How a Nigerian built a crypto company from an $11.12 allowance

As a first-year Computer Science student at the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA), Timilehin Zubair wanted to become financially independent.  

His parents gave him ₦15,000 ($11.12) a month, which was supposed to cover his expenses as he adjusted to living away from home. But Zubair could spend the money within two weeks. He began looking for ways to earn his own income.  

His first attempt was an Instagram blog, where he reposted pictures from other accounts and tried to build an audience. When that failed to gain traction, he moved into vector art, teaching himself Photoshop and spending hours drawing people. He attracted some attention, but the commissions he expected never came. 

Graphic design was one of his first experiments that actually made money. Zubair began designing for brands and used some of his earnings to advertise his services.

In his second year, a roommate asked him to design a flyer for a crypto business he was starting. The design job became Zubair’s introduction to crypto.

“That was not the first time I was hearing about crypto,” he told TechCabal in an interview. “This time around, I was very interested in knowing more about it. So, I told him to put me on and give me more information about the business.”

As the business grew, Zubair realised that he could not handle every transaction manually. If he wanted to serve more customers, he needed to automate the process and build a product. 

It took a failed attempt to hire an outside developer, and the discovery that one of his own coursemates could build software, the WhatsApp hustle to become Bitoshi, the crypto startup Zubair founded in 2020. The company allows users to send cryptocurrency to a wallet address and receive its naira equivalent in their bank accounts.

The name Bitoshi combines “Bit”, from <a href="https://xpertsstudio.com/flare-flr-surges-11-81-amid-bitcoin-rally-and-defi-focus-top-stories/” title=”Flare (FLR) Surges 11.81% Amid Bitcoin Rally and DeFi Focus | Top Stories”>Bitcoin, and “oshi”, from Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator or creators of Bitcoin. 

Bitoshi entered a Nigerian crypto market that was growing rapidly but operating under a difficult banking environment. In February 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)directed banks and other financial institutions to close accounts belonging to crypto businesses. It warned regulated institutions against dealing in crypto-related transactions. 

Day 1: Turning the WhatsApp hustle into a product

Ask Zubair when Bitoshi started, and he will not point to the WhatsApp side hustle. In his telling, that was simply a way to make money he badly needed.  Day 1, as he counts it, was the moment he decided to turn the hustle into a company. 

On WhatsApp, Zubair manually matched crypto buyers and sellers and tracked payments himself. Customers would tell him they wanted to sell Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency. He would give them a rate; they would send the crypto to his wallet, and he would transfer the naira equivalent to their bank account. It worked when the business was small. But Zubair knew he could not keep doing every transaction himself as the customer base grew.  

“I could not scale to 100 customers a day because it was not humanly possible,” he said.

Scaling meant getting off WhatsApp and building an actual product. The answer came in the form of Leon, a fellow FUTA student Zubair had known since his first year but did not realise was a developer.  

The first version of Bitoshi was a simple website that generated a wallet address for each user, allowed them to send cryptocurrency to it and paid the naira equivalent into their bank account. In effect, it was a website version of what Zubair had been doing manually on WhatsApp.

For the first few months, it was just the two of them. They were students, working remotely and learning as they went.

“We had no marketing team in the early stage. We did zero marketing,” Zubair said. “I was just telling the audience I already had about this product, and they all seemed to like it and started telling their friends about it.”  

Because Bitoshi launched during the crypto ban, Zubair built Bitoshi assuming it would never get a bank partnership,

“We built the product with the mindset that we were going to handle these transactions ourselves,” he said. 

To make that possible, Bitoshi built a vendor-dispatch system. Withdrawal requests were routed by an algorithm to a queue of vendors. A transaction would go to the first vendor and move to the next if it was not picked up within a set time, until an available vendor accepted it. 

That vendor would send the money from their own bank account to the customer’s account and earn a commission for processing the transaction. 

According to Zubair, the system gave the company an advantage over crypto platforms that relied on conventional peer-to-peer (P2P)transactions, where users had to find and transact with individual buyers or sellers.

The workaround came with its own problems. Zubair said hackers found ways to exploit the platform, while other users created multiple accounts with fake identities to farm referral bonuses. 

“We learned on the job. We made a lot of mistakes. We had a lot of losses, because we didn’t fully understand what it meant to build in a financial market,” Zubair says. “It was very messy. But everything that happened, every obstacle we came across, we were able to break through and proceed.”

Day 500: From holding crypto to spending it

Bitoshi had figured out how to make it easier for users to sell crypto and receive naira. But as more people started using the product, Zubair noticed that some users were selling their crypto because they needed to make a payment at a supermarket or restaurant. 

“I realised people wanted to actually be able to spend their crypto,” he said. “When they were using the website, we would see them sell for Naira because they wanted to pay.” 

In 2022, Bitoshi moved from its website to a mobile app that allowed users to hold cryptocurrency and spend directly from their wallets. It added features for sending money from a crypto wallet and paying bills without first converting the cryptocurrency to naira. 

As more people onboarded, Zubair noted that he saw it as a sign that Bitoshi could be more than a place to exchange cryptocurrency, but the startup still had an infrastructure problem. 

Its vendor system had helped the company operate without direct banking partnerships, but it remained l a workaround. An application programming interface (API) connecting directly to a payment partner could make settlements faster and more reliable.

Its fortunes changed in 2023, when the CBN lifted its restriction on banks working with cryptocurrency businesses.

“When that ban was lifted, it was actually amazing news for us,” Zubair said. “We started to look for payment partners to work with. The product was working very well; we just needed to improve our systems. Even though we were using the vendor system, it could never be as quick as something that is automated.”

That year, the company onboarded an undisclosed payment partner, allowing it to automate settlements that had previously depended on its vendor network.

“That made our transactions more seamless and more efficient for our users,” he said, “and that helped us grow more.”

The company also added a way for users to fund their naira wallets directly, giving them another route into crypto instead of requiring them to start with crypto and then convert it to naira.

Through 2023 and into 2024, Zubair and several members of the team were finishing university. Bitoshi was, in Zubair’s words, being sustained.

Day 1000: From crypto exchange to financial access

“2025 was the year we decided internally that we wanted to actually scale Bitoshi,” Zubair said.

Between June and July 2025, Bitoshi began working on the second version of its mobile app.

According to Zubair, the company had spent its first few years helping people trade and spend cryptocurrency. Now, he wanted it to become a financial-access platform where users could move and spend money without needing to understand the crypto infrastructure underneath it.

“We’re no longer positioning ourselves as just a crypto exchange,” Zubair said. “We’re positioning ourselves as global financial access for individuals, powered by crypto.”

He said entering these markets early is partly a regulatory strategy, as the countries are still developing their crypto regulatory frameworks. Bitoshi intends to participate in those policy discussions and sandbox programmes before formal licensing regimes are fully established

The startup generates revenue from bill payments, the spread on crypto-to-naira exchanges and transaction fees. But Zubair says Bitoshi’s ambition extends beyond its existing products.

Bitoshi started as one student’s attempt to make money when his monthly allowance ran out. A thousand days later, Zubair wants to turn that experiment into a financial platform that the average African can use to move money, whether or not they ever think of it as crypto.

“We want to immerse ourselves in the lifestyle of people,” he said. “We want people to learn more about the brand and understand that a regular average person can use this app to perform transactions, and we are powering it through crypto.”

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Source: techcabal.com