Stablecoins-Backed Loans: How Finna Fix Nigeria’s Money Struggles

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For a long time, I believed Nigeria’s money problem was simply about scarcity. Not enough dollars. Not enough opportunities. Not enough access to global financial systems.

Nigeria doesn’t lack money in circulation. Money flows in constantly from local employers’ salaries, freelance income from international clients, remittances from family members abroad, business transactions across cities, and informal trade networks that move value outside formal banking systems.

What Nigeria lacks are reliable financial systems that allow value to move, settle, and be stored without silently bleeding away through inflation, hidden fees, long delays, and unfavorable exchange rates. People don’t just want money. They want money that holds its value long enough to be useful in real life. They want money that can cross borders without being eaten alive by fees and delays.

For years, we’ve learned to adapt. We learned how to protect ourselves from naira depreciation by holding stablecoins as a store of value. We jumped between Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traders, exchanges, wallets, apps, and banks to do one simple money task. We learned how to navigate Foreign exchange (FX) scarcity, informal rates, and unpredictable payment delays as if these were normal parts of modern life.

This is the exact problem Finna is trying to solve by building a stablecoin-native financial platform for Nigerians.

What Finna Is Actually Building

Finna (formerly FLO protocol) is an inflation-proof, foreign exchange-backed loan, cryptocurrency swap, and cross-border payment platform. It allows users to sell or convert their stablecoins to their local fiat currency (Naira/NGN) and vice versa. All without the stress of peer-to-peer trading on centralized exchanges or jumping between decentralized apps.

It’s user-friendly and seamless with no complex interfaces, seed phrases, or wallet addresses needed.

The old approach often takes this form:

Earn in stablecoins → convert everything to naira → lose value over time through inflation and repeated FX friction.

Finna’s approach reframes the flow:

Earn in stablecoins → preserve value → access naira only when liquidity is needed.

Finna Dashboard

The Real Problems Finna Is Built For

Stablecoins are no longer just assets you hold passively in a wallet. They become active financial tools you can use for spending, saving, borrowing, sending, and receiving. This fundamentally changes how Nigerians can manage money in practice.

Here are some problems Finna is solving:

1. Naira Volatility

Inflation in Nigeria isn’t an abstract macroeconomic concept discussed in policy reports. It is visible in your daily decisions.

You save money in naira, and months later, you realize that the same amount can no longer buy the same basket of goods. Prices creep upward quietly, and your savings shrink in real terms without you doing anything wrong.

This is why stablecoins like USDC and USDT gained popularity, not because Nigerians were chasing crypto volatility or speculative upside, but because they wanted stability. Stablecoins offered a way to hold value in dollar terms without needing access to a dollar bank account. They became a personal hedge against local currency erosion.

According to a report by Statista, inflation has hit hard over the years, climbing to around 25% in 2023 after rising from about 17% in 2021 and 19% in 2022.

But holding stablecoins is only half the solution. Life in Nigeria still runs on naira. Rent is paid in naira. Food is bought in naira. Transport, utilities, and school fees are settled in naira. So even if you protect your savings in stablecoins, you still face friction the moment you try to use that value in everyday life.

2. Uneven Foreign Exchange Access

Access to foreign currency is unpredictable. Official channels are constrained. Parallel markets are volatile. Rates fluctuate rapidly and often move in ways that make planning nearly impossible.

This creates constant stress and financial anxiety for freelancers, importers, students paying fees abroad, and businesses that operate internationally.

You don’t just budget for expenses, but also for currency devaluation. You plan purchases not only around price, but around whether access to FX will still be favorable by the time you need to convert.

3. Cross-Border Payments Leak Value

Remittances are a lifeline for Nigerian families, but receiving money from abroad is slow, fee-heavy, and loses value due to poor exchange rates.

Inflation, currency hassles, and slow cross-border payments constantly drain money from everyday Nigerians. The losses are rarely dramatic in one moment, but devastating over time.

Finna’s Standout Products

Finna abstracts away blockchain complexity. Instead of long wallet addresses or connecting a wallet, users interact through simple usernames and familiar payment flows. With a Finna tag/username, you can send and receive money instantly. Invoices and transfers are designed to feel closer to modern fintech apps than typical crypto protocols.

This design choice matters because most Nigerians don’t wake up wanting to “use crypto.” They wake up wanting to spend money.

Stablecoin Wallets

Finna provides users with an internal stablecoin wallet that holds value in digital dollars (USDC and USDT). From this wallet, users can deposit stablecoins into the app, withdraw when needed, and maintain balances without dealing with addresses or network settings.

This sounds simple, but it changes how stablecoins fit into daily life. Money no longer lives in scattered wallets and platforms. It lives in one place where it can be stored, moved, and used without ceremony.

