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Mercy Wairimu Kariuki woke up on the morning of February 8, 2022, to a stream of alerts showing that KES 4.4 million ($34,000) had been withdrawn from her Diamond Trust Bank (DTB) account overnight, two days after fraudsters hijacked her phone line in a SIM swap she had already reported and believed had been resolved. On June 18, Kenya’s High Court ruled that both Diamond Trust Bank and Safaricom bore responsibility for the theft, finding that separate failures by the lender and the telecom operator enabled the fraud to succeed. Justice Asenath Ongeri upheld a lower court’s decision to split liability between the two companies, rejecting arguments from both that the other’s failures broke the chain of responsibility. The ruling raises the standard of care for banks and telecom operators handling SIM swap fraud, holding that each owes customers an independent duty to prevent foreseeable losses even when the fraud originates outside its own systems. Ongeri upheld a chief magistrate’s court decision that split liability between DTB Kenya, the Nairobi Securities Exchange-listed lender, and Safaricom, the telecommunications company behind M-PESA, ordering the bank to pay Kariuki KES 1,788,601 ($13,800) and Safaricom KES 2,630,000 ($20,300). The 40:60 split reflected the court’s finding that while Safaricom’s SIM swap failure enabled the fraud, DTB independently breached its duty of care by failing to detect and halt a series of suspicious transactions that should have prompted further checks. The underlying sequence is one that fraud investigators in Kenya’s mobile money ecosystem have seen before. According to the ruling, fraudsters swapped Kariuki’s SIM on February 6, and she reported the incident to Safaricom customer care the same day after receiving suspicious alerts, only for the swap to go through regardless. Her line was restored the following day at a Safaricom shop, but by the morning of February 8, her DTB account had already been emptied through a combination of mobile banking transfers and Pesalink withdrawals, structured to stay just under the bank’s KES 2 million ($15,400) daily limit by straddling a weekend reset. In the same ruling, DTB argued that its systems had worked exactly as designed, since every disputed transaction followed successful entry of Kariuki’s PIN. It also argued that the SIM swap itself was a novus actus interveniens, an intervening act that severed any chain of liability running back to the ban. Ongeri rejected that framing directly. “A bank cannot hide behind a customer’s PIN when it is presented with a series of transactions that are so glaringly out of the ordinary that a reasonable banker would have been put on inquiry,” she wrote, pointing to the rapid succession of transfers to unrelated accounts and phone numbers as red flags the bank ought to have caught. The bank’s secondary argument fared no better with the court, which was unmoved by the claim that the fraud fell outside normal monitoring because part of it occurred over a non-business day. “The banking system operates on an automated 24/7 basis,” the judgment states, adding that mere compliance with a transaction ceiling “does not satisfy the broader duty of care to protect a customer from loss.” Ongeri treated the daily limit reset not as a technical safeguard working in the bank’s favour, but as evidence of precisely the vulnerability it was obliged to guard against. Safaricom’s cross-appeal against its larger 60% share of liability was dismissed on similar grounds, with the court declining to treat the SIM swap and the subsequent withdrawals as separate events with separate causal chains. Ongeri ruled that both companies owed Kariuki concurrent and independent duties of care, drawing on the standard for bank liability set in Fidelity Commercial Bank v Italian Market Kenya and the threshold for flagging suspicious transactions established in Joe Owaka Ager v Barclays Bank of Kenya. The ruling arrives as SIM swap fraud remains a persistent threat to Kenya’s mobile money-linked banking system, and it complicates the argument, advanced by Safaricom through Wachira v Safaricom, that telecoms operators and banks occupy separate regulatory lanes. The implication for lenders is that a system capable of waving through an unusual fraud pattern without human review is no longer a defence in itself. True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks. Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.
