Shalom Osiadi founded a company out of a frustration that came too close to home. In 2022, as Naira lost value against the dollar, his parents, living in Ireland, watched the real estate properties they had bought in Nigeria before emigrating lose much of their value in dollar terms, even though nothing about the physical assets had changed. The experience forced him to confront a problem he had already been thinking about as an entrepreneur: what happens to African businesses when the currency they earn becomes a liability rather than an asset?

That question became Osiadi’s obsession. In 2023, he founded Esca Finance, a company that provides foreign exchange (FX) for clients in emerging markets. “I built a Euro‑backed stablecoin in 2018, which taught me financial engineering.

I used that experience to build an ecosystem that lets businesses hedge currency exposure in volatile markets like Nigeria, using stablecoins and Bitcoin inside the infrastructure. That’s essentially what became Esca today,” said Osiadi. Get The Best African Tech Newsletters In Your Inbox Select your country Nigeria Ghana Kenya South Africa Egypt Morocco Tunisia Algeria Libya Sudan Ethiopia Somalia Djibouti Eritrea Uganda Tanzania Rwanda Burundi Democratic Republic of the Congo Republic of the Congo Central African Republic Chad Cameroon Gabon Equatorial Guinea São Tomé and Príncipe Angola Zambia Zimbabwe Botswana Namibia Lesotho Eswatini Mozambique Madagascar Mauritius Seychelles Comoros Cape Verde Guinea-Bissau Senegal The Gambia Guinea Sierra Leone Liberia Côte d'Ivoire Burkina Faso Mali Niger Benin Togo Other Select your gender Male Female Others TC Daily TC Events Next wave Entering Tech Subscribe From food delivery to fintech Osiadi’s early life followed a straight line into technology and entrepreneurship.

As a teenager in secondary school, he said he was obsessed with computers and taught himself basic programming from YouTube. He said he built and sold a small business for his parents during a single summer holiday. That experience convinced him to abandon law and study computer science and business at Dublin City University (DCU) in Ireland.

With the software development experience he honed over the years, Osiadi tried to build his first business, Esca Menu. Having moved to Ireland for college, he saw an opportunity in the last-mile delivery market for users who didn’t like fast food and enjoyed slow-cooked meals. Esca Menu was a home‑cooked food platform where home chefs and small restaurants listed meals, and customers ordered through an app.

It offered cashback in stablecoins—digital currencies that are tied to real-world currencies such as the dollar—and Bitcoin instead of naira. In 2022, the company expanded operations to Lagos, Nigeria, onboarding restaurants in dense neighbourhoods like Yaba after finding Ireland’s small Black and African population too limited for meaningful growth; though Ireland remained its legal base, said Osiadi. Between August and October 2022, Esca Menu had onboarded about 130 restaurants, said Osiadi.

But the transaction data did not match a typical food-marketplace pattern: there were many sign‑ups and repeated orders from the same restaurants, yet very few actual deliveries. When the team spoke to merchants, a pattern emerged for Esca. In a market where the dollar‑naira rate was volatile, businesses were using Esca Menu to earn and hold stablecoins because they trusted those digital dollars more than the naira in their bank accounts.

The logic of the cashback made sense to them. If a restaurant kept all its profit in naira, every devaluation meant it paid more naira tomorrow for the same bag of rice. If part of its earnings stayed in stablecoins, it could convert those tokens back later into more naira than the original revenue, cushioning the impact of price increases.

The problem, for Osiadi, was that he was running a food business whose most engaged users were really there for FX protection. In December 2022, he and his team decided to shut down the food layer of Esca Menu and keep only the financial engine beneath it. In January 2023, they partnered with Nigerian fintech PalmPay to extend the same crypto-cashback model to PalmPay’s point-of-sale (PoS) machines.

When a customer paid in a restaurant by transfer or card on a PalmPay PoS terminal, Esca’s software awarded stablecoins to the restaurant owner and, where configured, to the customer too. That moved Esca out of the business of handling orders and deliveries and into the business of helping restaurants convert part of their naira earnings into digital dollars. The PalmPay integration took Esca from zero to $30,000 in total payment volume (TPV) by February 2023, according to Osiadi.

Yet, the business depended on another company’s hardware. By August 2023, after it became clear that the startup could operate its own infrastructure, it walked away from PoS devices entirely and rebuilt itself as Esca Finance. From that point, i