How TradePAL’s Deborah Ojengbede is building African Web3’s ultimate compliance bridge on WhatsApp

The bustling world of African over-the-counter (OTC) and peer-to-peer (P2P) cryptocurrency trading moves at a dizzying pace. It is a world fuelled by relentless momentum, where billions of dollars in hidden capital change hands daily through fragmented WhatsApp groups, chaotic screenshots, and a frantic mix of pidgin, local slang, and shifting currencies.

For years, this informal market thrived in the shadows, far removed from the sterile, rigid accounting software built for traditional enterprise.

But as global regulatory tightening collides with local tax reforms, a critical friction point has emerged. The ecosystem faces a stark ultimatum: evolve or risk extinction.

Enters TradePAL AI, an AI-powered accounting and payroll SaaS platform built for fintechs, OTC traders, and businesses in Africa. Founded by two veterans of the Web3 industry, Femi Adegolu and Ambassador Adebiyi Ayoyinka, through their interactions with the ecosystem and hearing operators’ operational pain points – scattered receipts, endless manual reconciliation, and constant vulnerability to regulatory crackdowns – the solution aims to address these pain points.

With the appointment of Deborah Ojengbede as the chief executive officer (CEO), the startup kicked off operations in January 2026 after raising a lean $50,000 family-and-friends round from fellow OTC market stakeholders.

TradePAL did not immediately rush to market. Instead, the team spent months validating their assumptions, travelling to Abuja to demonstrate the product to the regulators and ensuring alignment with how digital asset oversight is evolving in the country.

TradePAL AI

“It’s one thing to build from the comfort of your office thinking you’ve built the next best thing. It’s another thing entirely to actually build what works,” Ojengbede tells me during the interview. “We wanted to make sure we weren’t just building for ourselves or solving imaginary problems. We wanted to understand what operators needed, what regulators were thinking, and whether this could actually become infrastructure people would rely on.”

Operating with a small, elite team of brilliant minds, the company has intentionally pursued a lean growth model. Since launching in May 2026, the platform has rapidly onboarded over 140 merchants, with roughly 20% already converted into paid subscribers. Backed by strong inbound interest, high-level stakeholder conversations are already underway to expand into Kenya.

The ideological maturity curve: from cypherpunk to compliance

For some observers, Ojengbede’s leadership at TradePAL AI looks like an ideological pivot. She previously championed the trustless, decentralised ethos of absolute Web3 privacy with AFEN. Now, she sits at the helm of a platform designed to provide an immutable audit trail. Yet, Ojengbede rejects the notion that her move is a philosophical betrayal.

“I wouldn’t describe this as a pivot. I would describe it as a maturity curve of the industry,” she explains calmly.

“Yes, there was the cypherpunk philosophy and the focus on ownership, privacy, and trustless systems, and those things remain important. But the blockchain economy has evolved beyond that. There are enormous opportunities in this space, and there are real businesses operating within it. Those businesses deserve structure and protection too. As the ecosystem evolves, the infrastructure powering it should evolve as well.”

How TradePAL AI Works

At the heart of TradePAL’s brilliance is a keen understanding of behavioural economics: it meets informal traders exactly where they already do business, on WhatsApp.

Rather than force merchants to abandon their preferred workflows for a complex dashboard, TradePAL integrates an advanced artificial intelligence assistant directly into the messaging app.

A merchant can simply upload a transaction screenshot or send a chaotic voice note saying they bought Bitcoin at a specific price from a certain counterparty. Distilling this unstructured data without massive hallucination is exceptionally difficult.

TradePAL beats this by training its models with a deeply specific local industry context, allowing the platform to currently support and interpret English, Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba.

Deborah Ojengbede, CEO of TradePAL AI

To prevent the system from being fooled by doctored or generative AI-crafted screenshots, TradePAL enforces a rigorous, multi-level verification process that executes in milliseconds:

The AI processes the unstructured media log and reflects a highly detailed summary back to the merchant. The merchant must actively click “accept” or manually tweak errors before any data moves to the dashboard. Once approved, the back-end auto-reconciliation engine cross-references the transaction data with public blockchain ledgers.

This ensures that the transaction matches an actual imported wallet address, making data falsification nearly impossible.

“The screenshots are really just the starting point of the conversation,” Ojengbede clarifies. “TradePAL doesn’t simply take whatever data you upload and immediately convert that into records. The system summarises what it understands from the transaction, and then the merchant validates that understanding before anything becomes audit-ready.”

Working as a shield, not a spy

In a community fundamentally designed to circumvent centralised control, building a tool that provides state visibility inevitably triggers surveillance anxieties. Ojengbede is highly sensitive to these fears, drawing a sharp, unyielding line between a supportive infrastructure provider and a state surveillance mechanism.

“TradePAL AI is first the merchant’s partner,” she asserts. “This is not a product that was built for the regulators. The space has been largely informal, not because operators want to evade taxes, but because the tools to bring structure haven’t existed. A crypto trader cannot use QuickBooks; it doesn’t understand the cumbersome, specific nature of cryptocurrency.”

Deborah Ojengbede, CEO of TradePAL AI

To solidify this trust, TradePAL AI secured official certification under the Nigeria Data Protection Act (NDPA) late last year, ensuring absolute end-to-end encryption. The merchant strictly owns their ledger. If a regulatory agency demands audit proof, the government has no back-door access. Instead, the merchant utilises a secure “one-time link” feature, selecting precisely what data, such as profit-and-loss statements, tax liabilities, or automated KYC records, is visible.

Crucially, the ambition extends beyond merely surviving an audit; it is about establishing true financial legitimacy and ensuring data is universally accepted by legacy institutions.

“It’s one thing to have data. It’s another thing for that data to be admissible where it should be,” Ojengbede argues. “That’s why we’ve spent time engaging stakeholders early. We didn’t want merchants maintaining records all year only to discover those records mean nothing when they actually need them.”

This admissibility protects merchants from arbitrary, inflated tax bills, calculating company income tax (CIT) and personal income tax (PIT) in real time so the authorities do not mistakenly view high-volume crypto inventory as pure revenue. 

“When the taxman sees two billion naira in an account, they assume it’s profit or revenue,” Ojengbede points out. “But for an OTC trader, money is inventory, not always revenue. TradePAL helps structure that data so it is genuinely audit-ready.”

Beyond accounting, the platform serves an essential protective function via Anti-Money Laundering (AML) scanning. TradePAL allows merchants to run lightning-fast wallet scans before transacting, instantly identifying illicit or high-risk addresses to insulate their broader portfolio from contagion and illicit funds.

Also read: Utility beyond off-ramping: Inside Busha’s blueprint for a circular crypto economy