The crypto winter, marked by plunging bitcoin and ethereum prices, as well as the collapse of companies like FTX, Celsius, and Voyager, is now triggering layoffs at Nigerian crypto companies. At least two startups, Quidax and Lazerpay, have acknowledged their ongoing pains. Quidax, an exchange that has processed over $3 billion in crypto transactions, laid off a fifth of its staff last week, citing a need to be “more capital-efficient” to survive the downturn. The four-year-old company laid off employees from its marketing, engineering, business, and product teams, as the drop in the value of cryptocurrencies reduced transaction volumes and,…

Most large restaurant chains across Africa have grown accustomed to using legacy systems and point-of-sale providers to manage operations. However, for smaller restaurants — which represent the biggest segment of this $50 billion industry — these systems can be rather expensive and do not adequately cater to their needs; thus, they stick with running operations manually. Orda, a Nigerian food tech platform that provides a cloud-based restaurant operating system to solve these issues for small, independent restaurants, is announcing that it has secured a $3.4 million seed investment. The two-year-old startup raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding this January, bringing…

Once upon a time, picking the right leaders was easy. Most notably, our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in small groups where everybody knew each other really well, and most of the critical leadership skills were easily observable: physical strength, dexterity, courage, and speed. It was also rather costly to pick the wrong leader. You would probably end up beaten, killed, or eaten, as opposed to just changing jobs or moving to a different country. Fast-forward 200,000 years, and things are a great deal more complex. For starters, the critical leadership qualities that enable some individuals to effectively coordinate collective activity, turning…

Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) says non-oil exporters repatriated $4.98 billion into the country in the first nine months of the year. Godwin Emefiele, CBN governor, disclosed this during his keynote address at the second edition of the RT200 biannual non-oil export summit, held in Lagos on Tuesday. The summit is themed ‘RT200 Non-Oil Export Programme: The Journey So Far’. In February, CBN disclosed plans to pay a rebate of N65 to exporters for every $1 of goods sold to third parties through the investors and exporters (I&E) window. The N65 bonus is a benefit under the RT 200 non-oil…