Adunai Explained

A natural-language guide to understanding Adunai, for end users, investors, partners, and builders

Version: 0.1 (draft) Date: May 2026

What is Adunai? (The One-Sentence Version)

Adunai is non-state Digital Public Infrastructure for African economic life: an open digital layer any business, builder, or person can use to prove who they are, accumulate trust, and send money, without depending on any single company, platform, or government for their identity or their reputation.

Adunai is identity-first by design, primitives are organized around identity, attestations, reputation, and trust, with finance downstream as a first-class application. The category is DPI in the India Stack / EU eIDAS / Singapore SingPass / Brazil PIX-DREX sense; the structural distinction is non-state stewardship: a foundation-governed substrate working across 54 jurisdictions where no single state can coordinate.

Part 1, For Everyone (Plain Language)

What problem does Adunai actually solve?

If you've used MTN Mobile Money in Cameroon, Orange Money in Senegal, M-Pesa in Kenya, or Wave in Côte d'Ivoire, you already know one thing: each is a closed system. To send from MTN to Orange across countries, you usually go through expensive intermediaries. To pay a Nigerian supplier from a Cameroonian account, you pay banks $50+ in fees and wait 3–5 days.

This happens because each mobile money system is owned by a single company that doesn't easily talk to others. Imagine if every street in a city had its own language, you'd need a translator (and they're expensive) just to go anywhere.

Adunai is like a common language that any wallet, any business, any payment system can speak. Once Adunai is widely adopted, sending money from MTN to Orange to M-Pesa becomes as simple as sending a WhatsApp message, fast, cheap, and direct.

How does it work? (Without the jargon)

Think of Adunai as a giant shared notebook that everyone can write in and read, but no one can erase or fake. This notebook lives on something called a blockchain.

The notebook keeps track of:

Who has how much money
Who has sent what to whom
Who is who (people, businesses, agents)
What people have agreed to (contracts, trust signals)

The magic is: this notebook isn't held by one company. Copies of it are stored on thousands of computers around the world. To change anything in the notebook, you need agreement from those computers, which means no one (not a company, not a government, not even Adunai's creators) can secretly change the rules or steal money.

Why does this matter for African users specifically?

Six reasons:

Cheaper cross-border payments. Sending money across African borders today costs 5–10%+. Adunai-based wallets can do it for under 3%.
Faster settlement. Minutes instead of days.
No bank account required. Anyone with a phone and a network can use it.
Inflation protection. Adunai works with stablecoins (digital dollars/euros) that don't lose value when local currency loses value.
Identity and reputation that travel with you. Your credit history, your business records, your trust signals belong to you, not to one bank, one government, or one mobile money operator.
Open for builders. Any African developer can build apps on Adunai without asking permission. More apps = more competition = better products for users.

A concrete example

Aisha runs a small store in Yaoundé. She wants to import goods from Lagos.

Without Adunai (today):

She walks to a bank, brings paperwork
Pays ~$50 in wire fees on a $1,000 order
Waits 3–5 days for the supplier to receive
Loses another 5–10% to FX conversion
Total cost: $100–200 on a $1,000 order (10–20%)

With an Adunai-based wallet:

She opens her wallet, enters her supplier's phone number
Confirms with a 4-digit PIN or fingerprint
Payment arrives in 30 seconds
Total cost: ~$28 (2.8%)

That difference, $70–170 saved per transaction, is what separates a business that survives from one that grows.

Is this just "crypto"?

Adunai uses blockchain technology (the same kind that powers Bitcoin and Ethereum), but it's not about speculation or get-rich-quick schemes. It's about using these technologies to solve real problems that African families and businesses face every day:

High remittance fees from diaspora
Slow cross-border payments
No portable credit history
No interoperability between mobile money networks
Currency instability

You don't need to understand how blockchains work to use Adunai, just like you don't need to understand 4G/5G radio waves to use WhatsApp. The technology disappears into the experience.

Will I need to know about "wallets" and "addresses"?

Probably not, if the wallet you use is built well. The same way M-Pesa users don't see internal Safaricom databases, Adunai users won't see contract addresses. They'll see phone numbers, names of people, amounts in their local currency (CFA, NGN, GHS), and PIN prompts to confirm transactions.

The technology is in the background. The experience feels like mobile money, but cheaper, faster, and works across borders by default.

Part 2, For Investors, Partners, and Strategic Stakeholders

The opportunity

Africa is a $1+ trillion fintech opportunity sitting on broken rails. Mobile money has proven the demand, hundreds of millions of active users, trillions of CFA in annual transaction volume. But each network is a walled garden, every cross-border transaction is expensive, and most businesses can't reliably move money across the continent without significant friction.

