A New CAB: Regulatory and Business Intelligence for Africa’s Digital Asset Economy

Our Founding Editor on the rebrand, the six sections, the people now behind them—and the eighteen months we owe you an explanation for.

In July, the Nigerian President gave five agencies thirty days to agree with one other on virtual assets coordination in Nigeria.

The executive order directing the Central Bank, the SEC, the Nigeria Revenue Service, the NFIU and the ONSA to align their positions on virtual assets is the kind of document this publication exists for. It is short. It is consequential. And within a week of it landing, most of what had been written about it was either a rewritten press release or a headline about crypto going mainstream.

What it actually means is that five institutions with five different views of the same asset class have a deadline. What it means for an operator is that the answer you got from one regulator last quarter may not survive contact with another this quarter. That is a story about obligations, and it needs someone in the room.

Covering that story and similar stories from Africa’s digital asset economy properly is also what told us CAB had outgrown the way we were running it.

What has changed

We are CAB now. 

Not an abbreviation you need to expand. “Crypto Asset Buyer” is now defunct. At some point, the longer name was quietly telling compliance officers, general counsel, and country managers, and business developers that they were in the wrong place. Besides, nobody in this sector has called us anything but CAB for years.

We describe ourselves plainly: regulatory and business intelligence for Africa’s digital asset economy. Regulation is where we are anchored. Business is where it matters. A capital threshold is a filing to a lawyer and a survival question to an operator, and we had spent years covering only the first reading.

We look different. 

You will have noticed. The mark has been redrawn and the wordmark is now set in a serif—the typography of a masthead rather than a technology logo. That was a deliberate choice. Almost every publication in this market, ours included until now, looked like a crypto startup. We are not one. We are a record of how this economy is being governed, and we would rather look like what we are.

And we now publish in six sections, each with a job:

• Policy: the rules, and what they oblige you to do.
• Business: what the rules cost the people living under them.
• Infrastructure: the rails moving value, and who supervises them.
• Education: how this actually works, start to finish.
• Viewpoint: signed argument from people with something at stake.
• Dispatch: what happened, and whether it matters to you.

Business and Education are the additions, and both are overdue. Business is where we will publish what operators tell us and don’t often see written down: what the licence really took, what the bank actually said, which market was worth entering and which was not. Education, beyond the questions we have answered for five years, will now focus more on questions like what a VASP actually is, how custody obligations work, what a licence requires. This will exist in a form you can simply share with a colleague.

The part we owe you

CAB’s publishing has been irregular. Badly so, at times. There have been stretches this past year when weeks passed between pieces, and if you came looking for us during one of them and concluded we had gone quiet, that was a fair reading.

The explanation is not complicated. CAB was, for most of its life, one person with a law practice & consultancy. The same work that gives this publication its access—sitting in the consultations, the association work, the advisory roles—is the work that competes for the hours the publication needs. When those collided, the publication lost.

That is the thing we have actually fixed, and it matters more than the rebranded logo.

CAB now has a newsroom.

Senior policy analysts. Business and infrastructure analysts. A Dispatch reporter. An education researcher. People who handle social and the site so the editorial team does not. Contributing writers—lawyers, compliance professionals, writers, and researchers. Every one of them is named on our masthead, with what they do, because a publication that asks other people to put their names to things should start with its own.

You can hold us to a rhythm now, because there are enough of us to keep one. And we hope to keep building on this.

What has not changed, and will not

We do not publish investment advice, price predictions, token promotions or yield claims. We do not accept payment for coverage—not for a story, not for its timing, not for its removal. Commercial partners get placement and clearly labelled content, and nothing else.

Where our editors hold roles in organizations we write about—and we do, which is precisely how we get the access—we disclose it in the story itself, not buried in a policy page.

Those constraints cost us traffic. They are also the entire reason a bank’s risk team or a regulator’s adviser will read us at all, and they are not for sale.

All of it is now written down. Our editorial standards, our standing disclosures, our corrections policy and the full list of what we will not publish are on the About Us page. If we fall short of any of it, the corrections address is there too, and we answer in writing.

We will be here on Monday.

If you have been reading CAB since 2021, thank you for staying through the quiet stretches. We have built something sturdier with the time you gave us.

If you are new: we are the record of how Africa’s digital asset economy is being regulated, and what that is doing to the businesses inside it. Start with Dispatch for what just happened, or Policy for what it obliges you to do.

Either way, we will be here on Monday.

Senator Ihenyen

Founding Editor