A Nigerian startup born from a hackathon has closed a pre-seed round and launched publicly, aiming to replace the fragmented, unrewarding experience of crypto finance with something that works the way money should.
NectarFi gives users a complete financial toolkit in a single application: they can hold and manage digital assets in a self-custodial wallet, spend via Visa cards and global payment rails, trade crypto without gas fee constraints, and invest in tokenised stocks alongside traditional crypto assets. Users can also transact across bank transfer systems in Nigeria, PIX in Latin America, APACA scan in Southeast Asia, and Swift internationally, with blockchain operations running in the background on user-controlled infrastructure behind a familiar interface that requires no complex wallet knowledge.
Before its public launch, NectarFi spent months in private access, onboarding over 1,000 users across Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, and Argentina — allowing the team to test real financial behaviour across diverse markets.
In less than a year of operation, NectarFi has processed over $7 million in transaction volume. The platform began as a hackathon idea, later gaining traction through a local Demo Day win and earning recognition in a global Solana hackathon.
A central part of NectarFi’s proposition is making on-chain financial history count toward credit access — recognising the transaction activity users have already built and laying the groundwork for borrowing power that reflects the financial lives crypto users are actually living, rather than the ones legacy systems were designed to see. CEO Felix Daniel said the company was built to give crypto users one app that works wherever they do, whether that means bank transfers in Nigeria, PIX in Brazil, or Swift globally.
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