When Chris Morris landed in Lagos, Nigeria in 2018, he had been on a plane just four times in his life. And he was on another continent, and he had two options. You can activate your yellow card or you can permanently reside in Nigeria.
Day 1
It started at $90.
In Alabama, the “innovation capital,” Morris said, with obvious irony, that he met a Nigerian man at Wells Fargo who was trying to send $200 to his family. The bank asked for $90 to process it.
“I thought, well, that’s insane, right?” Maurice recalls. “Why does it cost so much?”
He did what any cryptocurrency enthusiast would do: I told him about Bitcoin. Free transportation! instant! Revolutionary! Then he went home and reality hit.
“I just started thinking, you know, what the hell is this guy’s mother going to do with $200 in Bitcoin?” Maurice says. “We can’t buy food with this. We can’t pay rent with this. What problems does this actually solve?”
This question led Maurice to begin researching Nigeria, its currency, banking system, and economy. And somewhere in that research, he realized something important. If you want to understand Nigeria, you need to talk to someone from Nigeria.
So he did what any sane person would do. He placed an online ad.
“I’d like to talk to a man in Nigeria,” Maurice said, then stopped. “In hindsight, there might have been a better wording.” This wording provoked exactly the wrong kind of reaction. But eventually, he connected with the right Nigerian man. And that’s when Maurice learned his first lesson about Nigeria. Nigerians are the most persuasive people in the world.
“Within about a month and a half of meeting this Nigerian guy on the internet, he convinced me to get a passport and take my first international flight,” Maurice says.
He had never left the United States. He knew very little about Nigeria beyond what he had researched online, maybe a YouTube video or two. That didn’t matter.
“Literally, the choice was to build something that worked or live in Lagos for the rest of my life,” Maurice says. This sounds like a founder commitment, and it may sound crazy until you realize it actually worked.
A pivot that no one expected
Maurice and his co-founder Justin Poloo had gone to Nigeria with a money transfer app in mind. Make it easier for people to send money home. Simple, obvious, and necessary.
Except it wasn’t.
“There are actually 500 money transfer apps, right?” Maurice says. “By the time I finish sentencing, there will be 700 apps available for download to help you send money. The world doesn’t need another money transfer app.”
What Nigeria needed, and what the continent needed, was something more fundamental: a better way to facilitate international payments and allow money to interact with local economies.
“Stablecoins are the first and only technology to actually make that possible,” Morris explains. “There is a huge opportunity here to do something about international payments, access to dollars and other fundamental issues that exist across the continent.”
That realization changed everything. Instead of building another money transfer app that would compete with many other money transfer apps, Yellow Card intends to build infrastructure, or rails, that will make it easier for any business to operate on the continent.
“Rather than building a money transfer app ourselves, how do we make money transfer easier for all these money transfer companies?” Maurice says.
Yellow cards were introduced in Nigeria in 2019. And for a while everything was fine. Maurice realized that Nigerians had something that most other markets lacked: a true openness to new technology.
“From the beginning, everyone really understood cryptocurrencies,” he says. “People are very open and willing to try new technologies and implement new technologies that solve problems. That’s one of the biggest benefits of doing business in Nigeria: the culture of innovation.”
Maurice compares it to the experience in Europe. Innovation is slow there, vacations overlap, and risk-taking is discouraged. In Nigeria, just like in the United States, people make a fuss.
“There’s no separation between work and life. It’s like they’re all one,” he says. “Nigeria, hey, people are making noise. There are countries in the world where people are just making noise, right? And those countries do much better from a business perspective.”
By 2021, Nigeria accounted for over 90% of Yellow Card sales volume and revenue. Although the company was also building meaningful infrastructure in seven other African countries, Nigeria was the driving force.
Then, in February 2021, everything changed.
Day 500: The ban that separated the winners from the losers.
The Central Bank of Nigeria has issued a directive prohibiting banks from processing transactions from crypto companies and users. While this was not technically a ban on cryptocurrencies, Nigeria has never actually banned cryptocurrencies, although it may as well have been banned.
“You know, it was a big hurdle for the industry and for growth in Nigeria,” Maurice says. For most cryptocurrency companies operating in Nigeria, this directive was devastating. Companies that had raised seed funding around the same time as Yellow Card began laying off employees. Growth has stagnated. Some have shut down completely. No one was dismissed for a yellow card.
“We were the only company to get through this without laying anyone off,” says Maurice. “As a result, we were the only company to get a Series A.”
difference? and 7 other countries.
