In a leaked pitch deck obtained by Techpoint Africa, Polytope Labs is planning to launch an on-chain stablecoin infrastructure for FX settlement.
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 finance companies with liquidity bottlenecks.
Meanwhile, Polytope’s flagship interoperability protocol, Hyperbridge, remains active, having processed roughly $500 million in cross-chain messages on mainnet.
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 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.
Victoria Fakiya – Senior Writer
Techpoint Digest
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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.
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.
With stablecoins now an interesting topic even within traditional finance, Polytope Labs could easily onboard users.
Editor’s note: 8:01 pm WAT An earlier version of this article described Polytope Labs’ new product as an expansion beyond Web3. This is an error. The product is an on-chain stablecoin infrastructure that is useful for companies that aren’t Web3.