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Yoseph Ayele spotted a pattern years before he raised a single dollar for LAVA, an early-stage Web3 fund backing African crypto startups with cheques ranging from $100,000 to $500,000. The pattern emerged while he was building Borderless Africa, a platform he launched in 2021 to connect African founders and talent with global capital and infrastructure. Time and again, founders in Lagos, Nairobi, and Johannesburg were solving meaningful local problems, yet the investors and infrastructure providers best positioned to help them scale had little understanding of those markets. A month-long tour across four African countries with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin sharpened his conviction. Throughout the trip, he realised that many founders—despite spending months in the same online community—were meeting one another in person for the first time. For Ayele, the problem extended beyond access to capital or international attention. Africa’s early-stage crypto ecosystem lacked a coordination layer: a space where founders could exchange ideas, learn from one another, and build relationships, much like entrepreneurs do in Silicon Valley or Asia’s established crypto hubs. Ayele launched magma, a biannual founder residency programme run through Borderless Africa, that connected early-stage builders and infrastructure providers. According to Ayele, the programme has supported more than 40 startups building financial infrastructure and decentralised trust solutions across the continent. Following the end of the zero-interest-rate policy (ZIRP) era in 2022, early-stage capital became significantly harder to access. Founders repeatedly told Ayele that fundraising had become their biggest constraint. He sat with the problem for several years before launching LAVA in 2024 to back startups building what he described as the financial layer and trust infrastructure underpinning Africa’s digital economy. According to Ayele, LAVA raised $11 million to back early-stage Web3 startups developing stablecoin apps, payments infrastructure, and digital identity solutions. About 16% of LAVA’s portfolio is based in East Africa, including stablecoin fintech HoneyCoin. Half of the fund has been deployed into West African startups—predominantly Nigerian companies—while the remainder has gone to pan-African or globally focused ventures. Those investments include Shield3, a digital transaction security app, and Ultramarkets, a prediction-market-leveraged infrastructure startup founded by Emmanuel Njoku and Justice Eziefule. Njoku previously co-founded the now-defunct Nigerian crypto payments startup Lazerpay. LAVA counts investors such as Coinbase chief executive officer (CEO) Brian Armstrong; Paradigm co-founders Fred Ehrsam and Matt Huang; Figma CEO Dylan Field; and the founders of Notion, Polygon, Celo, Base, Centrifuge, Huobi, Nonce, and TADA among its backers. The fund has deployed more than half of its $11 million fund across 18 startups in its first two years, according to Ayele. TechCabal spoke with Ayele, founder and managing partner of LAVA, and Andy Tudhope, the firm’s chief technology officer (CTO), who leads its technical diligence, about why the fund prioritises founders over markets, how the fund decides which startups to back or pass on, why exits remain scarce across Africa’s Web3 ecosystem, and what the sector still lacks. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Why do you describe LAVA’s investing strategy as operator-led, and how has that helped you build conviction in the companies you’ve backed? Ayele: The top funds in the world are run by founders, not professional money managers. In the global startup world, that has been a consistent pattern: your chances of identifying quality talent early and being a good contributor to the startups you invest in are much higher if you have gone through the journey yourself. Having gone through the process of building technology, building companies, fundraising, and making a whole lot of mistakes, that doesn’t make us experts in everything. It gives us the ability to understand the practicalities of what it takes for the founders pitching to us and the capacity to empathise with the competing priorities and challenges they’re about to go through. Relating to our founders from an operator lens allows us to be pragmatic and hands-on where it matters and hopefully add value that’s actually meaningful for them. You’ve said LAVA prioritises the founding team over the product or the market when evaluating a startup. What informs that order, and what have you learned about what works at the earliest stage? Ayele: If you’re investing at an early stage, it’s all about talent. You’re backing founders. Companies pivot, markets shift, but the one constant is the founder. The pace at which a company grows is predicated on the talent, market understanding, psychology, the founder’s decision-making, and the team they build around themselves. That’s the most critical element of investing early, and we’re not the first to say it. It’s consistent across successful funds globally, including early-stage investors across Africa. The market still matters because quality talent alone doesn’t move mountains. Finding an opportunity in a market and having clarity on which problems to solve is critical. But even that comes down to the founder’s capacity to identify those opportunities and be exceptional within that vertical. There’s also a hierarchy we believe in that sometimes gets flipped in venture capital, where the investor gets placed above the founder. We believe it’s the other way around. The founder is the higher priority, and the investor is secondary. Practically, that means we’re in the business of participating in founders’ success, and we only get involved in startups where we can understand, contribute to, and be part of that success. Early-stage investing isn’t really a science; it’s more of an art, and we’re constantly learning ourselves. What we know today is different from what we knew three months ago, let alone a year ago. There have been moments where we’ve said no because there was a lot we didn’t fully understand, and then come back to a company further down the road. You’ve backed 18 startups, but you must have interacted with far more. How do you decide when a startup makes business sense and is likely to return capital, and what leads you to pass on others? Tudhope: Each investment decision is highly contextual, so there’s no single global reason why we didn’t invest in a
