Use cases.

These are the things a builder composes from the primitives, not products the Foundation ships. Every example below runs against the 35 contracts live on Base Sepolia (testnet, pre-audit; 34 of 35 source-verified). The payment rail is deployed but dormant: PaymentsRouter routing arms only through a 14-day timelock, though the five-token whitelist (USDC, USDT, EURC, cbBTC, WETH) is already live in ProtocolConfig. A single external audit of the complete v1 system gates mainnet. No real users, no real volume yet.

The wedge: cross-border SMB payment

Aisha runs a store in Yaoundé and wants to import goods from Lagos. Today she walks to a bank, brings paperwork, pays around $50 in wire fees on a $1,000 order, waits three to five days, and loses another 5 to 10 percent to currency conversion: $100 to $200 of friction on a $1,000 order.

On the substrate, a builder ships a wallet where she enters her supplier's handle, confirms with a PIN or fingerprint, and the payment settles in stablecoin in seconds at roughly 2.8 percent, inclusive of the 0.05 percent protocol fee and the agent margin. That is the diaspora-and-intra-African receive corridor, Adunai's first commercial wedge.

What a builder composes: IdentityRegistry and HandleRegistry for the parties, AttestationsRegistry for phone and residence verification, PaymentsRouter for the transfer, AgentRegistry for the local cash-out, and ComplianceCompleteness plus TravelRule for the reporting hooks.

Phase-0 honest: the identity, attestation, and agent surfaces are exercisable on testnet now. The transfer itself waits on rail arming, and operational delivery depends on licensed payment-service-provider and money-transmitter partnerships in the send and receive jurisdictions. Adunai is the substrate, not the licensed rail. Local-currency stablecoin settlement is a later-phase capability.

Financial products a builder can ship

Intra-African B2B payments

An importer in Douala pays a textiles supplier in Lagos each month. Today that routes through correspondent banks (CFA to USD to NGN) at 7 to 10 percent friction. A builder wires the SMB's accounting system to sign payments through the SDK, attaches invoice metadata as an on-chain attestation for AfCFTA documentation, and the supplier's system reads PaymentsRouter events for accounts-payable automation. Direct African-to-African settlement, without the foreign-currency intermediary, is a Phase 3 capability that depends on central-bank partnerships per currency.

Group savings: chama, susu, njangi, stokvel, esusu, ajo

The protocol primitive is GroupSavings; the product brands to the local term. A twelve-person njangi across Douala, Paris, Brussels, and Montreal each contributes a fixed amount per cycle, and one member receives the pool each month until everyone has been paid. A traditional njangi trusts a secretary to hold the funds; here the contract holds them and executes payouts on schedule. A domestic same-jurisdiction group is deliverable end-to-end; cross-border groups add mobile-money and travel-rule discipline per member country.

Solo savings

SavingsRegistry gives a builder time-locked, goal-based savings: a "save for school fees" goal with weekly deposits, an app-set early-withdraw penalty the contract enforces, and a beneficiary-on-death path that composes AbandonmentRegistry as the legitimacy oracle. There is no protocol-layer yield, by design. Because the vault sits at the protocol layer, a user who switches savings apps keeps it.

Microfinance and lending

A first-time borrower in rural Mali presents a portfolio of attestations: phone verified, five community vouches, employment verified, months of consistent usage, no disputes. A lender requests a SelectiveDisclosure grant, reads the profile through ReputationExportunderwrites without a credit bureau, and on repayment issues a repayment attestation the next lender can read. The borrower carries reputation across lenders instead of being captive to one platform's score. Origination depends on the builder holding lending authorization in each jurisdiction.

Identity, credentials, and portability

Portable and reusable KYC

A tiered KYC provider issues typed attestations (kyc.ng.tier2 and the like) through AttesterRegistry; a consumer app evaluates whether a user clears a profile using ComplianceCompleteness (the omission-proof completeness screen; the older ComplianceCascade is deprecated). A separate pattern bridges KYC already done at an external exchange or wallet into an Adunai-recognized attestation, so a user verifies once and is recognized across every compatible app. Note the consent nuance: benign identity-scoped attestations require the subject's EIP-712 consent, but regulatory and adverse records (AML, sanctions, PEP) and authoritative negatives are issued without consent by design.

Diaspora identity

A diaspora professional links a pre-existing overseas wallet identity to a fresh African-namespaced DID through LinkedIdentitiesRegistryadds a country-of-residence attestation and a verified-citizenship attestation, and can then hold a national-namespaced handle and route diaspora-to-village remittance. Verified diaspora citizenship depends on origin-government recognition.

Credential issuance

Universities, professional bodies, vocational programs, and employers write verifiable claims to AttestationsRegistry as accredited attesters. A graduate carries a degree attestation a foreign university reads directly, no transcript request and no notarization. A licensed physician carries a council-issued, annually renewed license attestation for AfCFTA cross-border practice. An employee's past employers attest dates and role, replacing the reference call. Institutional Layer 3 verification and each authority's adoption are the gating factors here, so most credential rollouts are pilot-scale in Phase 0.

Agent cash-in and cash-out

The substrate settles in stablecoin; people live in cash and mobile money. AgentRegistry is the registration, staking, and supervised cash-in/cash-out surface that bridges the two, and the agent economy contracts (settlement, liquidity pool, dispute intake, reputation) sit behind it. A builder abstracts the agent hand-off at both ends of a transfer so a Lagos sender and a Nairobi receiver each see their familiar local interface while the value moves in stablecoin on-chain. These agent surfaces are live on testnet; arming them for real value is a future timelock and Foundation governance action.

How builders integrate

• Sign in with Adunai: a user arrives with an existing identity and grants scoped attestation reads through the OAuth-style flow. See the SDK for the integration surface.
• Get your Adunai ID: a user starts inside a builder's app, registers a DID, claims a handle, and later carries that identity anywhere. Neither pattern is privileged; identity lives at the DID layer, so no single builder can lock users in.

The Foundation picks no winners and holds no equity in any builder. There is one reference identity client, aID, and a reference wallet held open for a later phase (a public design preview exists; it is not an existing implementation). The SDK ships in-repo under Apache-2.0 and is not yet on npm; it lands there with the Phase 1 public release. Ecosystem grants are launching, with no awards yet.

Recovery is built in: a user can reclaim an identity from a hostile or unavailable builder through a 60-to-90-day timelocked abandonment claim, vetoable by the current key or registered guardians. GuardianRegistry and AbandonmentRegistry are non-upgradeable, non-pausable, and role-free.

Next: Build on Adunaifor institutionsthe ecosystem and grants. Background: whitepapercharterstatussecurity and auditsFAQor home.