Xend Finance
“Can an Africa-born DeFi savings app become the global tokenization layer for real-world assets?”
Founded2019
HQEnugu, Nigeria
FoundersUgochukwu Aronu, Abafor Chima
IndustryFintech / Crypto
The story
Founded 2019 in Enugu as a DeFi savings platform for African credit unions hedging against naira devaluation, backed by Binance Labs and Google Launchpad. Pivoted in phase two into blockchain infrastructure by launching Asset Chain — an EVM-compatible L1 built on Fantom's Lachesis consensus. Now positioning as a Real-World Asset (RWA) tokenization platform under the 'Onchain Asset Environment' framework, with its own $RWA token, moving away from the original consumer DeFi savings product toward developer/infra plays.
Last 12 months
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Product timeline
2019
Founded in Nigeria by Ugochukwu Aronu and Abafor Chima to address currency devaluation via DeFi· pivot
2021
Launched Binance-backed DeFi platform for African credit unions offering up to 15% APY· banking
2022
Phase two — built Asset Chain, an EVM-compatible L1 blockchain (based on Fantom's Lachesis consensus)· pivot
2024
Evolved toward Real-World Asset (RWA) tokenization platform; launched $RWA token on Gate.io, Uniswap (Arbitrum), CoinEx· pivot
Regulated entities
2
regulatory licences held by Xend Finance
Licence types, jurisdictions and registered entities are in the Embedded Finance Index report.
The stack
4 layers disclosed in Xend Finance’s embedded-finance stack
Banking / BaaS
Xend Finance Wallet (in-house)
Lending
in the full report
FX & payouts
in the full report
Crypto
in the full report
Accounting gap: none
7 more providers across 3 layers, with confidence-scored evidence and source URLs, are in the Embedded Finance Index report.