Timilehin Zubair started his first year at the Federal University of Technology, Akure with one goal. He wanted financial independence.
His parents sent him ₦15,000 a month. That is about $11.12. It was meant to cover his living expenses as a fresh student away from home. But the money never lasted. In fact, Zubair often spent it within two weeks.
So he went looking for ways to earn his own income. His first try was an Instagram blog. He reposted pictures from other pages and hoped to build a following. It did not work.
Next, he moved into vector art. He taught himself Photoshop and spent hours drawing people. He got some attention. Still, the paid commissions he hoped for never came.
Graphic design became his real breakthrough. He started designing for brands and used the money to promote his services further. That single decision would later change his life.
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In his second year, a roommate asked him to design a flyer for a crypto business. That job introduced Zubair to cryptocurrency in a way that stuck.
“That was not the first time I was hearing about crypto,” he told TechCabal. “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.”
By the time he finished the flyer, Zubair had started trading crypto himself. He bought from people at one price and sold at a higher price. His design earnings helped him promote the new hustle. Soon, customers were reaching him on WhatsApp to buy and sell crypto.
As demand grew, Zubair realised he could not keep handling every transaction by hand. He needed to automate the process and build a real product.
It took a failed attempt to hire an outside developer to get there. Then came a surprise discovery. One of his coursemates could actually build software. That partnership turned the WhatsApp hustle into Bitoshi, the crypto startup Zubair founded in 2020.
Bitoshi lets users send cryptocurrency to a wallet address. In return, they receive the naira equivalent in their bank account. The name blends “Bit,” from Bitcoin, and “oshi,” from Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.
Zubair built the company into a difficult banking environment. In February 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria directed banks to close accounts linked to crypto businesses. Regulated institutions were also warned against dealing in crypto transactions.
By 2026, Nigerians had transacted an estimated $96 billion worth of crypto. That made the country one of Africa’s largest crypto markets. For a startup like Bitoshi, this scale was both an opportunity and a problem. The banking rails needed to move money were effectively closed off.
Zubair does not count the WhatsApp side hustle as day one of Bitoshi. To him, that was simply survival. Day one, instead, was the moment he decided to turn it into a real company.
On WhatsApp, he matched buyers and sellers manually and tracked every payment himself. Customers told him what they wanted to sell. He gave them a rate. They sent the crypto to his wallet, and he sent back the naira. It worked while the business stayed small. But it could not scale.
“I could not scale to 100 customers a day because it was not humanly possible,” he said.
Getting off WhatsApp meant building an actual product. That is where Leon came in, a fellow FUTA student Zubair had known since his first year without realising he could code.
The first version of Bitoshi was a simple website. It generated a wallet address for each user, let them send crypto to it, and paid out the naira equivalent to their bank account. Essentially, it was a digital version of what Zubair had already been doing by hand.
For months, it was just the two of them. They worked remotely as students, learning on the go.
“We had no marketing team in the early stage. We did zero marketing,” Zubair said. “I was just telling the audience I already had about this product, and they all seemed to like it and started telling their friends about it.”
Because Bitoshi launched during the crypto banking ban, Zubair built it assuming a bank partnership would never come.
“We built the product with the mindset that we were going to handle these transactions ourselves,” he said.
To pull that off, Bitoshi built a vendor-dispatch system. An algorithm routed withdrawal requests to a queue of vendors. If one vendor did not pick up a transaction in time, it moved to the next. The vendor who accepted it sent money from their own bank account to the customer and earned a commission for the job.
According to Zubair, this system gave Bitoshi an edge over platforms that relied on traditional peer-to-peer trading. On those platforms, users had to find and deal with individual buyers or sellers directly.
Still, the workaround brought its own headaches. Hackers found ways to exploit the platform. Other users created fake accounts to farm referral bonuses.
“We learned on the job. We made a lot of mistakes. We had a lot of losses, because we didn’t fully understand what it meant to build in a financial market,” Zubair said. “It was very messy. But everything that happened, every obstacle we came across, we were able to break through and proceed.”
By then, Bitoshi had solved the problem of turning crypto into cash. But as more users joined, Zubair noticed something new. Many people were selling their crypto simply to pay for everyday things, like groceries or a meal out.
“I realised people wanted to actually be able to spend their crypto,” he said. “When they were using the website, we would see them sell for naira because they wanted to pay.”
So in 2022, Bitoshi moved from a website to a mobile app. Users could now hold cryptocurrency and spend directly from their wallets. The app also added features for sending money and paying bills, without converting crypto to naira first.
This growth convinced Zubair that Bitoshi could be more than a place to trade crypto. Even so, the startup still had an infrastructure problem. Its vendor system worked, but it remained a workaround. A direct payment partnership, on the other hand, could make settlements faster and more reliable.
Things finally changed in 2023, when the Central Bank of Nigeria lifted its restriction on banks working with crypto businesses.
“When that ban was lifted, it was actually amazing news for us,” Zubair said. “We started to look for payment partners to work with. The product was working very well, we just needed to improve our systems. Even though we were using the vendor system, it could never be as quick as something that is automated.”
That year, Bitoshi onboarded an undisclosed payment partner. As a result, it automated settlements that had previously relied on its vendor network.
“That made our transactions more seamless and more efficient for our users,” he said, “and that helped us grow more.”
By Zubair’s account, Bitoshi crossed roughly 10,000 users in 2023, up from its first 100 users in 2021. Meanwhile, transaction volume moved from about $100,000 in 2021 to around $5 million once the payment-partner integration went live. The company also let users fund their naira wallets directly. This gave them another way into crypto, besides starting with cryptocurrency itself.
Through 2023 and into 2024, Zubair and several team members were still finishing university. In his words, Bitoshi was simply being sustained.
“2025 was the year we decided internally that we wanted to actually scale Bitoshi,” he said.
Between June and July 2025, the team began work on the second version of its mobile app. Until then, the company had spent its first few years helping people trade and spend crypto. Now, Zubair wanted it to become a financial-access platform, one where users could move and spend money without needing to understand the crypto infrastructure behind it.
“We’re no longer positioning ourselves as just a crypto exchange,” he said. “We’re positioning ourselves as global financial access for individuals, powered by crypto.”
According to Zubair, entering new markets early is partly a regulatory strategy. Many of these countries are still shaping their crypto rules. So Bitoshi plans to take part in policy discussions and sandbox programmes, before formal licensing regimes fully take hold.
The startup makes money from bill payments, the spread on crypto-to-naira exchanges, and transaction fees. But Zubair says Bitoshi’s ambitions go beyond its current products.
What started as one student’s attempt to survive a shrinking allowance has grown into a platform with 60,000 users. A thousand days later, Zubair wants to turn that experiment into something bigger. He wants a financial platform the average African can use to move money, whether or not they ever think of it as crypto.
“We want to immerse ourselves in the lifestyle of people,” he said. “We want people to learn more about the brand and understand that a regular average person can use this app to perform transactions, and we are powering it through crypto.”
