In this episode, I sit down with Obi Emeratom, the founder and CEO of Zone, to explore how his company is rebuilding the core infrastructure of African payments using a regulated, blockchain-based architecture.

We unpack:

• The journey from Appzone to Zone and why the spin-off was necessary
  

• How Zone won over Nigerian banks without evangelizing crypto
  

• What makes regulated blockchains credible to central banks
  

• Why decentralization with permissioning may be the right model for Africa
  

• The real-world bottlenecks of legacy switches and how Zone bypasses them
  

• Zone Pay, deep linking, merchant wallets, and the next wave of use cases
  

• Why Obi believes the future of payments is regulated DeFi built from the ground up
  

  This is not a theoretical chat t’s a grounded look at the friction in today’s systems and a pragmatic blueprint for what comes next.

🎧 Listen in if you care about the evolution of African fintech infrastructure, cross-border payments, and compliance-aligned innovation.

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