On/off ramp APIs for stablecoin payments across East Africa
Kotani Pay is last-mile stablecoin infrastructure that connects wallets, protocols, and merchants to local African payment channels via a simple API. It helps businesses accept stablecoins and pay out to bank and mobile money accounts — bringing crypto liquidity into real-world commerce.
Critically, Kotani meets users where they are: it supports low-friction flows (including USSD/SMS-style experiences) and integrates deeply into local rails, enabling stablecoin payments without demanding crypto-native behaviour from customers.
How do stablecoin off-ramps work in mobile money markets?
A stablecoin off-ramp converts onchain dollars (USDC, USDT, cNGN and others) into spendable local money — usually a mobile money wallet like M-PESA or MTN MoMo, or a bank account. The hard part isn't the swap; it's the network of local licences, partner banks, and float management that makes payouts land reliably within minutes. We wrote about how liquidity finds its way through these markets in Liquidity Will Find a Way. Kotani is the off-ramp many of our other portfolio companies plug into, and a cornerstone of our Simple Finance thesis.
Why LAVA invested in Kotani Pay
We invested early because Kotani is building the hard, defensible layer at the boundary between onchain value and local payments. In African markets, deeply integrating into local rails is what drives reliability, margins, and long-term defensibility.
Kotani's frugal execution and steady growth, combined with strong partnerships and a developer-first API, made it one of the most credible teams we've seen for scaling stablecoin settlement into everyday payment flows across multiple countries.