Africa Bitcoin Corporation CEO Warren Wheatley says the company is not simply an African replica of Michael Saylor’s Strategy, despite its Bitcoin treasury strategy.
In an interview with CoinAfrica, Wheatley described Africa Bitcoin Corporation as a financial services group whose core business is providing capital to small and medium-sized enterprises, with Bitcoin embedded into its balance-sheet architecture.
The Johannesburg-based company, formerly known as Altvest Capital, uses Bitcoin as a strategic treasury asset and aims to use it as collateral to access international capital at lower costs, which can then be deployed through its SME lending business. ABC’s current public positioning similarly describes Bitcoin as a treasury asset supporting its private-credit business.
Wheatley told CoinAfrica that the ultimate objective is to reduce the cost of capital facing African entrepreneurs while creating a mechanism for global capital to reach SMEs across the continent.
Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.
CoinAfrica: What exactly is Africa Bitcoin Corporation building, and where does Bitcoin fit into the business?
Warren Wheatley: A lot of people mistake us for just a pure Bitcoin treasury company, and that would be wrong.
What we actually are is a financial services group that funds SMEs.
The problem I’ve been trying to solve is finding ways to get capital from institutions and investors to SMEs. When I started Altvest Capital, I tried to get capital from the retail market by issuing instruments that they could invest in.
The idea was to connect ideas to capital.
We were successful in raising money from the retail public, and we were able to raise capital for entrepreneurs from the public. For example, for a family-owned restaurant, we were able to raise around 20 million rand from its customers, the public, and the community in which that restaurant operated.
Right now, I’m getting capital from institutions and retail investors, and any capital we get, we distribute and use and package as loans for SMEs.
That’s the business. I go around raising capital, bring it onto my balance sheet, and lend it out to SMEs.
CoinAfrica: What problem are you ultimately trying to solve for African businesses?
Warren Wheatley: Across Africa, we suffer from extremely high capital costs.
It’s the same in Nigeria. Every country is the same. In all 54 of our countries, the cost of capital is a problem. It’s just the degree.
South Africa is probably one of the cheaper markets, but places like Zimbabwe can have extremely high borrowing costs.
The other thing all African countries share is high unemployment. That’s an issue I want to address in South Africa and beyond our borders.
We don’t have big companies setting up and employing thousands of people. It’s going to be up to young people starting businesses, getting capital, growing those businesses and hiring people.
That’s the driving force behind everything we do. It’s to address joblessness in South Africa and beyond our borders.
CoinAfrica: So where does Bitcoin come into this model?
Warren Wheatley: I’m a recent convert. My Damascus moment was about two years ago.
My background is as a lifelong financier — investment banking, wealth management, the full spectrum. I started looking at Bitcoin’s attributes and how it could be used as a financial instrument within a company.
It’s not just about growing the size of my balance sheet like Strategy is doing. It’s Bitcoin’s other abilities that I’ve started appreciating.
The fact that payments can be made securely, custody can be done securely, that the blockchain is robust, that there’s a fixed and capped supply, and that Bitcoin has now been widely adopted by institutions.
It’s become pristine collateral.
If I’ve got Bitcoin, which we do now have, I can use that as collateral and take it anywhere in the world. I can access capital and borrow against that Bitcoin as collateral.
That can be done quickly, efficiently and, most importantly, cheaply.
I’ve now got an asset owned by an African entity that can be used as pristine collateral to access capital anywhere in the world. I can get capital as low as 3.5%, bring that capital back and use it to give loans to SMEs.
That’s the business.
CoinAfrica: Are you ultimately building an African version of Michael Saylor’s Strategy?
Warren Wheatley: I think we’re very different from Strategy in that we’ve got a viable, profitable business.
We use Bitcoin in the same way they do to bolster the balance sheet, but we use it to create profits and create yield as opposed to paying out yield.
You couldn’t do what Michael Saylor does in Africa in the same way because our investors demand a much higher return on their capital.
You can get around 18% by investing in a government bond without taking the same kind of risk. So Saylor wouldn’t be able to issue a preference share in South Africa at 12% and expect investors to buy it.
What we’ve done is that Bitcoin has now been embedded into the architecture of the business. It’s part and parcel of the corporate balance sheet and is going to be used to grow the business through different financial services products.
For a company like ours in financial services, the cost of capital is the same as the cost of sales for a retailer.
The lower we can get our cost of capital, the cheaper we can on-sell those financial services to our customers.
CoinAfrica: So ultimately, Bitcoin allows you to lend more capital to SMEs?
Warren Wheatley: Yeah.
And that’s the flywheel.
We get more Bitcoin. I can get more capital. I can give more loans. Those loans become more profitable. Those profits go back into Bitcoin and the world just spins.
CoinAfrica: How sustainable is the spread between the cost of your capital and the rates at which you lend?
Warren Wheatley: The reason we haven’t done it at scale yet is precisely because we’ve been monitoring the market dynamics between the spreads over time.
What’s quite telling is that the price movements in Bitcoin don’t have a material impact on the lending rates we get when capital is offered against it.
The interest rates have been quite consistent, even when Bitcoin prices fluctuate widely. They’ve remained stable for the last 18 months, for as long as we’ve been monitoring this.
