Yellow Card to shut down retail offering to focus on its B2B stablecoin infrastructure

Yellow Card, a prominent African crypto company, is discontinuing its retail offering, a consumer mobile app, from January 1, 2026. This decision comes as the startup shifts its focus to its B2B stablecoin infrastructure, which provides treasury, payment, and liquidity solutions for corporate clients across Africa and emerging markets.

“We are closing the Yellow Card mobile app as part of a strategic shift in our business,” the company said on its website. “This decision allows us to fully focus on our core vision: providing institutional-grade stablecoin infrastructure for businesses across emerging markets.”

Operating in over 30 countries, nine-year-old Yellow Card has weathered the storms of intense Government scrutiny on crypto players. It is one of the most used crypto exchanges in Africa. Since its 2019 operational launch in Nigeria, the company has processed over $6 billion. While it’s over one million retail app users will be disappointed, this move is part of a wider trend for crypto-native players.

Consumer vs B2B focus: Yellow Card’s dilemma

Things are a lot different now than when Yellow Card started in 2016. Stablecoin market capitalisation now hovers around $300 billion, supported by clearer regulatory frameworks in Europe (MiCA), the US (GENIUS), and several other emerging markets. Incumbents like SWIFT, MoneyGram, Western Union, Zepz group and others have begun rolling out their own tokenised cash or stablecoin settlement options to enable 24/7 cross-border payments.

Crypto-native players, like Yellow Card, can choose to either fight for consumer market share or enable other businesses with the back-office infrastructure they built to service their own consumer business, like Nala.

There is an entire Reddit thread debating whether to build a consumer-facing or business-to-business offering. However, the facts are clear. B2C businesses have shorter sales cycles, so they rack up early transactions faster. They also help with more brand visibility, as the marketing required to reach a consumer puts the business (the advertiser) in more people’s faces. However, they come with high customer acquisition costs (including regulatory requirements) and take longer before the transactions add up to a large value.

A pivot three years in the making

Since its Series B raise in 2022, Yellow Card had begun exploring servicing businesses. It re-emphasised that pivot in 2024, when it raised an additional $33 million for its Series C round. In total, the stablecoin startup has raised $85 million, making it one of the best funded fintech startups on the continent.

“The big shift for us has been our focus on working predominantly with businesses now,” Chris Maurice, Yellow Card CEO, told TechCrunch. “When we started, we targeted the B2C market to serve retail customers. However, we realized that the real users who benefit the most from this technology are businesses.”

Yellow Card’s business offerings provide an on-and-off-ramp service where they collect illiquid currencies (like NGN) for or from global businesses and settle them in a more liquid currency (like USD) and vice versa. They could also help businesses change stablecoins for fiat and vice versa, while making payments on behalf of their business users to suppliers. Banks, fintechs and general enterprises as some of Yellow Card’s customers.

Key takeaways from Yellow Card’s consumer app shutdown

It is not everyday you see a business openly kill an arm in favour of another. B2B payouts company Nium, which rebranded from Instarem (its 10-year-old consumer-facing remittance product) in 2019, still operates Instarem under its Group structure.

Yellow Card’s decision to shutdown its retail business is a big statement.

First, it validates the massive, often informal, demand from African businesses, importers, and NGOs that already use stablecoins like USDT and USDC to escape dollar shortages and high banking fees. Yellow Card is betting that it can formalise this activity with a compliant infrastructure.

Second, it mirrors the global convergence on institutional use cases. As SWIFT builds its tokenisation layer and major card networks integrate stablecoins, Yellow Card is making the same macro call from the perspective of frontier markets.

Finally, the pivot represents a move toward a streamlined business model. Servicing corporates on a unified stablecoin stack is considered more favourable than managing a retail app across dozens of different jurisdictions, each with unique KYC rules and FX policies.