Six Nigerian-founded projects have secured a combined $521,700 from round 44 of the Stellar Community Fund (SCF), Stellar Nigeria announced on X.

Yolat received the largest award at $110,000, followed by Jumpa with $89,700, Azza with $89,000, Choppaddi with $80,000, Paycashless with $78,000 and Blink with $75,000.

The sweep lands in one of the world’s most active grassroots crypto markets. Nigeria has consistently ranked near the top of Chainalysis’ Global Crypto Adoption Index and is Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest recipient of remittances — the cross-border flows several of the winning projects are built to move — while stablecoin usage has grown in the country amid the naira volatility and hard-currency shortages that followed the currency’s mid-2023 flotation.

What the funded projects are building

Yolat is a cross-border money transfer platform enabling users to send and receive funds internationally, positioning itself around fast settlement and competitive exchange rates.

Choppaddi is a marketplace that combines e-commerce with stablecoin-based payments, aiming to let users “shop everything and pay anyone” without currency friction. The startup was founded by Chijioke Ogbechie, who died in December 2025; co-founders Chukwuemeka “DoctorVee” and Progress Ochuko Eyaadah now lead the venture.

Jumpa, according to posts from co-founder Anita Ndukwe and the FoundersHub accelerator on X, is building a cross-border payments platform designed to cut transaction delays for businesses and individuals moving money across African borders.

Blink allows users to spend stablecoins — including USDC on Stellar, Solana and Base, and USDT on Tron — at physical checkouts via Bluetooth, with merchants settling instantly in local currency.

Azza offers crypto buying, selling and peer-to-peer transfers through a WhatsApp-based AI agent, letting users send crypto using only a phone number.

Paycashless provides payment collection tools for businesses, including a virtual point-of-sale system, bank transfers, invoicing and payouts. The company says it serves more than 150 merchants.

About the fund

The SCF is the Stellar Development Foundation’s recurring grant programme, funding projects built on the Stellar blockchain across open-application, ecosystem-integration and infrastructure-request tracks. Stellar itself was launched in 2014 by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim as a payments-focused open network, and Circle has issued USDC on the chain since 2021 — in a winner list where stablecoin payments are a running theme.

Round 44, which closed for submissions in June, ran under a newly restructured framework and reportedly distributed several million dollars in XLM tokens across dozens of winning projects globally, with individual grants capped at $150,000.

The funding also lands as Nigeria formalises digital-asset oversight: the Central Bank lifted its 2021 prohibition on banks serving crypto firms in December 2023, and the country’s Securities and Exchange Commission has since been rolling out registration rules for virtual asset service providers — the regime under which payments startups like these operate.

Stellar Nigeria, the network’s local community arm — distinct from the global Stellar Development Foundation — has previously backed Nigerian fintech infrastructure and hosts recurring hackathons and builder programmes in the country.