AXK Network

Before AXK, I coordinated shipment documents, dispatches and field teams in a food distribution and export operation in Lagos. I watched handwritten receipts and fragmented confirmations delay verification again and again.

Agricultural commodities in East Africa move through long, informal chains: farmers, aggregators, warehouses, transporters, border points, buyers. Each handover produces evidence: a receipt, a weight, a stamp, a phone message. Almost none of it is connected.

My first hypothesis was simple. Sellers couldn't reach good buyers, so AXK began as commodity matching: a marketplace connecting them.

Field experience showed that the harder challenge was proving what happened after counterparties met. Who is this seller, where did this produce come from, what grade is it, who held it last, was it cleared, did it arrive, was it paid?

Those answers existed, but they were scattered across paper, people and institutions. I changed AXK's direction from commodity matching to a shared, verified transaction record.

Identity

Who is trading, and can that be confirmed?

Origin

Where the produce was grown and aggregated.

Quality

Grade, moisture, weight at each point.

Custody

Who held it, and when it changed hands.

Compliance

Permits, certificates, border clearance.

Delivery

What actually arrived, and in what state.

Settlement

Whether, when and how payment happened.

Verification and settlement infrastructure in three parts: AXK Verify, AXK Ledger and AXK Trade, integrating mobile clients, APIs, verifiable records and Stellar/Soroban settlement.

An interoperability architecture designed around Rwanda Revenue Authority, Rwanda Standards Board, RICA and the Electronic Single Window, so a record can be recognised by the institutions that clear trade.

USSD and decentralised-identity workflows for farmers and traders with low connectivity, plus AI-assisted compliance-evidence, credit-risk and fraud-risk workflows.

I led a ten-person team. The architecture went through external technical review, including Stellar Community Fund #45 (Integration Track), where I addressed nineteen points across six blockers and thirteen weaknesses. The AXK White Paper v1 is published; v2 is forthcoming.

25,000

farmers in the system

≈ $5M

processed trade volume

1.2 s

settlement demonstration

10

person team

AXK Network is built by Afrikabal Ltd, which is the name most external references use.

Development Bank of Rwanda, Hanga Startup Venture Ignite grant (2025).

World Food Prize Foundation, Innovate for Impact Challenge (2025) · Google for Startups Accelerator Africa (2025) · NVIDIA Inception (2025) · Qubic Labs / SDG Blockchain Accelerator (2025) · CV Labs Accelerator (2024).

The Sabah, Malaysia hill-paddy pilot was run as part of AXK; see Sabah.

A market only works as well as the record beneath it. Verification is not a feature added to a marketplace; it is the infrastructure the marketplace depends on.

Every structured record is also a decision about what to leave out. Informal trust, local relationships and context don't fit neatly into fields, and some of it is lost when trade is formalised.

AXK is the clearest version of the question: messy, physical activity, and the work of turning it into something institutions can trust and act on.