An increasing number of professionals earn their livelihoods through remote work, freelancing, or employment with companies based outside their home countries. Yet receiving cross-border payments and actually accessing that income represent two distinct challenges — and for many workers, the latter proves far more difficult. According to World Bank data, remittance costs to Sub-Saharan Africa have consistently ranked among the highest of any region globally, with average fees often exceeding eight percent of the transferred amount, underscoring the structural inefficiencies that burden workers in these markets.

Jennifer Echenim encountered these obstacles firsthand while working remotely for international firms. The payment platforms she used each created different complications: one provided transaction records that banks and visa authorities refused to accept as proof of income, another applied unfavorable exchange rates to her earnings, and a third imposed high fees for routing payments on Ethereum. These fragmented payment paths led her to question why cross-border compensation had to be so convoluted.

At the time, Echenim had spent years developing blockchain products. She began her career at Liquality, where she worked as a software engineer on a multichain wallet facilitating transactions across multiple networks. She later joined Nestcoin, advancing from frontend software engineer to leading the frontend team behind one of its flagship products. Through products like Nubian — a savings platform offering yield and staking features — Echenim gained direct experience in how blockchain could underpin practical financial services, knowledge that would eventually inform Bloccpay.

Today, Echenim and her co-founder Ajoke Asunmonu are building Bloccpay, a stablecoin-powered payroll and invoicing platform designed to help professionals in emerging markets receive payments seamlessly. Stablecoins — digital tokens pegged to fiat currencies like the US dollar — have emerged as a practical tool for cross-border value transfer because they combine the price stability of traditional currencies with the speed and programmability of blockchain networks, avoiding the volatility that characterizes many emerging-market currencies and the multi-day settlement times of correspondent banking.

The concept originated from a straightforward question the two founders posed to each other: "What would it take to make this easier?" Echenim took a notebook, and together they mapped the entire payment journey — from a business initiating a transfer to the contractor receiving funds — identifying every friction point along the way.

They subsequently consulted a seasoned blockchain engineer to work through the technical and regulatory considerations of building a solution bridging traditional finance with crypto infrastructure. At the time, regulatory clarity around cryptocurrency was significantly less developed than it is today, making compliance — particularly concerning the fiat-to-crypto-to-fiat flow — a central focus from the outset. Since then, several African governments have moved toward formalizing digital asset frameworks, with Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission issuing rules for digital asset service providers and South Africa's Financial Sector Conduct Authority declaring crypto assets a financial product under its regulatory umbrella — developments that have gradually narrowed the compliance gray zones that earlier builders like Bloccpay had to navigate.

Before developing any product, the founders conducted extensive interviews with their target audience: remote teams, HR managers, contractors, and business owners managing cross-border teams across Africa. Those discussions, more than their initial notebook sketches, formed the foundation for Bloccpay's first iteration.

The company's name emerged just as spontaneously. While discussing the concept with a friend who asked whether they had chosen a name, Echenim replied on the spot: "Bloccpay." It resonated immediately — blockchain solving a payment problem — and the name stuck.

"We're building this for Africa's and other emerging markets' working class and the global businesses that hire them," Echenim said. "Many professionals can earn money globally but still struggle to receive payments efficiently, prove their income, or access financial services in the countries where they live."

Echenim faced these barriers again after relocating to the UAE for work, where opening a bank account and verifying her income proved considerably more difficult, as the country's traditional financial systems are not designed for globally distributed workers.

For Asunmonu, the objective is to eliminate geography as an impediment to opportunity. "Too many talents lose out on global opportunities because employers don't know how to pay them efficiently. We want a world where skills matter more than location."

Bloccpay enables businesses to automate payroll for distributed teams, streamlining the process to a simple review-and-approve workflow after initial setup. Remote workers and global contractors can invoice and earn in both fiat and cryptocurrency through global payment channels. Recipients are not required to create an account to receive funds, which can be deposited directly into a bank account, a crypto wallet, or another supported method.

Each Bloccpay transaction does more than transfer funds — it also generates a verifiable financial record, documenting income, payment history, and audit trails that users can leverage when applying for loans, opening bank accounts, filing taxes, or substantiating income for visa applications. This addresses a pain point that conventional crypto payment rails have largely overlooked: the documentation gap that leaves gig workers and contractors without the paper trail that traditional employment automatically generates.

That value proposition has translated into rapid expansion. Bloccpay currently serves users across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa, with business customers predominantly based in the United States and the United Kingdom. In Q2 2026, gross transaction volume increased sevenfold compared to the prior quarter. By the close of the first half of 2026, the company had already equaled its total transaction volume for the entirety of 2025.

Alongside this growth, Bloccpay has received recognition through the Stellar Community Fund Build Award, the Techstars Founder Catalyst Program, and membership in the Circle Alliance Program. The Circle Alliance Program connects participants to Circle's ecosystem — the company behind USDC, one of the most widely used dollar-backed stablecoins — aligning with Bloccpay's reliance on stablecoin infrastructure for its payment rails.

Under the Hood

Behind the scenes, the platform routes payments across Ethereum, Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, BSC, and other EVM-compatible networks, as well as Stellar, Solana, and Tron, leveraging stablecoins to ensure fast and cost-effective transactions. Supporting this many chains allows Bloccpay to route payments through whichever network offers the lowest fees and fastest confirmation times at a given moment — a meaningful advantage given that layer-1 Ethereum gas costs can fluctuate significantly during periods of network congestion.

Several additional features are in development, including named virtual accounts that allow businesses to fund their balances directly and invoice uploads enabling users to consolidate their complete payment history in a single location. The company is also exploring benefits traditionally available only to full-time employees, aiming to extend them to remote workers and global contractors who have historically been excluded.

Remote work has already rendered employment borderless. Payments, however, have been slower to adapt. Bloccpay is positioning blockchain as the infrastructure for this new workforce, enabling individuals in Lagos, Nairobi, or Accra to work for any company without geography dictating how quickly, affordably, or reliably they receive compensation. The company enters a competitive but still-fragmented space, with players like Deel, Bitwage, and various regional fintechs each addressing pieces of the cross-border payroll challenge — yet few combining stablecoin-native settlement with the verifiable income records that workers in emerging markets increasingly need.

"We think of Bloccpay as a one-stop platform for managing income and everyday life," Asunmonu explained. "Payroll is where we've started, but the long-term goal is to help people manage both their income and the services they need through this ecosystem."