There is a thought experiment worth doing before we get into what Keepaza actually is.
Imagine you are a product designer at any major Nigerian bank.
Your team is building a new transfer flow and you want to solve a real user problem: people make transfer errors constantly because they are copying long account numbers from chat messages, reading them off screenshots, or typing them from memory.
You want something cleaner. Something that works like a username. Something that resolves to the right account without the human error risk baked into the current experience.
Now imagine you are building that same feature for crypto payments, where addresses are not ten digits but forty two characters of mixed case letters and numbers, where one wrong character means the money is gone and there is no customer support to call.
Now imagine you want both of those things to live in the same place.
That is the product Akindele Liasu started building. He calls it
Keepaza. And the more you think about what the username layer of Nigerian finance could become, the more you understand why he sold a Dubai business to fund it.
Keepaza is a payment identity platform. Users create a verified username at keepaza.com and that username resolves to their Nigerian bank account and cryptocurrency wallet addresses simultaneously across five networks: TRC20, ERC20, BEP20, Bitcoin, and Solana.
The user shares a single link. keepaza.com/theirname. The person paying opens that link and sees exactly what they need, whether they are sending naira from a bank app or USDT from a crypto exchange. No account numbers in WhatsApp. No forty two character wallet addresses in DMs. No voice notes walking someone through what BEP20 means.
The invoicing layer adds a second product surface. Users generate payment request links in under thirty seconds. The receiver gets a clean invoice page, copies payment details, executes via their own banking app, and uploads confirmation directly. The invoice sender gets notified on view and on payment response. It replaces what most Nigerian small businesses currently manage through a chaos of WhatsApp exchanges, screenshot chains, and manual reconciliation.
What makes Keepaza’s architecture genuinely interesting from a product and business model perspective is where it sits relative to everything else that has been built in Nigerian fintech.
Paystack is a transaction layer. It processes the payment. Flutterwave is a transaction layer. It moves the money. Moniepoint is a transaction layer with infrastructure for merchants. All of them operate at the moment the money moves. Keepaza operates at the moment before the money moves. It answers the question that every payment depends on: who exactly am I paying, and how do I reach them safely? That is the identity layer. And identity layers, when they achieve adoption, tend to become foundational in ways that are difficult to displace.
Think about how domain names work. The internet’s addressing system lets you type a human readable name and resolve to a machine address behind the scenes. DNS did not replace the internet. It became the layer without which the internet could not function at scale.
Keepaza is attempting something structurally similar for Nigerian payments. A human readable username resolving to account details that no human should have to memorise or share in a chat message. It is not competing with the payment processors. It is trying to become the addressing layer they sit on top of.
Whether that vision gets realised depends on adoption velocity and the company’s ability to build the API business that makes financial institutions want to integrate rather than replicate. But the architecture of the idea is sound.
Akindele Liasu comes to Keepaza with a background in hardware and mobility at OH Mobility Solution Limited, where he has built real business operations in both Nigeria and the UAE. The decision to restructure UAE operations and redirect founder capital into Keepaza is notable not just for what it signals about conviction but for what it creates structurally.
Most Nigerian startups that raise institutional capital, particularly from international investors, are asked early in due diligence about their international holding structure. This is a well documented friction point. Founders who incorporated in Nigeria only find themselves needing to reincorporate in the Cayman Islands, Delaware, or the UAE to be investable by major funds. It is time consuming, expensive, and sometimes causes deals to collapse or delay significantly.
OH Mobility FZ LLC already exists as an incorporated UAE entity. Keepaza’s founder did not plan this as a fundraising strategy. He built his previous business internationally and now that entity becomes an asset in the fundraising process. That is serendipity, yes. But it is also the kind of structural readiness that sophisticated investors notice.
Liasu has confirmed plans for a first institutional funding round in the coming months. By the time that process launches,
Keepaza will have founder capital deployed, a working live product, documented user traction, and an international holding structure already in place. That is a different table to arrive at than most early stage Nigerian founders sit at.
Keepaza operates on a freemium foundation. All users access the core product at no cost, a sensible decision for an identity layer that needs to achieve breadth before it achieves depth. Revenue comes from three sources. Premium username registration for short or desirable usernames captures early value from power users and brands who want clean, memorable handles. Cryptocurrency swap commissions through integrated swap widgets capture a percentage of the cross currency transactions that Keepaza’s user base will increasingly want to execute. B2B API licensing for financial institutions and fintech companies who want to embed username resolution into their own products is where the structural opportunity lives.
That last line is worth dwelling on. If Keepaza becomes a standard identity resolution layer across Nigerian fintech, the API business model means scale comes not from acquiring individual users but from acquiring institutional partners who each bring thousands or millions of their own users. That is a fundamentally different growth curve than a consumer fintech. It is more like infrastructure than an app.
The honest version of this story includes the challenges clearly.
Keepaza needs adoption velocity before the narrative of a username standard becomes self fulfilling. The crypto user base in Nigeria is real and growing but it is not the majority of the payment market. The invoicing tool is genuinely useful but invoicing is a crowded category and switching costs for businesses already using any organised system are non-trivial. The API licensing business requires institutional relationships that take time to develop and that depend heavily on the regulatory environment, which in Nigerian fintech is real and active. But all of those challenges exist for any infrastructure play. The counterargument is that the problem Keepaza is solving is experienced daily by a massive number of Nigerians, the solution is immediately understandable, and the technical barriers to adoption are low because the platform is free and takes sixty seconds to set up.
Infrastructure businesses in tech tend to look premature right up until the moment they look inevitable. Keepaza is at a premature stage right now. The question worth watching is how quickly it moves toward the other one.
