How this 26-year-old created Yellow Card top crypto exchange in

ACCRA, GHANA – On the afternoon of Dec. 26, 2022, Chris Maurice finally capitulated and went to the emergency room at Hospital Clinic de Barcelona, just west of the city’s gothic quarter. For roughly ten months, the 26-year-old CEO of the largest centralized crypto exchange in Africa had ignored many of the symptoms consistent with malaria as he bounced between 21 different countries on the continent, advising heads of state on bitcoin adoption and setting up institutional accounts for his business, Yellow Card.

By the time Maurice was admitted to the intensive care unit, plasmodium parasites had been wreaking havoc on his red blood cells for nearly a year, multiplying in his liver and threatening to shut down many of his major organs, including his kidneys. His face and eyes were yellow from jaundice. As his hemoglobin levels plummeted in response to the intravenous meds administered as treatment, four days of blood transfusions helped save his life.

But to Maurice, his brush with death was simply the price of doing business. Since graduating from Auburn University in Alabama with a finance degree four years ago, he has traded security and stability for a career on the road, all with the goal of fundamentally disrupting Africa’s broken financial system. 

“I’ve slept more nights than I can count in the Joburg airport,” Maurice told CNBC on the sidelines of the Africa Bitcoin Conference in Ghana. “I’ve mastered the art of where to go to find chairs with no armrests. I’m six-foot-five, so I need my space.”

For nearly 1.4 million users across the continent, Yellow Card – which offers an experience similar to Block‘s Cash App – is a vital lifeline to money. 

“We wanted to make it as easy as possible for anybody to be able to come on and buy crypto within three minutes,” explains Maurice in an Uber ride cutting due south through the Ghanaian capital of Accra. 

From there, Yellow Card users can send or receive digital cash in eligible markets. But unlike a centralized exchange like Coinbase, where many customers store their tokens for an extended period of time hoping that their digital assets will appreciate in value, the average customer on Maurice’s exchange keeps money on the platform for under five minutes. People take their local fiat currency, turn it into bitcoin or a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin like tether to send it across a border, and the recipient instantly cashes it out.

“It’s literally like, I deposit a million Francs in Cameroon, I buy USDT or BTC, and then I send it off,” continued Maurice. 

Yellow Card customers can receive cryptocurrency from anywhere in the world and pay only a network fee, which typically ranges from 5 cents to $1, according to Maurice. That is especially helpful for people who would customarily turn to a money service provider like Western Union and MoneyGram, which sometimes charge…