Our average interest rate is around 18% per annum. That’s cheaper than the next best non-bank lender in the country, which charges around 28%.
Using Bitcoin, I’m going to be able to get that down to around 15% and potentially even 12% once I grow big enough.
Other than banks, I don’t think many people are going to be able to compete from a pricing perspective.
CoinAfrica: What happens to the model if Bitcoin’s price falls sharply?
Warren Wheatley: The Bitcoin treasury is structured in a ring-fenced special purpose vehicle.
We don’t do self-custody. We use institutional-grade custodians — Coinbase Prime, FalconX and Galaxy — and we also use Valr locally. Bitcoin is spread across four different institutional custodians.
We also use very moderate leverage.
The loan-to-value ratio is something we wouldn’t ever take beyond 50%. Ideally, we’d like the LTV to hover around 40%.
So it would take a severe event for the balance sheet to come at risk on one particular day.
Even then, we have the ability to top up the collateral position so that there’s no liquidation event.
The Bitcoin price is something we track daily, but it would take a severe drop to put the balance sheet at risk.
CoinAfrica: What kinds of businesses are you looking to finance?
Warren Wheatley: We have no biases. It’s really any business that can viably service debt.
Farmers, fisheries, manufacturing — businesses in the real economy that are hiring people and making a difference.
I have a preference for companies that are job creators and are less prone to disruption by AI.
For example, farming and some manufacturing businesses where AI can be deployed as a tool rather than coming in and disrupting the business.
A farmer can now scan his cattle and get thousands of opinions on what disease they may have, or scan the soil and ask AI how to fertilize it.
Those are the kinds of businesses I’m interested in.
CoinAfrica: What does the expansion onto multiple exchanges give Africa Bitcoin Corporation?
Warren Wheatley: Accessibility.
There’s a phrase that the world is really small. That’s true in many ways, but it’s also not true in many different ways.
Africa is a perfect example.
It’s very difficult for a Nigerian pension fund to invest in a South African company and vice versa. The investment rails are still quite broken.
When you’re a Bitcoiner, you can move money cheaply, quickly, and efficiently. You can get payments from anywhere, anytime.
The same is not true for different stock exchanges.
The multi-exchange approach is to address that lack of access and give investors different access points.
There are billions of dollars of capital in places like the UK that might want to help African investors, but it’s difficult to physically and practically do it.
So it’s easier for us to go there and give them an access point.
CoinAfrica: Is the Aquis listing primarily about visibility, liquidity or access to European capital?
Warren Wheatley: I’m hoping all three pan out.
Aquis isn’t the most liquid of markets. It’s a small exchange in London, so I don’t anticipate much liquidity.
The major idea is that we’d be able to become an access point for institutional capital from London and Europe, which has vast amounts of capital available.
If I had to pick one, I would pick access to capital over liquidity or visibility.
Editor’s note: In the interview, Wheatley said the Aquis listing expected for the following Monday had been delayed to the first week of September. An Aquis application had been publicly announced on July 31, 2026.
CoinAfrica: What does Africa Bitcoin Corporation look like five years from now if the model works?
Warren Wheatley: Where I want to get to is to be a non-bank lender with operations globally, headquartered potentially out of the US or London, and servicing the African continent with growth capital and cheap financial services.
I want operations in as many African countries as possible.
What I want to be is a funnel for drawing the world’s capital into deployment into Africa, and more specifically into African SMEs.
CoinAfrica: What changes for the African entrepreneur if that model works?
Warren Wheatley: Finally, they can compete with entrepreneurs across the world because the input cost is the same or cheaper.
If it costs me 20% a month in interest, I can’t compete against the Japanese entrepreneur with the same idea who’s paying 4% interest per annum.
I need to be a thousand times better than him just to be on an even keel.
If I can drop that cost of capital for an SME, he finally gets to compete on the world stage with one less thing holding him back.
The amount of innovation coming out of Africa — Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya — is significant.
If those entrepreneurs could access capital markets the same way an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley could, can you imagine what becomes possible?
That’s what we want to be. We want to be that provider of capital to entrepreneurs so we can take the world on.
What Warren’s argument ultimately comes down to
Wheatley’s thesis is relatively straightforward:
Bitcoin → collateral → cheaper global capital → more SME lending → more SME profits → more Bitcoin.
He describes that as the company’s “flywheel.”
The distinction is important because Africa Bitcoin Corporation’s proposition isn’t simply that Bitcoin will appreciate. Warren argues that Bitcoin can become a financial instrument embedded within a broader lending business, helping the company access capital at a lower cost and potentially pass some of that advantage to African SMEs.
That is also broadly consistent with ABC’s current public description of its model, which says its Bitcoin treasury is intended to strengthen its balance sheet and improve access to international pools of capital while its private-credit business provides the operating cash flows.
The model nevertheless depends on several variables working simultaneously: access to affordable Bitcoin-backed funding, disciplined leverage, sustainable SME lending spreads, collateral management and continued demand for SME credit.
For Warren, the end goal extends beyond Bitcoin.
It is connecting global capital with African entrepreneurs.
Watch the full interview: CoinAfrica One-On-One: Warren Wheatley on Bitcoin, African SMEs and the Future of Capital
