One Year of MiniPay: What Can We Learn from Its Journey?

Financial Inclusion
Written By Drew Simon
MiniPay - Built on Celo, Powered by Mento

On September 13, during the second day of EthSafari, MiniPay celebrated its one-year anniversary.

Built by Opera in partnership with Celo, MiniPay is a mobile-first wallet designed to deliver affordable and accessible financial services to users across Africa. With its focus on simplicity and utility, it quickly became a key player in regions where traditional banking services fall short.

MiniPay’s focus on real-world solutions has made it one of the few blockchain-based applications to gain sustainable traction. By addressing everyday financial challenges, it has found a way to connect with real users—something still rare in the Web3 space.

So, what exactly made MiniPay’s first year successful, and what can other projects learn from its approach?



1. Scaling Existing Ecosystems

One of the main reasons for MiniPay’s success is its ability to integrate Web2 financial systems with the Web3 ecosystem. Rather than pushing users into the complexities of decentralized finance (DeFi), MiniPay allows them to open wallets using their mobile phone numbers—a process already familiar to millions across Africa.

MiniPay’s integration with Opera Mini, a browser widely trusted across Africa for its data-saving capabilities, is a key factor in this strategy. With around 300 million users in the region, Opera Mini provided MiniPay with a vast, ready-made user base. Embedding the wallet within the browser lowered barriers to adoption and aligned with users' everyday digital habits, making MiniPay instantly accessible to a huge user base.

🌐 Integrating into systems that users already trust and rely on can be a game-changer. By embedding within established infrastructure, you not only reduce friction but also open the door to faster, more sustainable adoption at scale.

Tosin Onikosi talking about MiniPay’s anniversary at EthSafari. Source: Celo Twitter

After launching in Nigeria, MiniPay expanded into markets like Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, and Tanzania. Its seamless connection to mobile money systems like M-Pesa and MTN Momo played a crucial role in enabling this expansion. By working with these familiar services, MiniPay made the transition to blockchain wallets effortless, allowing users to maintain their existing financial habits while accessing the benefits of decentralized finance.

2. Simplicity, Not Innovation Just for the Sake of It

Simplicity has been a driving force behind MiniPay’s rapid adoption, attracting over 3.5 million wallets in just a year. Even just the ability to create a wallet with just a phone number—without complex crypto keys or security phrases—makes onboarding much less daunting, especially for users that may be more Web3 cautious.

🛠️ MiniPay shows that designing for simplicity opens doors to broader adoption and builds long-term trust, allowing complex technology to serve more people effectively.

In July, MiniPay introduced the Pockets feature, making it easier to manage multiple stablecoins like cUSD, USDT, and USDC. This functionality simplifies managing cryptocurrencies, making tasks like currency swaps feel as intuitive as moving money between bank accounts. By eliminating unnecessary complexity and focusing on accessibility, MiniPay shows that making technology simple doesn't sacrifice its capabilities but rather makes it more usable and scalable.

3. Utility Above All

MiniPay is built around financial utility, with fast, low-fee transactions at its core. Interestingly, this robust infrastructure also opens the door to even more utility and financial empowerment as new services are added.

For example, MiniPay’s partnership with Mural allows freelancers and small businesses to access real-time payments, addressing issues like delays and high fees. This offers immediate financial stability, especially in regions where timely payments are crucial. MiniPay’s ability to integrate these practical solutions shows how it’s expanding from basic payments to solving more complex financial challenges.

🤝 Focusing on utility from the start and allowing room for future growth enables platforms to add real value, engage users meaningfully, and scale over time.

MiniPay is also growing through its integration with decentralized applications (dApps) like Impact Market, which offers services such as Universal Basic Income (UBI). This positions MiniPay as a platform that supports a broader range of financial needs, making it more than just a payment tool.

What’s exciting is that MiniPay actively encourages developers to contribute to its growth through initiatives like Celo Camp (accepting applications for its next batch). By doing so, MiniPay continuously expands its ecosystem and utility, introducing new dApps to the platform. The Discover Page plays a crucial role by helping users easily find and engage with these dApps, further enhancing the platform’s value.


Wrapping Up

Reflecting on MiniPay’s first year, I reached out to Celo Foundation to hear their thoughts, too. This is what Isha Varshney, Head of Ecosystem at Celo, shared with me:

“MiniPay delivers on the core primitives Celo was built for—providing access to financial solutions for users often excluded from traditional financial systems. Bringing user-friendly, intuitive design to mobile devices is a key driver for crypto adoption, as we’ve seen with the growth of MiniPay to date.”

She also expressed her hope for MiniPay to continue bringing the benefits of stablecoins and decentralized applications to even more users across the continent—something that’s likely to happen soon with the app’s plan to expand to other countries throughout Africa.

Looking back at MiniPay’s journey, there are key lessons to learn from its approach to product design, accessibility, and seamless integration with trusted systems. These are valuable insights for builders, and hopefully, we’ll be seeing more apps adopting similar strategies to create real-world impact.

Tereza Bízková is a Colombia-based journalist, tech writer, and the co-founder of ReFi Medellin. Her passion for technology and a master's degree in Defence, Development, and Diplomacy fuels her exploration of how innovation can drive social change.

Drew Simon
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