Adunai is the open settlement protocol that fixes this, the equivalent of what TCP/IP did for the internet, or what GSM did for mobile telephony. Build it as open infrastructure, and the ecosystem builds on top.

Why now?

Three things have aligned that didn't exist five years ago:

Ethereum L2 scaling. Layer 2 networks like Base now offer the transaction speed and cost (cents, not dollars) needed for African retail use cases.
Stablecoin maturity. USDC and USDT are accepted as legitimate digital dollars by regulators, banks, exchanges, and businesses worldwide. Annual stablecoin volume is in the trillions.
African mobile readiness. Smartphones, mobile money penetration, and digital identity initiatives have prepared users for digital-first financial services. The market is pre-trained.

Adunai is the protocol layer tying these together for African markets specifically.

The architecture

Adunai's deployed v1 system is 35 smart contracts on Base (an Ethereum Layer 2). Six core primitives anchor it:

IdentityRegistry: digital identities for people, businesses, and agents (privacy-preserving by default)
HandleRegistry: opt-in public names linked to identities (usernames, phone numbers, emails, business names)
AttestationsRegistry: verifiable credentials and trust signals
PaymentsRouter: fast, fee-aware payment routing
Treasury: protocol fee accumulation, governed by the Adunai Foundation
AgentRegistry: registered agents (AI assistants, cash agents) that can act on users' behalf

The first contracts went live on Base Sepolia (testnet) in May 2026; the complete 35-contract v1 system has been live since 2026-07-01 (full fresh redeploy). Mainnet deployment follows the independent security audit.

The ecosystem thesis

Adunai isn't a product, it's infrastructure. Like Ethereum, like TCP/IP, the value comes from what others build on top:

Consumer wallets (multiple competing implementations, Foundation provides an open-source reference)
Cross-border SMB payment products
Diaspora remittance applications
Embedded finance for verticals (agriculture, logistics, e-commerce)
Credit and lending products built on attestation history
Insurance and savings primitives
Trust/identity verification services
AI-agent-based financial assistants

Adunai earns small protocol fees from every transaction. As the ecosystem grows, protocol revenue scales, flowing to a Foundation-governed treasury that funds ecosystem development.

Governance and credibility

The Adunai Foundation is structured for genuine decentralization:

Multi-sig governance with signers distributed across West Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, Southern Africa, North Africa, plus diaspora and international advisors
No single party can unilaterally change protocol rules
Foundation funds ecosystem grants open to all builders
Strategic alignment with PAPSS (Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, AU-backed) as the open-source/permissionless complement to institutional rails

What's already done

The complete 35-contract v1 system written, tested (3,715 tests across 135 suites, all passing), and deployed to Base Sepolia, the first six core contracts in May 2026, the full system in a fresh redeploy on 2026-07-01
All contracts verified on Basescan; world-readable today
The fresh-redeploy script ran its on-chain post-deploy assertions (role handover, recovery wiring, rail dormancy) in-broadcast; 34 of 35 contracts are source-verified on Basescan
TypeScript SDK and the aID reference identity client under active development
Whitepaper, Project Brief, and Wallet Integration Guide in place

What's coming next

TypeScript SDK first release
aID, the open-source reference identity client ("Sign in with Adunai"; African-native UX baseline)
Public source code repository
Marketing site at adunai.org
First end-to-end cross-border SMB payment demo on testnet
Foundation legal structure finalization
Independent security audit (gates mainnet deployment)
Ecosystem grants program launch

Part 3, For Builders and Developers

Quick orientation

If you're a developer wanting to build on Adunai, here's what's accessible today:

Core registries from the 35-contract v1 system, deployed on Base Sepolia (chain ID 84532):

Contract	Proxy Address
Treasury	`0x691ffaaac4b557696cfdd6c2fd4bb721dd33e0f8`
IdentityRegistry	`0xfe841acb925e6f5cf05bcc45d58374f7ed43a209`
AttestationsRegistry	`0xe01f602932ffbfbdbf5f8b9dcb5fbb98bdb4c17f`
HandleRegistry	`0xd9047a6bec97ad73b20efd7f8611b17671efc21c`
AgentRegistry	`0x554d3b38acc641f87c32dfccf4dda7e62c6433ea`
PaymentsRouter	`0x64e743e263ab8ebdc063b81053271717e8e129b2`
TimelockController	`0xD38B7FaF4980Ce86971f85b8d0c0B7D086Aba63A`

Visit any address on sepolia.basescan.org to see:

The contract's verified source code
All transactions involving the contract
Current state and balances
ABIs for integration into your code

This is true regardless of whether the GitHub repo is public, the chain is the source of truth, and verification was published to Basescan at deploy time.

