A growing number of professionals earn a living by working remotely, freelancing, or being paid by employers outside the country or continent where they live. But getting paid across borders
A growing number of professionals earn a living by working remotely, freelancing, or being paid by employers outside the country or continent where they live. But getting paid across borders and accessing that income are two different problems, and for many, the second is the harder of the two.
Jennifer Echenimexperienced this firsthand while working remotely for international companies. The platforms used to pay her created different problems: one offered transaction records that banks and visa authorities would not accept as proof of income, another converted her earnings at an unfavourable exchange rate, and the third charged high fees for routing payments on Ethereum. Navigating these broken payment paths made her question why getting paid across borders had to be so complicated and what it would take to simplify it.
At the time, Echenim had spent years building blockchain products. She began at Liquality, where she worked as a software engineer on a multichain wallet supporting transactions across networks. Later at Nestcoin, she went from frontend software engineer to leading the frontend team behind one of its flagship products. Through products like Nubian, a savings platform with yield and staking features, Echenim saw firsthand how blockchain could power practical financial services, an experience that would later shape Bloccpay.
Jennifer Echenim and Ajoke Asunmonu, cofounders of Bloccpay Today, she and her co-founder, Ajoke Asunmonu, are building a stablecoin-powered payroll and invoicing platform that helps professionals in emerging markets get paid hassle-free.
The conversation that birthed Bloccpay as we have it todayThe idea started with a simple question the duo asked each other: “What would it take to make this easier?” Echenim grabbed a notebook, and together with Asunmonu, they sketched the entire payment journey, from a business sending money to the contractor receiving it, marking every point of friction along the way.
They later brought the idea to a seasoned blockchain engineer and talked through the technical and regulatory realities of building something that connected traditional finance with crypto infrastructure. Regulatory clarity around crypto was far less developed than it is today. Hence, compliance, especially around the fiat-to-crypto-to-fiat flow, was a central part of the conversation from the start.
Before building anything, they spent time speaking to the people they hoped to serve: remote teams, HR managers, contractors, and business owners managing teams across Africa. Those conversations, more than the notebook sketch, became the foundation for the first version of Bloccpay.
The name came together just as quickly. While discussing the idea with a friend, Echenim was asked if they had a name yet, and on the spot, she said, “Bloccpay.” It felt right immediately because it used blockchain to solve a payment problem, and so it stuck.
“We’re building this for Africa’s and other emerging markets’ working class and the global businesses that hire them,” she says. “Many professionals can earn money globally but still struggle to receive payments efficiently, prove their income, or access financial services in the countries where they live.”
Echenim experienced this challenge again after moving to the UAE for work, where opening a bank account and proving her income were far more difficult, as the country’s traditional systems aren’t built for globally distributed workers.
For Ajoke Asunmonu, the goal is to eliminate geography as a barrier to opportunity. “Too many talents lose out on global opportunities because employers don’t know how to pay them efficiently. We want a world where skills matter more than location.”
Bloccpay lets businesses automate payroll for distributed teams, reducing it to a simple review-and-approve process after setup. Remote workers and global contractors can invoice and earn in fiat and crypto through global channels, and recipients don’t need an account to receive funds directly into a bank account, a crypto wallet, or another supported method.
Every transaction on Bloccpay does more than move money. It also creates a verifiable financial record, capturing income, payment history and audit trails that users can draw on when applying for loans, opening bank accounts, filing taxes or proving income for visa applications.
Jennifer Echenim and Ajoke Asunmonu, cofounders of Bloccpay That value is translating into rapid growth. Today, Bloccpay serves users across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa, with business customers primarily based in the US and UK. In Q2 2026, gross transaction volume grew sevenfold compared with the previous quarter, and by the end of the first half of 2026, the company had already matched its total transaction volume for all of 2025.
Alongside this growth, Bloccpay has earned recognition through the Stellar Community Fund Build Award, Techstars Founder Catalyst Program, and membership in the Circle Alliance Program.
Under the hood
Behind the scenes, the platform routes payments across Ethereum, Base, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, BSC and other EVM-compatible networks, as well as Stellar, Solana, and Tron, using stablecoins to keep payments fast and affordable.
A handful of other features are in view, including named virtual accounts for businesses to fund their balances and invoice uploads that allow users to keep their full payment history in one place. Other benefits traditionally reserved for full-time employees are also being explored for remote workers and global contractors who have historically been locked out.
Remote work has already made employment borderless. Payments, however, have been slower to catch up. Bloccpay is betting that blockchain can power the rails for that new workforce, allowing someone in Lagos, Nairobi, or Accra to work for any company without geography determining how quickly, cheaply, or reliably they get paid.
“We think of Bloccpay as a one-stop platform for managing income and everyday life,” Asunmonu explains. “Payroll is where we’ve started, but the long-term goal is to help people manage both their income and the services they need through this ecosystem.”
