Q&A | ‘The 2025 MoonShot Conference Will Include Conversations on Stablecoins’ – A Chat with CEO, TechCabal

Tomiwa Aladekomo, CEO of Big Cabal Media and TechCabal, provided an overview of the 2025 Moonshot conference, a Pan-African tech event in Lagos, Nigeria, highlighting its growth and evolution over the past three years.

The upcoming third edition, which takes place between October 15-16 2025 at the Eko Convention Center in Lagos, Nigeria, will prioritize facilitating business deals through dedicated meeting spaces and investor matching, with a focus on discussions around the increasingly sophisticated crypto and blockchain space in Africa, including compliance and regulatory engagement.

The conference aims to drive capital into Africa’s tech ecosystem by enabling startups to secure investments and helping investors connect with Limited Partners.

David Gitonga, the Managing Editor at BitKE, got to chat with Tomiwa and discuss the upcoming conference and what it will feature as regards crypto and blockchain.

Q: Who are you, what do you do, and what’s the thinking behind Moonshot?

Tomiwa:

Morning, David. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Tomiwa Aladekomo. I’m CEO of Big Cabal Media. We are the publisher of Tech Cabal, which is a pan-African tech publication that’s been covering the business and the impact of technology in Africa since 2013.

We also have a unit called Tech Cabal Insights, which provides data, intelligence, and analysis around Africa’s digital economy. We work with anyone who’s interested in African prosperity. And Tech Cabal and Tech Cabal Insights together bring you Moonshot, which is a pan-African tech conference based out of Lagos, Nigeria.

We started Moonshot three years ago because Lagos, Nigeria is obviously one of the hotspots of tech on the continent. And we thought there wasn’t a tech conference in that market that really represented the full potential of what it is that Africa is doing in technology and that could convene all the most important thinkers, doers, and funders of technology in Africa.

And so over the last three years, we’ve built this conference that’s sort of grown quite robustly. It’s a gathering of really smart and incredible people thinking about how to build cool things, thinking about how to fund cool things.

We bring in regulators so that they can hear from people within the ecosystem. We bring in global investors so they can see what’s happening in tech in Nigeria and across Africa. And I think it’s an incredibly exciting gathering and continues to grow year on year.

Q: What have you learned during the first and second editions, and what is different about the third edition?

Tomiwa:

So we built a really cool conference. Last year we had 4,000 guests. That was year two. We have been able to build really compelling agendas, both years, really exciting speakers, masterclasses, and workshops.

We have more and more people attending from across the continent. Last year we had about 15 countries represented. We expect that to go up to about 20 this year, perhaps more than that.

We have more global investors. We have interest from the US. We have interest from across Europe. This year we have D4D, which is a development organization that represents the EU, joining us, bringing over 100 investors and participants from across Europe.

Last year, we had representatives from the trade missions of about 10 different countries join us for closed-door roundtables, for working sessions, and as part of the panels. And so we’ve built this conference where we know that the content is exciting, the formats work, the audiences find it really compelling.


This year [2025], what we’re really trying to double and triple down on is make it a place where business gets done. So we have sort of testimonials from people who met partners that they’ve done a dozen projects with at the first or the second Moonshot.

We have word of some investments. But this year we want to be really, really systematic about making sure that everybody who attends is able to find the people that they want to schedule meetings.

We have a lot more meeting space and dedicated meeting rooms and deal rooms. We have investor matching and we’re taking it to another level. We have an app so that people can sort of connect ahead of the conference and find each other ahead of the conference.

We have what we call Fuel, the Investor Conference, and that has agenda setting sessions for investors coming from outside of the continent who want to understand what’s going on, or even investors from other parts of the continent to understand what the landscape in Nigeria, West Africa is.

So we are raising the bar in terms of the ability of people to do deals, to meet one another and find one another, to actually do business and get deals done. We think that’s a really critical thing to do to raise the value of the event for everybody that’s coming. In our app and in person, we’re going to have a little ticker so that if you sign a deal, you know, you can come take a picture in front of a banner and we can capture that information a little bit more than we have in the past so that we’re doing it a bit more systematically than we have in previous years.