How does Adunai actually live on Base?

GitHub (source code archive)
   ↓
   Developer laptop + Forge (compiles Solidity to bytecode, submits to network)
   ↓
   Base RPC endpoint (gateway to Base network)
   ↓
   Base nodes globally (replicate and store the bytecode)
   ↓
   Contracts live permanently at their assigned addresses

GitHub doesn't "deploy" anything. GitHub stores source code. The actual deployment is: developer runs Forge locally, Forge submits transactions to Base, Base nodes around the world replicate the result.

Once deployed:

The contracts exist on every Base node worldwide
Anyone can interact with them via any Base RPC provider
No single point of failure
If GitHub disappeared tomorrow, Adunai contracts would still be on Base
If the founder team disappeared tomorrow, Adunai contracts would still be on Base

What's coming for builders

TypeScript SDK: idiomatic JavaScript/TypeScript wrappers for the protocol primitives
aID reference identity client (open source, MIT/Apache licensed): African-native UX baseline any builder can fork. A separate Adunai reference wallet is held open as a Phase 1+ decision; consumer wallets are built commercially by independent builders
Public source repository
Comprehensive docs and tutorials
Ecosystem grants program

Recommended starting points for builders

Inspect the contracts on Basescan
Read the WHITEPAPER
Read the PROJECT_BRIEF
Wait for the SDK release
Fork the aID reference client when it lands
Apply for an ecosystem grant when the program opens

What you can build

Adunai is open infrastructure, so the answer is "anything that fits within the primitives." Examples:

Consumer wallets for specific markets, demographics, or use cases
B2B cross-border payment products for specific corridors
Diaspora remittance products
Vertical fintech (agritech, logistics, e-commerce)
Credit/lending products on attestation history
Tontine / susu / ajo digital products
Merchant payment apps with QR codes
Bill payment aggregators
AI agent products
Insurance with attestation-based claims
Identity verification services
Goal-based savings

If it serves African economic life, payments, savings, identity, trust, Adunai probably has primitives that help.

How to contribute back

Adunai is open infrastructure. Contributions welcome: bug reports, feature proposals, audit findings (especially before mainnet), ecosystem tools, documentation translations, governance participation.

Lock-in: Technical Reality (May 2026)

What is Adunai (technical reality)

35 smart contracts deployed on Base Sepolia (fresh redeploy 2026-07-01; first six core contracts May 2026)
Mainnet planned post-audit (Phase 2 trigger)
Source code in private GitHub repo currently; planned public before Phase 1 launch
Verified contracts on Basescan; world-readable today regardless of repo status
Operational infrastructure (RPCs, indexers) inherits from Base's globally distributed node network
Foundation governance forming, geographically distributed multi-sig planned

What Adunai IS

Open settlement protocol for African finance
Foundation primitives for any builder to use
aID reference client showing the African-native UX baseline
Protocol-level fees funding ecosystem development
Open, permissionless, foundation-governed

What Adunai is NOT

Not a closed product owned by one company
Not a speculation vehicle or trading platform
Not dependent on any single chain operator (inherits Base's progressive decentralization)
Not a competitor to PAPSS or central banks (complement, not replace)

The decentralization model

Adunai is decentralized through:

Contracts: immutable / governance-restricted (no single party can change rules)
Access: permissionless (anyone can interact with the contracts)
Operators: diverse and competing (no single wallet or app dominates)
Infrastructure: multiple providers (no single RPC or indexer is critical)
Governance: globally distributed Foundation multi-sig (no single jurisdiction can capture)

A "network of Adunai across Africa and the world" is not a network of separate Adunais. It is:

Many builders building apps on the single Adunai protocol
Many infrastructure providers serving different geographies
Many signers governing the Foundation
Many users in many countries accessing the same protocol

The contracts themselves live on Base, replicated across thousands of Base nodes worldwide. No single point of failure, no single party in control.

Document History

v0.1 (May 2026): Initial draft. Three-audience structure: end users (plain language), investors/partners (strategic), builders (technical access). Companion explainer to the Adunai Whitepaper and Project Brief.

For the technical specification, see the Adunai Protocol Whitepaper. For the phased roadmap, see the Project Brief. For wallet implementation patterns, see the Wallet Integration Guide. Contact and engagement paths at adunai.org as the site launches.