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This is Follow the Money, our weekly series that unpacks the earnings, business, and scaling strategies of African fintechs, financial institutions, companies, and governments. A new edition drops every Monday. In Juja, a busy area in Kenya’s Kiambu County, Faith Mbinya, a local mom-and-pop trader, proudly displayed an orange-and-white banner bearing a quick response (QR) code that read “Bitcoin accepted here.” Inside the household goods shop she runs, customers browse plastic buckets, cookware, electronics, toiletries, and cleaning supplies. Every so often, someone pays for a dustbin, toilet brush, or other household item with Bitcoin. Mbinya began accepting the cryptocurrency in November 2025 after a friend introduced her to it. For her, the appeal has little to do with Bitcoin’s price and everything to do with the cost of moving money. “I accept Bitcoin because it reduces the transaction cost, which is a very major problem when we go to our Kenyan local banks or local M-PESA,” Mbinya told TechCabal. “It helped me save on those little transactions.” Most of her customers still pay in Kenyan Shillings. However, she says four or five customers—a handful of the foot traffic—each month ask to pay with Bitcoin. One customer recently paid KES 6,000 ($46) in Bitcoin for household goods. Mbinya says most of the people who ask to pay this way are Bitcoin users (Bitcoiners) under 35, reflecting a growing community of young Kenyans already familiar with the cryptocurrency. Verified Ledger The Micro-Merchant Tax Comparing verified Safaricom transfer tariffs against Fedi network routing. Infrastructure Note: Fedi App Traders use the Fedi to handle community e-cash. They migrated to this app because it combines receiving Bitcoin, converting currencies, and spending into a single wallet, solving the storage strain on low-cost Android phones. Internal transfers inside a federation are free, while external outbound transfers across the Lightning Network carry a minor 21 basis points (0.21%) fee. Monthly Customer Payments (fixed at 130 KES / $1 each): 100 payments ($100) CUMULATIVE PROCESSING FEES Total Business Volume: $100.00 $5.38 Safaricom M-PESA7 KES Flat Transfer Fee $0.21 Fedi Network Rail0.21% External Routing The Cash-Out Reality: While a 7 KES Pochi la Biashara / Till transfer amounts to $26.92 at max slider volume, if the merchant withdraws those funds via an offline agent, Safaricom’s standard 29 KES fee applies—bringing total operational friction to $111.54. By operating purely on-chain via Fedi, micro-merchants protect their margins from compounding flat fee brackets. Data source: Safaricom Official Tariffs (Latest Update) & Fedi Processing Metrics. USD/KES conversion pegged at 130. In Lagos, the appetite centres on stablecoins Across Africa’s cryptocurrency hubs, a growing number of merchants are beginning to accept digital assets as payment. But while Mbinya embraces Bitcoin itself, some businesses in Lagos have adopted a different model. Trib3 Lagos, a fine-dining restaurant in Victoria Island, an upscale part of Lagos, Nigeria, accepts cryptocurrency payments, although customers typically pay with stablecoins, digital tokens pegged to the value of fiat currencies. The restaurant, however, has no interest in holding digital assets after a transaction is complete. “We are an all-inclusive restaurant, catering to mostly those in the formal sector, and quite a number of Nigerians, mostly young people who deal in crypto, want to pay with that, hence the reason,” Franklyn Obinna, business development manager for sales and events at Trib3 Lagos, told TechCabal. “We sell an experience, and that extends to how payments are made.” Obinna said that although the restaurant accepts Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, USDT, and other digital assets, it converts every crypto payment into Naira immediately. “We transact in our local currency [Naira] daily, so we always have to convert all crypto payments to local currency immediately,” Obinna said. Mbinya and Trib3 represent two ends of the same spectrum. One accepts Bitcoin both as a means of payment and as a store of value. The other accepts digital assets only as a payment rail, converting every transaction into local currency. The Crypto Payment Pipeline Compare how crypto settles at checkout in Kenya vs. Nigeria. The Juja Model (Hold) The Lagos Model (Convert) Customer Sends $46 in BTC Fedi / Self-Custody Wallet Merchant Receives BTC System Insight: The Circular Economy Mom-and-pop stores hold the native cryptocurrency. They absorb the exchange-rate risk directly, relying on community rebates if the asset’s price drops sharply. Source: TechCabal Reporting Businesses like Trib3 accept cryptocurrency largely because customers increasingly expect that option. Their confidence comes from knowing they do not have to hold the assets themselves. Startups, including CoinCircuit and Mular, bridge that gap by receiving cryptocurrency from customers, converting it almost instantly, and settling merchants in local currency. The model allows cryptocurrency holders to spend the assets they already own while enabling merchants to continue operating in the currencies they already use. For years, cryptocurrency payments have struggled to move beyond speculation into everyday commerce. Bitcoin’s price volatility, network congestion, and tax treatment have discouraged many merchants from accepting it directly. Stablecoins remove much of the volatility, but they do not solve another challenge. Most businesses still keep their accounts, pay suppliers, and settle taxes in local currency. Any payment system that expects merchants to hold cryptocurrency, therefore, requires them to change the financial infrastructure on which their businesses operate. The startups and communities emerging across Nigeria and Kenya are betting on a different approach. Rather than asking merchants to become crypto businesses, they are building infrastructure that enables customers to spend digital assets while merchants continue receiving local currency. Building the missing payment rail Startups building crypto payment infrastructure across Africa argue that t persuading merchants to adopt cryptocurrency is the wrong way to think about the market. h Instead, they see the opportunity in serving consumers whose money is already on-chain. Across Nigeria and much of Africa, stablecoins and other digital assets have become an increasingly common way for freelancers, remote workers, exporters, and crypto traders to receive cross-border payments. Spending that money, however, still typically requires converting it into local currency before making everyday purchases, often incurring conversion fees and withdrawal charges along
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