Q: You mentioned momentum in the crypto space. What informed this, and what do you see about the crypto space in Africa?

Tomiwa:

I think the crypto space is getting more sophisticated across the continent. We’ve gone from a place of complete regulator opposition to all things crypto to a place where you are seeing more acceptance.

You’re starting to see it get regulated as a security in some markets. You’re starting to see central banks experiment with stablecoins and come to accept that they might be part of the mix of whether currencies or securities in each market or underlying infrastructure for the financial rails across the continent.

And so we have conversations about stablecoins. We have conversations about where crypto is today. We have a number of sponsors and partners who are going to be in there talking about the kind of projects that they’re doing.

But fundamentally, from a momentum space, I think, as with everything on the continent, on the conference, we are reflecting on the fact that, you know, as an ecosystem, we’ve had highs, we’ve had lows, but in crypto, as in technology broadly, it feels like we are moving forward from a place of strength now.

When I talk about that across the entire ecosystem, it means that we’ve gone from extreme overvaluation, people building vaporware, everybody pitching a tech app for something without kind of a real depth of knowledge or domain expertise to a place now where the founders I see, or the most impressive founders I see, have lots of experience working in high growth startups, have lots of experience and domain expertise, and understanding of the spaces that they are going into.

They’re starting from a more mature place. I think similarly in crypto, we’ve had waves of hype and, you know, all kinds of crazy projects out there.

I do think that the amount of projects with real substance, or the percentage of projects with real substance, is significantly higher now and that they have a bigger chance of success than in the past because they are rooted in a more realistic understanding of what it is that we’re trying to solve and know how it is going to get solved.

And so we’re building momentum towards sort of a much stronger future. That’s our thinking.

Q: Some of your sponsors are big exchanges like Luno and Busha. Will the conference also go beyond exchanges into blockchain?

Tomiwa:

Absolutely! I think that in terms of, you know, globally, there’s sort of big blockchain initiatives that have gone a bit further. I think that probably the crypto exchanges are still the biggest part of the market in Africa, and they’re probably the biggest sponsors at the moment.

But the conversations at the conference will definitely go beyond sort of crypto and coins and crypto exchanges into stablecoins, into sort of blockchain as infrastructure. And I think that’s some of the stuff that we’re covering at Tech Cabal and it’s some of the conversation that we are excited to have at the conference.

So yeah, I think that we will definitely be going beyond crypto.

So for instance, if I look at sort of some of the sessions, we’re talking about stablecoins to drive cross-border trade. We have been thinking about how it is that they transform local payments, how it is that they power switches. And so, yeah, some conversations along those lines.

Q: Will compliance conversations at Moonshot also touch on crypto?

Tomiwa:

Absolutely yeah! We’ve invited the regulators, we have invited quite a few of them out of Nigeria. Like I said, we have some ministers of technology and digital economy from other countries joining us.

But in terms of crypto regulators, we’ve invited the Nigerian Central Bank. We’ve invited the Nigerian SEC to join us. And so, yeah, there will be compliance conversations.

Q: Finally, what do you hope comes out of the third edition as you hopefully go into the fourth?

Tomiwa:

I think super important for us is that the first objective is always that people come and they find meaning, they learn from one another, they exchange ideas, they build a foundation in which to build things.

For this year, that people do business with one another is really really important, so that startups find investors. I mentioned the G4D was joining us. We also have the African Business Angels Network doing the annual congress in Lagos, Nigeria during the same week.

We have Accelerate Africa doing their conference in Lagos, Nigeria during the same week. And so we have quite a preponderance of early stage investors who will be present at the conference. And so the goal is for them to find investments for us to present.

You know, we have some people presenting their entire portfolios. So portfolio showcases of promising startups doing exciting things. We want all of those startups to get funding. We want people to do deals.

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