Wallets on Finna

Swap

This enables users to swap stablecoins and Naira right in the app. It seems like a simple feature at first glance. In practice, it removes several layers of friction that Nigerians have grown used to navigating manually.

Until now, converting cryptocurrency or stablecoins to fiat meant finding P2P traders, verifying them, managing multiple exchanges, and risking being defrauded. Each step added cognitive load and emotional stress, even when transactions ultimately succeeded.

The Swap feature collapses this complexity into a single, predictable experience. Users can convert between stablecoins and naira in one place, without intermediaries. This simplifies something that used to feel operationally risky and mentally draining.

Swap interface on Finna

Loans

There is a common problem where many Nigerians sell their stablecoins whenever they need naira. And once you sell, you are vulnerable to devaluation of the currency in a matter of time. You exit stability just to meet short-term liquidity needs, and rebuilding that position later often comes with new FX costs and timing risks.

With the Stablecoin-Backed Loans, users can lock their stablecoins as collateral to receive naira instantly for real-world expenses such as subscriptions, utility bills, groceries, and more. Once they repay the loan, their stablecoins are unlocked. Loan durations are flexible, ranging from short-term windows to longer periods of up to 90 days. The app shows the exchange rate, collateral requirement, and loan-to-value in plain terms before users continue. This fixes short-term cash shortages without hurting long-term stability.

Get Loan on Finna

As co-founder, Adebayo Juwon explained in his Raise Africa interview:

Sometimes you want to travel out, you have to sell your stablecoins (USDC/USDT) to have proof of funds, and then after three months, it has devalued.

Payments

Users can send and receive stablecoins using simple usernames instead of wallet addresses. Transfers feel closer to normal fintech payments than crypto transactions.

If sending money requires double-checking addresses or worrying about network mistakes, stablecoins never become comfortable to use. By making transfers feel routine and low-friction, Finna allows stablecoins to behave like everyday money rather than fragile assets you move carefully.

Send USDC stablecoins on Finna

How To Set Up a Finna Account

The onboarding experience is intentionally simple because Finna targets everyday users, not just crypto-native customers. The flow mirrors familiar fintech patterns, so users aren’t forced to learn new mental models to access basic financial functionality.

A typical setup flow looks like this:

Step 1: Create an Account

Users sign up using an email and password or via Gmail, similar to mainstream financial apps. This lowers the psychological barrier to entry and makes the product feel familiar from the first interaction.

Sign Up on Finna

Step 2: Complete ID Verification

To get access to exclusive features, users will have to complete the necessary verification steps required for compliance by providing their NIN and BVN identification numbers.

Step 3: Access Exclusive Features from Dashboard

Once ID verification is complete, users can make a deposit, swap to naira, send payments, or lock stablecoins to borrow naira in a unified interface. Behind the scenes, wallets and blockchain addresses exist.

Why Finna is built on Solana

Slow networks and high fees introduce friction into everyday transactions. Solana provides Finna with four properties that are essential for consumer finance:

Speed: Users can make a deposit, borrow, and swap, and expect transactions to be processed within a few seconds with no delays, compared to other blockchain networks that might wait for some minutes during congestion.

Financial interactions need to feel immediate. Waiting minutes for confirmations introduces anxiety and undermines trust, especially when users are moving money for real-world needs.

Low Fees: The average transaction fee is about a fraction of a cent. You can swap stablecoins to naira, send to a friend, or borrow against collateral multiple times a day without worrying about the extra transfer fees.

Scalability: If Finna grows to serve large user bases, the network can handle volume without congestion. Scalability is guaranteed to ensure growth and optimize user experience without adding extra infrastructural complexity and cost.

Reliability: When people are moving money for rent, food, or emergencies, downtime is unacceptable. This is why Finna chose Solan to process transaction is no downtime or pending processes, whereby reliability at the infrastructure layer translates directly into trust at the user layer.

What’s Coming Next for Finna

Aside from the Stablecoins Loans, Swap, and Wallets features in Finna V2. They are rolling out a better consumer experience that adds even more practical tools: savings features, yield on your stable positions, virtual cards for spending anywhere, and seamless bill payments.

Conclusion

Stablecoins have already won trust in Nigeria because they protect purchasing power. But trust alone doesn’t build financial systems. Usability does.

Finna is attempting to move Nigerians from simply holding stablecoins to actually using stablecoins as everyday money. Finna is worth trying because it not only provides less friction in daily financial transactions and loan acquisition, but it also helps Nigerians preserve value against inflation, access naira liquidity without selling stablecoins, move money across borders with less leakage, avoid operational complexity, and treat stablecoins as collateral rather than merely a store of value.

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