Pretium Finance

Pretium Finance is a stablecoin payment platform that lets people across Africa spend their USDT and USDC directly at merchants and on everyday bills with no P2P trading, no bank conversion, no custodial risk.

The Problem Pretium Solves

For most crypto holders in Africa, spending digital assets has meant hunting down a trustworthy P2P counterparty, negotiating a rate, waiting for confirmation, and hoping the transaction does not reverse or trigger a frozen account. This friction has kept stablecoins as a store-of-value asset rather than a spending tool, even as dollar-denominated stablecoins have become the preferred financial instrument for workers earning crypto remotely or receiving remittances.

The platform removes the P2P layer entirely by connecting stablecoin wallets to existing merchant payment infrastructure and mobile money networks across the continent.

How It Works

Pretium operates as a payment bridge between on-chain stablecoin balances and the fiat rails that underpin African commerce. On the consumer side, users hold USDT or USDC within the Pretium app and can spend it anywhere the platform network is active: at grocery stores, supermarkets, restaurants, petrol stations, and through mobile money integrations like M-Pesa, Airtel Money, paybills, and till numbers in Kenya.

For bills and utilities, the platform covers electricity, TV subscriptions, mobile data and airtime top-ups, and government service payments. Cross-border transfers between supported markets settle with fees as low as 1%, a significant reduction from traditional remittance corridors that charge several percent per transaction. As an example highlighted by the project, sending KES 1,010 via M-Pesa costs KES 23 in transfer fees; the equivalent transaction through Pretium costs nothing.

On the business side, Pretium offers a payment API that gives merchants and developers access to USDT/USDC-to-fiat liquidity without requiring pre-funded accounts. This unified API abstracts the fragmented payment rails across multiple African markets, allowing a business to launch once and operate across Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Ghana, Tanzania, Malawi, and South Africa without building separate integrations for each country.

Features

Consumer App: A mobile wallet where users can receive stablecoins, make purchases at merchant points, pay bills, and send money internationally. An incentive layer offers up to 5% cashback on qualifying transactions.

Payment API: Developer-facing infrastructure providing USDT/USDC-to-fiat liquidity across African markets. The API handles the complexity of local payment rail integrations, compliance, and settlement, so businesses can focus on their core product.

Agentic Payments: Pretium has integrated AI agent capabilities, allowing autonomous payment execution with programmable spend policies including per-transaction limits, daily caps, and monthly budgets. This positions the platform within the broader trend of AI agents handling financial tasks on behalf of users or organizations.

MCP Integration: The platform has native compatibility with the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling direct calls from AI development environments such as Cursor or Claude-based tools. Developers can build payment workflows into AI applications without custom API integration work.

Ecommerce Checkout: A no-code embeddable checkout widget for merchants who want to accept stablecoin payments online.

Supported Assets and Markets

Pretium currently supports USDT and USDC on Celo, Base, and BNB networks, as well as cUSD, the Mento-issued US dollar stablecoin on Celo. The platform operates across seven or more African markets, with the most developed infrastructure in Kenya (400,000+ merchant points) and Nigeria (800,000+ merchant points). As of mid-2026, the platform has processed more than 600,000 transactions with a reported 99.99% success rate, and has accumulated more than 50,000 users.

Security and Compliance

Pretium does not publish details about smart contract audits. On the compliance side, the platform partners with licensed payment service providers in each market, ensuring that transactions run through regulated infrastructure rather than operating as an unlicensed money transfer service. This approach allows the platform to access formal banking rails, including bank transfers alongside mobile money networks.

Team and History

Pretium Finance was founded in 2023 and is headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya. The company is small, with LinkedIn listing 2 to 10 employees, reflecting an early-stage operation rather than a scaled fintech. CEO Derrick Bundi has described Mento stablecoin infrastructure as offering an important opportunity for providing users with reliable digital currency in local-currency terms.

The project entered the Solana Compass registry in September 2024. Its origins trace to EthSafari, an Ethereum-focused hackathon in Nairobi, where it was presented as a project integrating cryptocurrencies into the real-world economy. It has since partnered with Mento Labs (the team behind Celo stablecoin infrastructure) and received coverage in Disrupt Africa and at the Africa Tech Summit Nairobi in 2026.

Blockchain Context

Pretium current stablecoin infrastructure runs on Celo, Base, and BNB, not Solana. The platform choice of networks reflects its emphasis on low transaction costs and existing African developer familiarity with EVM-compatible chains. Solana stablecoin ecosystem, particularly USDC on Solana, would be a natural future expansion candidate given Solana low fees and fast settlement times, but no such integration has been announced as of mid-2026. The project listing in the Solana Compass registry positions it as a watchlist item for the Solana community rather than a currently-deployed Solana application.

The Broader Picture

Pretium Finance represents the maturing phase of crypto adoption in Africa: not speculation or DeFi yield, but the infrastructure work of making stablecoins useful for groceries, airtime, and rent. Its focus on eliminating P2P friction addresses a genuine pain point documented across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana. The addition of agentic payment capabilities and MCP integration suggests the team is positioning the platform for the next wave of AI-driven financial automation, where autonomous agents need direct access to payment rails without human approval at each step.

For users who earn crypto remotely and need to live locally, Pretium proposition is practical and immediate: hold your USDT, spend it everywhere, and skip the informal market entirely.