While its competitors were committed to Nigeria, Yellow Card was actually opening business entities, securing bank accounts, obtaining license approvals, and building infrastructure across the continent. If Nigeria goes offline, we have the potential to immediately migrate resources.
“We were the only pan-African crypto player to actually build meaningful infrastructure outside of Nigeria,” Maurice explains. “When that happened, we were the only company that was able to actually move our resources to other countries and other markets to grow.”
The ban lasted about two months, after which things returned to near-normal conditions. Yellow Card worked with payment service providers to maintain operations, even if the situation was “a little ugly from an operational standpoint.”
But the damage to competitors was done. And the lesson was clear.
“It shocked us and other people. We thought, oh my gosh, we need to have a presence not just in Nigeria but in other parts of the world,” Maurice says. “Risks are too concentrated in one country.”
Yellow Card actively diversified. We currently operate in 20 African countries. Nigeria remains a very large market, “but it’s by no means 90%. It’s not even half of the business.”
Of all the crypto companies founded around the same time, Yellow Card was the only one to raise a Series A. The company has built a sustainable business. And we were able to do that because we were prepared for the worst before it happened.
Beyond the big 3
One of the core assumptions of Yellow Card, which has been proven correct, is that opportunities exist beyond Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.
“Most companies don’t actually do business in Africa,” Maurice says. “They operate in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, right? And sometimes in Ghana. That’s it. There are 54 countries on the continent, but only three or four.”
Is it the second country after Nigeria to receive a yellow card? Botswana.
“To this day, I think we are the only company in Botswana that actually has operations on the ground,” Maurice says. “And this is a big market for us, as well as other markets that people don’t usually think about.”
This strategy required working closely with national regulators, something that crypto companies have not been able to do effectively thus far.
“We weren’t the first company on the continent to deal with cryptocurrencies, but we were the first to say we needed to support the entire industry as part of this,” explains Maurice. “We have traveled country by country and worked with regulators to develop licensing systems. Many of the recently published bills are of our own authorship.”
It’s a modest piece of work. It’s a slow job. But what creates a sustainable business is work.
Day 1000: A data-driven approach to failing fast
Maurice is candid about his mistakes. Yellow Card made mistakes in marketing campaigns, product decisions, and operational choices. However, it has developed a philosophy of “you can’t go wrong for a long time.”
“You can go in, you can guess, you can be wrong, but you can’t be wrong for a long time,” he says. “Fail fast, fail fast.”
It’s a philosophy born of necessity. Operating in 20 African countries means navigating 20 different regulatory environments, 20 different user cultures, and 20 different market trends. We can’t afford to leave it wrong.
“We try to be pretty data-driven,” Maurice says. “We haven’t made many long-term assumptions other than the basic business model, which is that we’re going to operate in all of these countries and there are opportunities in these countries.”
That’s why Maurice believes Africa’s crypto market is vastly undervalued by outsiders.
“Africa is the leading continent in many metrics in this universe,” he says. “There are seven countries that are in and out of the top global recruiting rankings. It’s a huge market, but I think it’s largely overlooked.”
Why is there an oversight? Maurice points out expression, or lack thereof.
“Africa isn’t really represented in the media. It’s underrepresented in pop culture and movies,” he says. “People outside the continent generally don’t understand that.”
Even within continents, understanding is fragmented. “If you talk to the average person in Nigeria, I don’t think they really understand Francophone Africa or the cultural nuances there, and vice versa.”
Compare this to the American and British cultures that dominate global media.
“I can’t even think of a movie that’s set in the Congo off the top of my head,” Maurice says. “It’s very difficult to learn more unless you actually start doing research.”
What’s next: Building for the long term
Yellow Card currently operates in 20 African countries, raised a Series A, and is positioning itself as the continent’s crypto infrastructure. In 2025, Yellow Card discontinued its retail services to focus solely on business customers. With the lifting of banking restrictions on cryptocurrencies in Nigeria in 2023, new opportunities have arisen.
What advice does Maurice have for founders? Please enter with an open mind.
“I came into Nigeria without any preconceptions, so I didn’t experience any culture shock,” he says. “I think to experience culture shock you expect things to go a certain way, and then things are completely different. I didn’t know what I was getting into.”
That openness, combined with aggressive diversification, regulatory partnerships and a willingness to fail quickly, has turned a one-way ticket gamble into a pan-African success story.
Looking back, Maurice’s assessment of his initial decision to fly to Lagos with a six-day-old passport was simple. “The choice was to build something useful or live in Lagos for the rest of my life.”
He built something that worked. Across 20 countries. And count.
