• Nigerian entrepreneur Chibuotu Amadi co-founded Paycrest to bridge cryptocurrencies and local fiat payments.

• Paycrest enables instant crypto-to-fiat transactions using a liquidity provider network with reduced costs.

• Amadi brings experience from Web3, fintech, and decentralized health platforms to the payment infrastructure.

Chibuotu Amadi is a Nigerian entrepreneur and software engineer. He co-founded and leads Paycrest as chief executive officer. Paycrest operates a payment infrastructure that seeks to make cryptocurrency transactions as simple and accessible as traditional payments for individuals and businesses worldwide.

Founded in 2024, Paycrest targets financial inclusion by enabling seamless payments between digital currencies and local fiat money. The company aims to lower transaction costs, simplify processes, and remove frictions linked to daily cryptocurrency use.

Paycrest offers open tools that allow users to send or receive payments in cryptocurrencies while settling or collecting local currency through standard bank accounts and wallets. Behind the platform, a network of liquidity providers converts value instantly between digital assets and traditional currencies at reduced cost. The tools target individuals, online merchants, enterprises, and decentralized finance projects.

Amadi has built multiple ventures over the past decade. In 2014, he founded SMSLeak, a Nigerian bulk SMS company that provides large-scale messaging solutions for advertising, sales promotions, product launches, and customer engagement.

In 2018, he co-founded Cura Network and served as chief technology officer until 2022. The company develops a decentralized global healthcare system that connects entities to collaborate and share data to promote, restore, and maintain health.

Amadi graduated from the University of Benin in Nigeria, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering in 2016. He completed a software engineering internship at the Manipal Institute of Technology in India in 2015.

In 2019, Amadi joined Indian financial firm Inkredo as a full-stack developer. At the same time, he worked at Smarter.Codes, a software development company. In 2020, he joined U.S.-based ConsenSys, which provides tools for building Web3 solutions. From 2021 to 2023, he held a similar role at Gitcoin, a U.S. organization that funds community-driven projects.

This article was initially published in French by Melchior Koba

Adapted in English by Ange J.A de BERRY QUENUM