Nigeria no longer appears on IATA’s list of countries blocking airline revenue, but OnePipe argues that turning naira ticket sales into dollars is still slower and riskier than it should be, and has built a product called Nokrin to address it. No airline uses Nokrin yet, so the case rests on the company’s own account.
What was fixed
The blocked funds problem was real and large. In mid-2022, about $465 million of airline revenue was stuck in Nigeria, and Emirates announced it would cut services after failing to recover $85 million. The Central Bank of Nigeria released $265 million that August. The balance peaked at $850 million in June 2023, according to IATA, and the CBN said in March 2024 that it had cleared its foreign exchange backlog. IATA later confirmed that 98 per cent of the trapped funds had been cleared.
By April 2025, IATA’s report on blocked funds, which put the global total at $1.3 billion, no longer listed Nigeria. In Africa and the Middle East, the largest balances had moved to Mozambique, the XAF zone, Algeria, Lebanon and Angola. IATA’s December 2025 report, covering the end of October 2025, put the global total at $1.2 billion, again without Nigeria, with Algeria at the top of the list at $307 million. That cleared a backlog. It did not change how an airline converts naira into dollars on an ordinary day, which is the question OnePipe is now raising.
What OnePipe says is left
OnePipe told TDN explaining the thinking. Its argument is that global carriers selling in Nigeria still struggle to repatriate what they collect, and that the difficulty is practical: exchange rates, delays and the effort of moving naira out of the country. The company says carriers often leave the problem to their local teams, but that is OnePipe’s description of the market, not something TDN has tested with an airline.
The proposed fix starts with collection. Nigerians mainly pay by bank transfer, OnePipe says, and cards are not the main payment method. So the company would collect an airline’s naira revenue by transfer, convert it, and settle the airline in US dollars. In OnePipe’s words, the money is the airline’s, collected on its behalf and then passed on.
How Nokrin would work
Nokrin is the product that handles conversion and payout. OnePipe describes it today as liquidity for international money transfer operators, or IMTOs. An IMTO holding dollars that needs naira can get naira, and one holding naira that needs dollars can get dollars, with a switch matching the two. Conversion is where the digital-asset exchange Kraken comes in, according to the company, which has not described the rails in more detail.
OnePipe’s own licence, as a CBN-licensed payment solution service provider (PSSP) working through five partner banks, covers collections. The IMTOs cover the cross-border step. That means Nokrin’s conversion and payout rest on partners’ licences rather than a licence of its own.
On price and speed the answers were thin. OnePipe says fees depend on the nature of the transaction and gave a window of 24 hours, 48 at most, without saying whether that is settlement time or how long a quoted rate holds. It did not give a spread against the CBN official rate or bank rates, and it did not say whether the CBN has commented on the model.
What is verified and what is not
OnePipe’s airline credentials are in collections, not conversion. As TDN reported in June, the company says it serves 9 of Nigeria’s 14 licensed domestic carriers and powers 65 per cent of domestic airline payments, a figure it tracks internally and that no third party has audited. It also says one airline saw bank transfer selections rise eightfold within three hours of switching the option on. Independent context comes from the CBN’s Fintech Report, which counted nearly 11 billion NIBSS Instant Payments transactions in 2024, more than double 2022.
Nokrin has no airline customer. OnePipe says its users today are ordinary businesses working through its IMTO partners, and that it is looking for its first airline. The headline figures on its marketing material, $800 million in monthly payment volume and more than 25,000 businesses served, are company data for OnePipe as a whole and do not describe airline or foreign exchange activity.
The two halves of the business may point to different customers. The carriers OnePipe serves today are domestic operators that collect naira but pay lessors, maintenance providers and insurers in dollars, which are the uses its Nokrin material lists as illustrative. The company’s stated target for Nokrin, however, is international carriers repatriating ticket revenue. On TDN’s reading, the domestic carriers already on OnePipe’s books are the nearest candidates for a first airline, though the company has not said so.
The open question
The blocked funds crisis was a policy failure and it ended through policy: the CBN released dollars. What OnePipe offers is a commercial route that does not depend on that, and for an airline with naira revenue and dollar bills, that is a reasonable thing to want. It is also a better-placed pitch than most, because the company already collects for a majority of Nigeria’s domestic carriers by its own count.
But a treasurer will judge Nokrin on three things OnePipe has not yet shown. The first is price against the official rate. The second is who carries rate and counterparty risk when collection, conversion and payout sit with different licensed parties across a 24 to 48 hour window. The third is how the CBN regards a conversion step that touches an overseas digital-asset exchange. There is a fourth point that follows from the model itself: if conversion depends on liquidity supplied by IMTO partners, airline-sized flows will be limited by how much liquidity is available on each side and how quickly it is replenished, a question OnePipe has not addressed.
Nokrin’s first airline customer will be the real test of its case. The problem it describes was real in 2023 and has been cleared. Whether any of it remains is something that customer, or IATA, will have to say.
