Nuvion acquires Evolution, assimilates core team

Global banking and cross-border payments company Nuvion has acquired the Nigerian stablecoin-powered fintech startup Evolution in undisclosed terms. Evolution's CEO Oluwatimilehin Oluwasanmi and select members of Evolution's workforce have also joined the Nuvion team. 

Fast facts: Oluwasanmi announced the acquisition via social media on Oct. 21. 

• He highlighted Evolution's transition through the years from a crypto exchange to a financial application and cross-border transfer product. 
• Nuvion's acquisition of Evolution furnishes it with the needed infrastructure and regulatory standing to scale its product offerings, qualities it had hitherto lacked, Oluwasanmi told Mariblock. 
• In addition to a full acquisition, members of Evolution's team, including Oluwasanmi, his chief technology officer and chief marketing officer, joined Nuvion as part of its workforce. 
• As at the time of writing, the terms of the deal are undisclosed. 

Dive deeper: Evolution's transformation over the years from a core crypto company to a payments fintech highlights the growing merger between decentralized finance and traditional fintech. 

• In the last four years, several crypto companies have either expanded their products to include financial services such as multicurrency accounts and crossborder payments or pivoted completely. 
• In 2023, Nigerian-founded crypto exchange Bitmama acquired the payments fintech Payday, a fintech startup that allowed Africans to receive payments via virtual euro, pound and USD bank accounts. 
• The acquisition followed the launch of Changera, Bitmama's subsidiary offering virtual foreign currency accounts and cards aside from the exchange's core business. 
• Other companies that took a similar trajectory include Bitnob, Busha and Kraken, among others, all starting as crypto exchanges and expanding to broader financial services down the line. 

But: Crypto is far from dead in the water to these firms. In the backend, stablecoins are crucial to their operations. 

• Typically, transfers across borders are settled using stablecoins while accounts are maintained and payouts are made in local currency to end users, usually powered by local partnerships. 
• Other companies such as Yellow Card retained their crypto-facing brands but built exclusively around institutional cross-border payments powered by stablecoins and shuttered their retail exchange arms. 

What this means: The era of retail crypto exchanges looks to have passed, and we are now seeing a financial system built around stablecoins. 

• Complexities of crypto are abstracted for end users, who feel like they are interacting with any other fintech product, even if the product still runs on blockchain technology.