Today we're opening early access to Trot, a new product from Startbutton that brings pay-in, treasury, FX, and payout together behind one API. Fiat and stablecoins live in the same account.

Startbutton has spent years building licensed collection and payout rails across 16 African markets. Over that time, 700+ business merchants from more than 30 countries have settled on those rails, and most of our volume comes from fintechs and aggregators.

Those merchants kept telling us something we didn't expect. They wanted control, visibility, liquidity, and reliability. They wanted to manage their balances, move between local currencies and stablecoins, and send money without depending on infrastructure they don't control.

So we built Trot.

With Trot, your fiat and stablecoin balances sit in one treasury. You manage funds, convert currencies, and execute payouts from the same place. For FX, you see live quotes and convert when you choose, with an audit trail on every conversion.

Trot sits across the rails instead of being one of them. Customers pay in local currency, you hold fiat and stablecoin balances in one treasury, convert through live quotes from connected liquidity providers, and pay out through local networks.

The problem with moving money across Africa

A typical cross-border payment passes through banks, payment service providers, aggregators, FX providers, liquidity partners, and payout networks. Each handoff is a place where something can go wrong. When one provider has an outage, changes its terms, or loses a licence, your money movement stops.

What follows is a set of problems that could have been avoided: failed transactions, delayed settlements, unexpected deductions, balances scattered across providers, reconciliation that never quite closes, and a separate integration for every rail.

What Trot is

Trot is a financial orchestration layer that connects global liquidity to African financial infrastructure. It does five things through one account and one API:

Collect money through local bank accounts, virtual accounts, APIs, and mobile money.

Hold fiat and stablecoin balances in one treasury.

Convert between stablecoins and local currencies through aggregated liquidity.

Route transactions through connected financial providers.

Pay businesses and consumers through local payout networks.

One treasury for fiat and stablecoins

Stablecoins are already part of how African businesses move money. At Startbutton, 70% of settlement volume already moves through them. Yet for most teams, stablecoin flows sit with one vendor, local collection with another, and FX with a third, each with its own balance and its own reconciliation.

Trot puts them in one place. Hold USDT, major fiat currencies, and African local currencies together, and move between them without juggling a balance per provider. Because the treasury connects to local collection and payout in 16 markets, stablecoins stop being a separate leg of the journey.

On-ramp and off-ramp, built in

Crypto businesses have a specific problem. Customers pay in local currency, but the business settles in USDT. Or USDT comes in, and local currency has to reach a bank account or mobile money wallet fast. Trot handles both directions.

On-ramp: collect in local currency and convert to USDT.

Off-ramp: receive USDT, convert, and pay out in local currency.

Wallets: once your business is approved for production, USDT wallet addresses are generated automatically on TRON (TRC20), Ethereum (ERC20), and BNB Smart Chain (BEP20).

Top-ups: fund your USDT balance by sending to your wallet address.

Transfers: move fiat and USDT through the dashboard or the API.

Know your rate. Convert when you choose

Take a USDT to NGN conversion. Trot surfaces live quotes from connected liquidity providers, you choose when to convert, and every conversion is recorded with an audit trail. Trot handles the integration and settlement underneath.

Not another PSP

A PSP gives you access to its rails. Trot gives you access to a network of rails.

That difference matters because businesses don't move money the same way. A remittance company, a payment provider, a crypto exchange, a global merchant, and a fintech app each have different settlement needs and different corridors. Trot doesn't ask them to adapt to one provider's infrastructure. It orchestrates across the rails, with banking partners, mobile money, card networks, and FX and liquidity providers behind one integration.

Compliance is part of the layer

In African payments, compliance can't be bolted on afterwards. Trot orchestrates on top of Startbutton's existing licensed and partner-bank rails, backed by ISO 27001 and PCI DSS certification, and Gettrot Tech Inc. is a FINTRAC-registered money services business in Canada. Our compliance stack includes Sumsub for KYB/KYC, transaction monitoring, and, for crypto and stablecoin flows, Travel Rule compliance and Chainalysis on-chain analytics.

Where we are today

Trot is in beta (v0.1.0), and we're onboarding businesses. Today that includes USDT on TRON, Ethereum, and BNB Smart Chain, manual conversion and settlement, and local collections and payouts across our supported currencies. Automatic conversion and settlement and bulk transfers are next.

Our vision is to make African financial infrastructure programmable: one platform, one API, one orchestration layer across the continent. Africa doesn't need another payment provider. It needs a layer that connects the ones that already exist.

Try Trot

If your business moves money in, out, or across Africa, including crypto and stablecoin flows, we'd like to hear from you. Crypto exchanges, fintechs, payment platforms, and global payroll platforms are who we built this for.

Sign up here. You can start testing in sandbox right away while we verify your business for production.