When Timilehin Zubair arrived at the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA) as a first-year Computer Science student, his parents gave him ₦15,000 — roughly $11.12 a month to cover living expenses. It was gone within two weeks, every single month.
That financial pressure pushed Zubair to experiment. He tried an Instagram blog, reposting content to build an audience. It went nowhere. He taught himself Photoshop and spent hours doing vector art portraits, hoping for commissions that never materialized. Graphic design for brands finally earned him real money — and those earnings paid for ads that brought in more clients.
Then, in his second year, a roommate asked him to design a flyer for a crypto business. That single design job changed everything.
A Roommate's Flyer and a Market Opportunity
Zubair had heard about cryptocurrency before, but this time he wanted to understand it properly. He asked his roommate to walk him through the business. By the time the flyer was done, Zubair was already trading — buying crypto from people at one price and reselling it higher, pocketing the difference. Customers started reaching him on WhatsApp.
"That was not the first time I was hearing about crypto. This time around, I was very interested in knowing more about it. So, I told him to put me on and give me more information about the business," Zubair told TechCabal.
The WhatsApp operation grew fast — too fast to run manually. Zubair first tried to hire an outside developer to automate it. That failed. The breakthrough came when he discovered that one of his own coursemates could build software. Together, they turned the informal hustle into Bitoshi, a crypto startup Zubair formally founded in 2020.
The name blends "Bit" from Bitcoin and "oshi" drawn from Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. Bitoshi's core function is straightforward: users send cryptocurrency to a wallet address and receive the naira equivalent directly in their bank accounts.
Building Under a Banking Ban
Launching a crypto business in Nigeria in 2020 meant navigating one of the most hostile regulatory environments on the continent. In February 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) directed banks and financial institutions to close accounts belonging to crypto businesses and warned regulated institutions to steer clear of crypto-related transactions entirely.
The timing was brutal — but the demand was undeniable. By 2026, Nigerians had transacted an estimated $96 billion worth of cryptocurrency, making the country one of Africa's largest crypto markets. The same environment that made Bitoshi's banking infrastructure difficult to access was producing millions of potential users desperate for a reliable crypto-to-naira solution.
Bitoshi's growth sits within a broader surge in African crypto adoption that is reshaping how fintech founders approach the continent's unbanked and underbanked populations. You can follow that trend across our AI and emerging tech coverage to see how infrastructure constraints are driving some of the most creative solutions anywhere in the world.
What Bitoshi Is Today
Six years after that first WhatsApp trade, Bitoshi has 60,000 users and has processed more than $50 million in transactions. It is a remarkable arc for a startup that did not begin with venture capital, a formal co-founder deck, or even a development team — just a graphic design student who could not make his allowance last the month.
Zubair's path also reflects a wider pattern across Nigerian fintech news: founders who discovered their market not through research reports but through living the problem themselves, then building the fix one WhatsApp message at a time.
The CBN's 2021 crackdown did not kill Nigerian crypto. It produced founders like Zubair who built around it anyway.