Zinari

ZinariPay is a crypto payment infrastructure company targeting businesses and consumers across Africa. It offers a developer payment gateway alongside a consumer mobile app. Founded by Nigerian brothers Michael and Hope Bernard, the company launched as Zinari Finance in November 2021 with the goal of making crypto-based cross-border payments accessible to businesses that conventional payment networks have largely bypassed.

The Problem

Cross-border payments carry persistent structural costs for African businesses. Many importers and startups find it difficult to pay overseas suppliers, employees, or investors because of high fees, slow settlement, and the complexity of moving money across jurisdictions through traditional rails. ZinariPay routes those transactions over blockchain infrastructure as an alternative, positioning itself as a lower-cost path than established wire transfer and money-transfer services.

Business Payment Gateway

The core B2B product allows merchants and developers to accept USDT and USDC on their websites and applications. Integration is available through three methods: an npm package (npm install zinari-pay), a CDN script tag, and an OpenAPI that authenticates via Bearer token for custom implementations.

Configuration requires three credentials: appId, apiKey, and publicKey. The API provides endpoints for transaction creation with unique payment addresses, real-time status tracking across Pending, Confirming, Confirmed, and Incomplete states, webhook notifications for transaction updates, wallet balance retrieval, withdrawals to external addresses, exchange rate queries, and paginated transaction history. Developers can enable a development mode with automatic transaction confirmation to test integrations without live funds.

The platform converts across multiple fiat and crypto pairs, including Nigerian Naira, South African Rand, US Dollar, Euro, and British Pound. Every payment is recorded on-chain, producing a verifiable transaction ID. Pricing is 1% per transaction for Nigeria-based businesses and 3% for international transactions. New users receive three months of processing at no fee.

ZinariPay 2.0.0 introduced a fully redesigned interface, made API key authentication mandatory across all integrations, and updated the npm package and CDN to simplify developer setup and tighten security.

Consumer App

The ZinariPay mobile app, available on the Apple App Store, extends the payment infrastructure to individual users with:

• P2P crypto trading with escrow-backed transactions and verified counterparties
• Cross-border money transfers across seven African countries
• Instant swaps between crypto and Nigerian Naira, or between supported coins
• A gift card marketplace covering more than 14,000 global brands
• Airtime and mobile data purchases using crypto

The consumer app supports 27 cryptocurrencies.

Background and Token

Zinari Finance was bootstrapped from the start. By late 2021, the company had accumulated over 100,000 registered crypto traders. The ZINA token operates on BNB Smart Chain (BEP20) and launched as a payments and governance token for the broader Zinari Finance ecosystem, which at launch also included Zinax, a DeFi platform covering staking, NFT minting, and lending.

Coverage and Status

TechCabal covered ZinariPay in September 2024, describing it as a gateway tailored for African businesses seeking low-cost access to the crypto payment ecosystem. The platform applies KYC and AML procedures for compliance. Active development continues, with ZinariPay 2.0.0 released and the consumer app available on the Apple App Store as of mid-2026.