After raising $5.5 million for Hyperbridge, Polytope Labs wants to build for Nigerian fintechs too

After raising $5.5 million to help people swap crypto between blockchains, Polytope Labs is building an on-chain stablecoin infrastructure.

In a leaked pitch deck obtained by Techpoint Africa, Polytope Labs is planning to launch an on-chain stablecoin infrastructure for FX settlement.

Built on top of its Intent Gateway, which is part of Hyperbridge and designed for fast and secure asset transfers, the new product will help finance companies with liquidity bottlenecks.

Meanwhile, Polytope’s flagship interoperability protocol, Hyperbridge, remains active, having processed roughly $500 million in cross-chain messages on mainnet.

The liquidity problem Polytope Lab sees

According to Lanlege, “FX settlement in emerging markets is expensive, slow, and inaccessible to the businesses that need it most.”

The deck for the lab’s new product shows that pre-funding is what makes FX settlement slow and expensive. For example, when a user in London sends $500 to Lagos, the receiving fintech must already have naira sitting in a Nigerian bank account, ready to be disbursed.

This is known as a float, which must not run dry or payouts will stall, eroding the fintech’s trust and competitive edge.

For early-stage startups, this means tying up scarce venture capital in idle bank accounts rather than deploying it into growth or product development. For larger players operating across multiple corridors, it means maintaining sizeable balances in different currencies, each exposed to volatility.

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Between 2023 and early 2025, the naira lost roughly 70% of its value against the dollar. Fintechs holding naira-denominated floats effectively watched part of their working capital evaporate in real time. In a market already defined by thin margins, that kind of currency exposure is not trivial.

Fintechs also need liquidity providers willing to exchange stablecoins like USDT or USDC for naira at competitive rates. These relationships are often managed manually, negotiated over months, monitored daily, and rebalanced constantly.

Victoria Fakiya – Se...