“The crypto ban that made us stronger”: Day 1-1000 of Yellow Card

When Chris Maurice landed in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2018, he had only been on a plane four times in his entire life. And then he was on a different continent with two options: make Yellow Card work, or live in Nigeria permanently.

Day 1

It started with $90.

In Alabama – “the capital of innovation,” Maurice says with obvious irony – he met a Nigerian man at Wells Fargo trying to send $200 to his family. The bank wanted $90 to process it.

“I thought, you know, well, that’s insane, right?” Maurice recalls. “How could it possibly cost that much?”

He did what any crypto enthusiast would do: told the guy about Bitcoin. Free transfers! Instant! Revolutionary! Then he went home, and reality hit.

“I just started thinking, you know, what on earth is this guy’s mom gonna do with $200 in Bitcoin?” Maurice says. “You can’t buy food with that. You can’t pay rent with that. What problem is this actually solving?”

That question led Maurice down a research rabbit hole about Nigeria, its currency, its banking system, and its economy. And somewhere in that research, he realised something critical: if he wanted to understand Nigeria, he needed to speak to someone from there.

So, he did what any reasonable person would do. He put out an ad online.

“Looking to speak to Nigerian men,” Maurice says, then pauses. “Which, you know, in hindsight, probably could have been worded better.” The phrasing attracted exactly the wrong kind of responses. But eventually, he connected with the right Nigerian man. And that’s when Maurice learned his first lesson about Nigeria. Nigerians are the most convincing people in the world.

“Within about a month and a half of meeting this Nigerian man on the internet, he convinced me to get a passport and take the first international flight of my life,” Maurice says.

He’d never left the United States. He knew almost nothing about Nigeria beyond what he’d researched online, maybe a YouTube video or two. None of that mattered.

“The options, very literally, were build something that works or live in Lagos for the rest of my life,” Maurice says. It’s the kind of founder commitment story that sounds insane until you realise: it worked.

The pivot nobody expected

Maurice and his co-founder, Justin Poiroux, had gone to Nigeria with a remittance app in mind. Make it easier for people to send money home. Simple, obvious, needed.

Except it wasn’t.

“The truth is that there are 500 remittance apps, right?” Maurice says. “By the time I finished the sentence, you can download 700 different apps to help you send money. The world doesn’t need another remittance app.”

What Nigeria needed, what the continent needed, was something more fundamental: a better way to facilitate international payments and enable money to interact with local economies.

“Stablecoins are the first and only technology that actually enables that,” Maurice explains. “There’s a huge opportunity to do something here with international payments, with access to dollars, and other fundamental issues that exist across the continent.”

The realisation shifted everything. Instead of building another remittance app competing with a host of others, Yellow Card would build infrastructure – the rails that would make it easier for every company to operate on the continent.

“How do we make it easier for all of these remittance companies, rather than build a remittance app ourselves?” Maurice says.

Yellow Card launched in Nigeria in 2019. And for a while, everything worked. Maurice found that Nigerians had something most other markets lacked: a genuine openness to new technology.

“From the beginning, everybody just really understood crypto,” he says. “People have such an openness and willingness to try new technology and implement new technology that solves their problems. That’s one of the biggest benefits of doing business in Nigeria—the culture of innovation.”

Maurice compares it to his experiences in Europe, where innovation moves more slowly, vacation days pile up, and risk-taking is discouraged. In Nigeria, as in the US, people hustle.

“There’s no such thing as work and life separation, like it’s all just one,” he says. “Nigeria, man, people hustle. There are certain countries around the world where people just hustle, right? And those countries, from a business perspective, get along much better.”

By 2021, Nigeria accounted for over 90% of Yellow Card’s volume and revenue. The company had built meaningful infrastructure in seven other African countries, but Nigeria was the engine.

Then, in February 2021, everything changed.

Day 500: The ban that separated winners from losers

The Central Bank of Nigeria issued a directive prohibiting banks from processing transactions from cryptocurrency companies or users. It wasn’t technically a crypto ban—Nigeria never actually banned cryptocurrency—but it might as well have been.

“Look, it was a major hindrance to the industry and to being able to grow in Nigeria,” Maurice says. For most crypto companies operating in Nigeria, the directive was devastating. Companies that had raised seed funding around the same time as Yellow Card started firing staff. Growth stalled. Some shut down entirely. Yellow Card didn’t fire anyone.

“We were the only company that came out of that without having to fire anybody,” Maurice says. “We were the only company that came out of that able to raise a Series A.”

The difference? Those seven other countries.

