to consistently beat peer-to-peer pricing.
Ghana’s broader financial ecosystem also plays a role. In many ways, it mirrors Nigeria’s: freelancers receiving stablecoins, traders cycling between assets, and a large informal layer of “collect crypto, settle in fiat” businesses operating through WhatsApp groups and P2P channels.
“The behaviors are almost identical,” the team notes. “If something works in Nigeria, there’s a high likelihood it will work in Ghana with minimal adaptation.”
Moving Users Out of Informality
One of the paradoxes Obiex has observed across West Africa is that many of the continent’s most active crypto traders operate almost entirely outside formal platforms.
High-volume transactions are routinely coordinated through WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels, and direct peer-to-peer arrangements, not because users prefer informality, but because infrastructure has historically failed to meet their needs.
These traders function like institutional players in scale, but without institutional tools. Obiex’s growth strategy is built around migrating this activity into a more structured, compliant environment.
The appeal is not regulation for its own sake, but the practical benefits that come with it: tighter spreads, faster settlement, reduced counterparty risk, and predictable access to fiat liquidity.
In Ghana, where mobile money systems are widely adopted and function reliably, this transition is especially viable. Traders already trust digital rails for fiat movement; the missing layer is a crypto platform that matches that reliability while improving pricing and execution.
Pricing, Trust, and Speed
Obiex believes three gaps define the opportunity in Ghana and much of Africa more broadly.
The first is pricing. Many users still rely on P2P markets, where spreads can be wide and rates volatile. For high-volume traders, even a difference of 10 to 30 basis points can translate into significant gains or losses.
Obiex’s pitch is simple: tighter spreads, institutional-grade pricing, and the ability for traders to pass those advantages on to their own customers.
The second is trust. In markets like Ghana, where several crypto platforms have launched loudly and disappeared quietly, skepticism runs deep. Obiex is betting that consistency, not hype, will be its differentiator, reinforced by OTC partnerships that allow it to maintain reliable off-ramp liquidity even during market stress.
The third is settlement. While swaps and crypto withdrawals on Obiex are already instant, the company has invested heavily in partnerships that allow equally fast settlement into bank accounts and mobile money wallets. The goal is to collapse multiple steps into a single, predictable flow.
Regulation as a Strategic Signal
Perhaps the most important factor shaping Obiex’s expansion strategy is regulation.
Across Africa, regulatory clarity remains uneven. Sudden policy shifts can disrupt user experience overnight, often driving traders back to global platforms they perceive as safer. For Obiex, expansion decisions increasingly depend on whether regulators are signaling openness, engagement, and a willingness to define the rules of the road.
In Ghana, that signal is emerging. The Securities and Exchange Commission has been working on digital asset frameworks, and Obiex has already completed its virtual asset service provider license application, which is currently awaiting approval.
For the company, this isn’t just a compliance box to tick, it’s a strategic hedge. Being closer to the regulatory process allows Obiex to anticipate changes rather than react to them, and to design products that can survive policy shifts without disrupting users.
This regulatory lens is also shaping where Obiex doesn’t expand yet. Markets with strong demand but opaque or hostile regulatory environments are approached more cautiously, regardless of transaction volume.
Nigeria vs Ghana: Small Differences, Big Implications
Years of operating in Nigeria have conditioned Obiex to one of the most demanding crypto user bases on the continent. Nigerian users expect near-instant settlements and are acutely sensitive to fees. In Ghana, the dynamics are slightly different.
Mobile money systems work well, and users are more accustomed to paying higher transaction fees. That tolerance has allowed many platforms to normalize expensive withdrawals and slow improvements.
For Obiex, this represents an opportunity. By offering lower spreads and faster, more predictable settlement, the company hopes to show users, both retail and high-volume, that they don’t have to accept the status quo.
Expansion, Reframed
Obiex’s move into Ghana is not a land grab. It is a measured step informed by data, behavior, and regulation, and a signal of how African crypto companies are maturing.
As the continent’s crypto ecosystem grows, expansion strategies are becoming less about geography and more about alignment: with regulators, with liquidity realities, and with how people actually use money.
For platforms willing to read those signals carefully, Ghana may be less an experiment and more a blueprint for what comes next.
