In 2025, when Techpoint Africa sat down with Seun Lanlege, cofounder of Polytope Labs, the lab behind Hyperbridge, he argued that crypto was not built to cooperate with traditional finance but to escape it.
Less than a year later, Lanlege has made a U-turn from this stance as Polytope Labs plans to expand its products/protocols beyond Web3.
A leaked pitch deck obtained by Techpoint Africa shows Polytope Labs quietly courting the institutions that crypto once sought to bypass as it expands outside Web3 with a new solution
Built on top of its Intent Gateway, which is part of Hyperbridge and designed for fast and secure asset transfers, the new product will help cross-border and remittance companies with liquidity bottlenecks.
Lanlege admits the lab is developing a product outside its known focus, but denies seeing it as a U-turn on philosophy.
“I have argued that blockchains, when built and used correctly, produce systems that are more open, more efficient, and more honest than the ones they replace. This new application is exactly that argument applied to a real problem.”
However, this expansion outside the core Web3 ecosystem is coming at a time when the crypto market has seen better days. Bitcoin has lost 48.3% of its value since October 2026, going down from an all-time high of $122k to $62k this year.
This expansion, therefore, raises questions: Is this simply diversification, or a move by the crypto infrastructure company to build for an ecosystem that isn’t swayed by the volatility of the crypto market?
Meanwhile, Polytope’s flagship interoperability protocol, Hyperbridge, remains active, having processed roughly $500 million in cross-chain messages on mainnet.
Victoria Fakiya – Senior Writer
Techpoint Digest
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The liquidity problem Polytope Lab sees
According to Lanlege, “FX settlement in emerging markets is expensive, slow, and inaccessible to the businesses that need it most.”
The deck for the lab’s new product shows that pre-funding is what makes FX settlement slow and expensive. For example, when a user in London sends $500 to Lagos, the receiving fintech must already have naira sitting in a Nigerian bank account, ready to be disbursed.
This is known as a float, which must not run dry or payouts stall, or payouts will stall, eroding the fintech’s trust and competitive edge.
For early-stage startups, this means tying up scarce venture capital in idle bank accounts rather than deploying it into growth or product development. For larger players operating across multiple corridors, it means maintaining sizeable balances in different currencies, each exposed to volatility.
Between 2023 and early 2025, the naira lost roughly 70% of its value against the dollar. Fintechs holding naira-denominated floats effectively watched part of their working capital evaporate in real time. In a market already defined by thin margins, that kind of currency exposure is not trivial.
Fintechs also need liquidity providers willing to exchange stablecoins like USDT or USDC for naira at competitive rates. These relationships are often managed manually, negotiated over months, monitored daily, and rebalanced constantly.
The alternative is to rely on automated market maker pools, but those come with their own trade-offs: someone must still lock up capital, large orders create slippage, and liquidity providers face impermanent loss.
Several companies have tried to solve it from different angles. Yellow Card has built one of the continent’s largest licensed stablecoin infrastructures, managing liquidity through treasury teams and banking partnerships across multiple markets.
Kotani Pay integrates stablecoins with mobile money, allowing users to convert via USSD, but it still relies on local agents to provide fiat liquidity.
Even Stripe’s billion-dollar acquisition of Bridge signalled that the liquidity layer is becoming strategically important. But orchestration and APIs do not eliminate the need for someone, somewhere, to hold pre-funded local currency.
Polytope’s solution is a proposed replacement for the pre-funded model. Instead of asking fintechs to manage liquidity, it proposes to match liquidity on demand. It works by broadcasting a user’s stablecoin-to-fiat “swap intent” to a network of competing liquidity providers, who bid in real time to fulfil the transaction.
Whether that works at scale is another question.
The cNGN layer
Naira liquidity for Polytope’s solution will be dependent on cNGN. The process for a LemFi user that wants to send dollars to Nigeria, for example, would be USD to USDT/USDC to cNGN to naira.
cNGN is important to off-ramp into a naira bank account. Essentially, a user’s USDT or USDC is matched through the intent network and swapped for cNGN. That cNGN is then redeemed 1:1 for fiat naira and pushed to a Nigerian bank account.
This solution makes it easy for remittance and cross-border fintechs to process transactions on the backend with stablecoins without breaking any rules.
While Polytope did not share fintechs that could be piloting this solution, it gives Nigerian fintechs homegrown options.
Flutterwave and YellowCard, for example, are already on Circle’s stablecoin-based payment network. Other fintechs with stablecoin ambitions now have more options.
However, Polytope Labs may struggle to find fintechs willing to bet on its new solution. While founders Lanlege and David Salami have unparalleled engineering expertise, they’ve spent most of their careers building in Web3.
But with stablecoins now an interesting topic even within traditional finance, Polytope Labs could easily onboard users.