While competitors had gone all-in on Nigeria, Yellow Card had actually opened entities, secured bank accounts, obtained licencing approvals, and built infrastructure across the continent. When Nigeria went offline, it could shift resources immediately.

“We were the only Pan-African crypto player that had actually built meaningful infrastructure outside of Nigeria,” Maurice explains. “When that happened, we were the only company actually able to shift resources to other countries, to other markets, to be able to grow.”

The ban lasted about two months before things largely returned to normal. Yellow Card worked with payment service providers to maintain operations, even if it was ‘a little bit uglier from an operational standpoint.’

But the damage to competitors was done. And the lesson was clear.

“It sent a shock wave to us and to others that, like, oh shit, we need to have a presence in more than just Nigeria,” Maurice says. “One country has too much concentrated risk.”

Yellow Card diversified aggressively. Today, it operates in 20 African countries. Nigeria remains a very large market, “but it is by no means 90%. It’s not even half of the business.”

Of all the crypto companies that launched around the same time, Yellow Card was the only one to raise a Series A. It built a sustainable business. And it did it because it’d prepared for the worst before it happened.

Beyond the big three

One of Yellow Card’s core assumptions—one that’s proven correct—is that opportunity exists beyond Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.

“Most companies don’t really operate in Africa,” Maurice says. “They operate in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, right? And sometimes Ghana. That’s it. Three to four countries, where there are 54 on the continent.”

The second country Yellow Card was launched after Nigeria? Botswana.

“To this day, I think we’re still the only company actually operating locally in Botswana,” Maurice says. “And it’s a big market for us, as are some of these other markets that people don’t usually think about.”

The strategy required working closely with regulators country by country—something previous crypto companies had failed to do effectively.

“We were not the first company to be doing crypto on the continent, but we were the first company that said, as part of this, we need to help the industry as a whole,” Maurice explains. “We went country by country and worked with regulators on the development of licensing regimes. A lot of the bills that have come out recently—we were the ones that wrote them.”

It’s unglamorous work. It’s slow work. But it’s the work that creates sustainable businesses.

Day 1000: The data-driven approach to failing fast

Maurice is candid about mistakes. Yellow Card has made mistakes in marketing campaigns, product decisions, and operational choices. But it has developed a philosophy: don’t be wrong for long.

“You can go in, you can make assumptions, you can be wrong, but don’t be wrong for a long time,” he says. “Fail fast and fail quickly.”

It’s a philosophy born from necessity. Operating across 20 African countries means navigating 20 different regulatory environments, 20 different user cultures, 20 different market dynamics. You can’t afford to stay wrong.

“We try to be quite data-driven,” Maurice says. “Other than the fundamental business model—we’re going to operate in all these countries, and there is an opportunity in these countries—we don’t really make assumptions over the long run.”

It’s also why Maurice thinks Africa’s crypto market is massively underestimated by outsiders.

“Africa is the leading continent by a number of metrics in the space,” he says. “Seven countries have been in and out of the top rankings globally for adoption. It’s just a massive market that I think is largely overlooked.”

Why the oversight? Maurice points to representation, or lack of it.

“Africa is just largely undercovered in the media. It’s underrepresented in pop culture, movies, things like that,” he says. “People outside of the continent just generally don’t understand it.”

Even within the continent, understanding is fragmented. “If you talk to the average person in Nigeria, I don’t think they really understand Francophone Africa and some of the cultural nuances there, and vice versa.”

Compare that to American or British culture, which dominates global media.
“I couldn’t tell you a movie that’s set in Congo off the top of my head,” Maurice says. “Unless you’re actually setting out to do research, it’s quite difficult to learn more.”

What’s next: Building for the long term

Yellow Card now operates across 20 African countries, has raised a Series A, and has positioned itself as crypto infrastructure for the continent. In 2025, the Yellow Card discontinued its retail services to focus solely on enterprise clients. The 2023 lifting of Nigeria’s banking restrictions on crypto created new opportunities.

Maurice’s advice for founders? Come in with an open mind.

“I didn’t experience culture shock in Nigeria because I went in with absolutely no preconceived notions,” he says. “I think in order to experience culture shock, you expect things to be a certain way, and then things are totally different. I had no idea what I was getting into.”

That openness—combined with aggressive diversification, regulatory partnerships, and the willingness to fail fast—turned a one-way ticket gamble into a pan-African success story.

Looking back, Maurice’s assessment of that initial decision to fly to Lagos on a six-day-old passport is simple: “The options were build something that works or live in Lagos for the rest of my life.”

He built something that works. Across 20 countries. And counting.