The Cashat Journal

Notes on African money.

Product dispatches, policy explainers and field reports from the team building the continent's money layer.

The State of African Fintech in 2026

From Lagos to Nairobi, a quiet rewrite of the continent's payment rails is underway. Here is what the data — and the streets — are telling us.

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Importers from Cotonou to Mombasa are settling invoices in USDC before the bank wires even clear. The reason is not ideology — it is arithmetic.

The technical and product decisions behind holding NGN, KES, GHS, XOF and USDC in the same balance — without the user ever thinking about FX.

The kiosk at the corner of your street is the most important piece of African fintech infrastructure. We need to start treating it that way.

A primer on the most important payments project on the continent — and why it changes the math for every cross-border fintech.

The humble printed QR sticker has quietly become Africa's most successful point-of-sale device. Here is the story of how that happened.

A pilot in northern Kenya is testing whether a goat can be a credit score. The early results are more interesting than you would expect.

Sending money home used to take days and a meaningful slice of the principal. In 2026, it can take seconds and cost almost nothing.

The most demanding engineering constraint in African fintech is not scale. It is the dropped connection. Here is how we design around it.

We will not have a single African currency any time soon. But we may already have something more useful: a single African money layer.