👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Layoffs at Zap Africa

The threat of AI taking jobs may be real, but in the case of Zap Africa, the Nigerian crypto startup that allows users to buy and sell digital assets for fiat currencies, there is a deeper issue to dissect.

Zap Africa has cut 44% of its workforce, shrinking from 18 employees to 10 in what the company describes as an “AI-driven efficiency shift.” On the surface, this looks like a classic automation story: software replaces support staff, operations get leaner, margins improve. Beneath that narrative sits a more complicated intersection of slowing retail activity, revenue pressure, and reputational strain in a bruised crypto market.

State of play: The automation push ties directly to Cognito Systems (formerly Syx Labs), an AI startup founded by Zap’s co-founder and CTO, Moore Dagogo Hart. In recent months, Dagogo Hart has been publicly championing Martha AI as a tool to help companies “streamline operations” and “improve response times.” TechCabal exclusively reported that Zap began testing Martha AI internally, integrating it into customer support workflows to handle first-line enquiries. That shift made several operations and support roles redundant.

Sources familiar with the startup’s product operations say retail activity on Zap Exchange—its non-custodial crypto wallet—has slowed in recent months. In trading businesses, fewer transactions translate almost instantly into thinner revenue. A leaner team becomes less about innovation and more about survival math.

Operational strain adds context. Over the past two years, Zap faced at least two incidents: a 2024 double-counted deposit that required refunds and a 2025 fraudulent transfer that resulted in a loss. 

Automation may reduce headcount, yet it also raises questions about oversight, escalation, and human judgment when things go wrong.

The broader takeaway goes beyond one startup. African crypto exchanges operate in a uniquely exposed model where revenue is tightly coupled to speculative retail momentum.

Zoom out: Zap Africa says it remains stable and focused on building infrastructure. Stability, in this context, likely means extending runway, consolidating costs, and betting that markets will eventually rebound. Whether Martha AI becomes a competitive edge—that it uses efficiently internally, or sells as a service to other businesses—or simply a cost-cutting footnote will depend less on automation and more on whether retail traders return to click “buy” again.

If you’re a company looking to poach MTN Nigeria’s top-earning employees, easy: you just have to match their monthly salary—₦2.4 million ($1,800)—band for band.

MTN Nigeria, the subsidiary of Africa’s largest telecoms company, nearly doubled the number of employees earning at least ₦29.5 million ($22,000) annually in 2025, pushing 659 staff (about 35% of its total 2,001 employees) into its highest salary band. While headcount barely moved from the previous year, the company’s top of the pay pyramid swelled dramatically.

That is a structural choice. Inflation has reduced purchasing power. The “japa” wave continues to drain engineers and senior operators. Fintechs and foreign companies are dangling remote dollar roles. MTN’s response has been to concentrate cash on specialised talent tied to revenue engines: network optimisation, data, fintech, enterprise services, and digital platforms.

Mid-tier bands shrank as the top tier grew, pointing to promotions, reclassifications, and targeted upgrades rather than mass hiring. More money is flowing to fewer, higher-impact roles. Revenue recovery made that possible. After tariff hikes, service revenue surged past ₦5 trillion ($3.7 billion), giving the company room to defend its bench.

A top-heavy pay structure indicates that MTN is signalling that spectrum and towers are no longer the only competitive edge. Talent is. The salary line tells you exactly how serious that fight has become.

South Africa’s tax collector is about to see your crypto—and your offshore cash—whether you talk to it or not.

Why? From March 1, 2026, the South African Revenue Service (SARS) will sit inside a global firehose of financial data, pulling bulk information on South African taxpayers from more than 120 jurisdictions under the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) upgraded Common Reporting Standard and its new Crypto‑Asset Reporting Framework (CARF).

State of play: Banks, brokers, and crypto platforms will routinely report accounts, portfolios, and wallets tied to South African residents, from London bank balances to Bitcoin on a Dubai exchange, without SARS having to send a single enquiry letter.

Between the lines: The scale of what SARS is chasing explains the urgency. In 2024, SARS said that 5.98 million South Africans hold crypto, yet only about 17,000—less than 0.3%—have declared those holdings on tax returns. 

SARS says the unpaid crypto taxes run into the billions of rands, and it has doubled the headcount in its crypto enforcement unit and deployed AI to trawl banking records for mismatches.

Why it matters beyond South Africa: CARF is an off-the-shelf blueprint. About 76 jurisdictions have committed to it, with the EU and UK going live this year and first cross-border data exchanges expected in 2027. Several other major crypto hubs, including the US, Singapore, Kenya, and Nigeria, have committed to the framework.

After 2027, further live implementations are scheduled sequentially for 2028 and 2029; with multiple countries exchanging cross-border digital asset and offshore account data, it will make transaction monitoring—even for diasporan users—easier for regulators.

Yet, the biggest friction for CARF is wider adoption. If more countries decline to implement the framework, it could cripple its scale. Globally, industry operators have raised concerns about compliance costs and fragmented know-your-customer (KYC) standards have lobbied against it.

Crypto investors everywhere should assume the default is shifting from “they might find me” to “they already know.”

Liquid Intelligent Technologies, the digital infrastructure arm of billionaire Strive Masiyiwa’s Cassava Technologies, has pulled in R6.5 billion ($410 million) in fresh funding from a syndicate of commercial and development finance lenders. Cassava is putting in another R3.1 billion ($195 million) in equity on top. Total new capital: R9.6 billion ($605 million).

The sequencing matters. Liquid first repaid its existing rand term loan and dollar revolving facility in full, allowing the company to clear its books. Up next, Liquid plans to replace a $620 million bond maturing in September with a leaner $300 million issuance, cutting leverage in the process.

None of this is distress funding. Liquid runs over 110,000 km of fibre across Africa—the continent’s largest independent network—with data centres, cloud and cybersecurity operations spanning more than 40 countries. 

Cassava has also offloaded a minority stake in its South African data centre subsidiary, Africa Data Centres, to Standard Bank-backed Stanlib, a deal the Competition Commission waved through in January. 

Zoom out: African digital infrastructure needs roughly $7–$8 billion in annual capital expenditure (capex) through 2030, and development finance institutions (DFIs) and private equity remain the dominant funders. In a tighter rate environment, the companies that can restructure cleanly and pull in institutional money will set the pace. Masiyiwa is making clear he wants Liquid at the front of that queue.