By Osaro Jackson
The crypto industry has an acquisition problem. And it won’t solve it by talking to other crypto people.
Walk into almost any crypto marketing meeting across Africa, and you’ll hear the same playbook being rehearsed: partner with the top crypto influencers, sponsor the next Web3 conference, run a campaign on crypto Twitter, chase engagement in the Telegram groups. It sounds like strategy. It feels like momentum. It is neither.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: that audience is already converted. Their followers have already heard of Bitcoin. They already hold accounts, often multiple accounts, on the major exchanges. When a new platform shows up in their feed, they are not discovering crypto; they are comparing fees. We are not acquiring new users. We are shuffling the same wallet between logos and calling it growth.
This is why the industry’s customer acquisition cost keeps rising while lifetime value declines. We are fishing in a pond we have already emptied, and we keep buying bigger rods.
The Real Market Sits in Web2
The real, untapped opportunity isn’t on crypto Twitter. It is in the Web2 world.
It is the small business owner reconciling sales on WhatsApp Business, tracking cash flow in a notebook, with no visibility into whether his money is actually compounding or eroding. It is the salaried professional who checks her pension balance once a quarter and wonders if there is something better. It is the Gen Z creator earning in dollars on TikTok but getting crushed on FX when she cashes out to local currency. It is the cross-border trader at Balogun in Lagos, Katwe in Kampala, or Makola in Accra, moving goods and wrestling with settlement delays and forex losses. It is the diaspora worker sending money home every month and watching intermediaries eat the transfer. It is the engineer with a side hustle on Upwork. It is the university student saving for a laptop, watching inflation eat her savings.
None of these people wakes up thinking about blockchain. All of them think about money. Opportunity. Protection against inflation. Getting ahead of a system that often feels rigged against them. That is the addressable market. And it does not live on crypto Twitter.
During my time managing operations across fifteen African markets at Binance, I watched this pattern emerge with clarity. The fastest-growing cohorts were not the Bitcoin maximalists or the DeFi natives. They were people solving a specific problem: a merchant who needed to receive payment across borders without losing 8% to intermediaries, a family in Nigeria wanting to save in dollars as the naira depreciated, a freelancer needing to get paid instantly instead of waiting five days. These were not crypto enthusiasts. These were pragmatists using crypto infrastructure to solve a genuine problem. The distinction is everything.
The Channels Matter
Reaching this market requires a fundamentally different muscle than most crypto-native teams have built.
It requires meeting people inside the channels they already trust. In Africa, this almost always means a deliberate blend of digital and traditional media. Radio still moves markets here. Out-of-home advertising still creates awareness and shapes perception. Vernacular content outperforms English in most of the continent’s fastest-growing corridors. Community activations, religious networks, market associations, and alumni groups carry conviction that no paid ad ever will.
I have seen this work repeatedly. A stablecoin platform explaining its value proposition on a local radio station reaches more meaningful users in 30 minutes than a thousand Telegram posts. A WhatsApp-based acquisition campaign targeting diaspora networks in Abuja, Lagos, Accra, and Kinshasa captures users who are actively looking for a solution to remittance costs. A physical activation at a market, showing traders how to move money across borders in minutes instead of days, creates believers, not followers.
The brands that will win the next decade are not the ones shouting louder inside the echo chamber. They are the ones walking out of the chamber entirely into the markets, the airwaves, the neighbourhoods, the kiosks, and the WhatsApp groups where real African economic life actually happens.
The Harder Problem: What Do You Say Once You Reach Them?
But reaching them is only half the problem. The harder half is this: what do you actually say when you get there?
Most of the industry gets this wrong. We lead with spot trading. We lead with futures. We lead with leverage, liquidity, order books, and charts that look like an ECG in a cardiac ward. For a first-time user coming from a savings account and a mobile money wallet, this is not an invitation. It is a wall.
Education has to lead the charge. But not education about complicated products.
Education should start with products that look and feel like things the Web2 user already understands, just smarter, faster, and more rewarding.
Earn products with competitive APRs. Anyone who has ever opened a fixed deposit or a money-market fund immediately understands the value proposition: put your money here, earn yield. A stablecoin savings product offering 8-12% APR on USDT is immediately legible to someone accustomed to traditional banking.
Tokenised stocks and stock trading. The aspiration to own a piece of Apple, Tesla, or Nvidia is already deeply embedded in the Web2 psyche. Make it accessible, make it cheap, and you have a hook.
Stablecoin savings and payments. Anyone who has watched their local currency slide against the dollar intuitively gets the value proposition. In markets where currency volatility is a fact of daily life, this is not exotic. It is practical.
Crypto-powered cards and Pay. Tap-to-pay is already second nature to anyone with a smartphone. A card that lets you transact in stablecoins is a natural extension.
Copy trading and simple portfolio products. The mutual fund logic is already familiar. Passive investing is not new; the distribution mechanism just is.
These are the hooks. These are the on-ramps. Get the user comfortable here first. Let them experience a win. Let them build trust in the platform and in themselves. Only then do you introduce spot trading. Much later, futures.
The Patient Game
And here is the part nobody wants to hear: this is not a one-quarter turnaround.
Building a Web2-to-Web3 pipeline is a patient game. You are shifting perception, building financial literacy, and earning trust in markets where trust has historically been hard-won. The unit economics are different. The CAC timeline is longer. The compounding happens quietly, then, suddenly, all at once.
I have watched this play out in real time over the past several months, managing institutional partnerships and market operations at a stablecoin infrastructure company. The markets that moved fastest were not the ones with the most crypto influencers. They were the ones where we:
- Established the right banking partnerships so money actually moved reliably
- Started with the simplest use case (send money across borders, save in dollars)
- Built through community networks and trusted channels (not Twitter)
- Used disciplined, data-led lifecycle marketing at each stage of the user journey
- Resisted the urge to upsell to complex products too early
This requires patience. It requires discipline. Most importantly, it requires a team that understands Web2 user behavior as well as Web3 infrastructure.
The Real Competitive Advantage
The exchanges, fintechs, and Web3 platforms that internalize this will own the next decade of African growth.
Not because they have the best technology, though that helps. But because they will have built the distribution muscle that crypto companies have historically avoided: reaching normal humans in normal places, with normal problems, in normal language.
The ones still shouting into the crypto echo chamber will wonder where everyone went.
Osaro Jackson is Country Manager & Growth Lead at a leading African stablecoin infrastructure provider, managing banking relationships and institutional partnerships across high-priority markets. He previously led P&L and regional operations for Binance Africa, overseeing stablecoin adoption strategy and user acquisition across 40+ markets. His career has been built on understanding how African economic life actually works, not how it should work in theory. His views are his own.