In this episode, I sit down with Obi Emeratom, the founder and CEO of Zone, to explore how his company is rebuilding the core infrastructure of African payments using a regulated, blockchain-based architecture.
We unpack:
The journey from Appzone to Zone and why the spin-off was necessary
How Zone won over Nigerian banks without evangelizing crypto
What makes regulated blockchains credible to central banks
Why decentralization with permissioning may be the right model for Africa
The real-world bottlenecks of legacy switches and how Zone bypasses them
Zone Pay, deep linking, merchant wallets, and the next wave of use cases
Why Obi believes the future of payments is regulated DeFi built from the ground up
This is not a theoretical chat t’s a grounded look at the friction in today’s systems and a pragmatic blueprint for what comes next.
🎧 Listen in if you care about the evolution of African fintech infrastructure, cross-border payments, and compliance-aligned innovation.
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