The 26-year-old’s crypto exchange is taking Africa by storm

Cryptocurrency exchange Yellow Card has grown to be the largest centralized exchange in Africa since its launch in 2019, with $1.75 billion in transactions facilitated so far.

Chris Maurice and Justin Poiroux are the co-founders of Yellow Card, who launched the platform from their dorm room in Auburn, Alabama, in 2019.

Yellow Card offers an experience similar to Block’s Cash app, which allows users to buy cryptocurrencies using fiat currencies, which they can then send across a border.

But unlike centralized exchanges like Coinbase, where many customers store their tokens for an extended period in the hope that their digital assets will increase in value, the average customer on Maurice’s exchange keeps money on the platform for less than five minutes.

“It’s literally like I deposit a million francs in Cameroon, I buy USDT or BTC, and then I send it,” company co-founder Maurice explained in an interview with CNBC.

The exchange allows users to send money to 16 countries on the continent. More importantly, the platform has streamlined the process of converting crypto back into local currencies at the other end of the transaction.

The platform has now grown to become the largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange in Africa. With around 220 employees, Yellow Card currently has 1.4 million users across the continent.

Furthermore, the exchange has facilitated $1.75 billion in transactions since its launch in 2019. According to Maurice, the platform typically facilitates around $5 million in transactions on a good day. On a slow day, it’s closer to $1 million.

With all its success, Yellow Card is currently worth $200 million. The company has also raised $57 million in funding from investors including Jack Dorsey’s Block and Valar Ventures, a venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel.

However, Maurice aims to turn Yellow Card into a billion-dollar company by expanding the service to the rest of the continent. “I realized very early on that there are so many opportunities in all these countries and that we needed to be the first there,” Maurice said.

“I drove from South Africa to Botswana, Zimbabwe to Zambia, then flew up to Ethiopia, Ghana and Uganda. In all these places I did the grunt work – things like company registration and opening bank accounts so we were ready to go.”

Crypto presents hope to Africa’s broken banking system

Part of Yellow Card’s phenomenal success can be attributed to the problems with Africa’s banking system, which has led to the growing use of crypto.

For example, the continent has a quasi-colonial payments framework, where approximately 80% of cross-border payments originating from African banks are processed offshore, mostly in the US or Europe, meaning higher costs and processing times sometimes measured in weeks.

“The whole banking system in Africa is completely and utterly broken, even among the mobile money providers, the telcos,” said Ray Youssef, CEO of Paxful. He added that another problem is that payment operators on the continent are not connected.

“Two thousand payment networks and only 2% of them talk to each other. That number continues to grow. It’s not getting better, it’s actually getting worse.”

This creates a great opportunity for crypto to come in and fill the gap that the traditional banking system presents, especially since crypto payments facilitate efficient cross-border transactions that take place in real time.

“Everyone is looking for alternative ways to pay,” said Nigerian national Franklin Okoye, who makes a living helping companies import goods such as clothes and chemicals from China. “Everyone is going to crypto.”