Open prototype — built in public, not yet in production

A public trust layer for Africa's informal economy

44 million micro, small, and medium enterprises power African economies — and most of them are invisible to the formal financial system. ADULIX is digital public infrastructure that gives every MSME a portable, tamper-evident, consent-controlled record of who they are and what they've done — so any bank, lender, or agency can verify it, and no single company has to own it.

1
Shared, append-only ledger — not a database per app
100%
Tamper-evident: every record's hash chains to the last
0
Vendor lock-in — open API, open source, open spec

Trust has always existed here. Records haven't.

Africa's small traders and exporters have run on trust for generations — reputation, community vouching, informal ledgers kept in notebooks. What's changed is the infrastructure now available to make that trust legible to institutions, without erasing who holds it.

For generations

Informal trust, undocumented

Reputation and relationships carried real economic weight, but none of it was portable — a trader's history reset to zero with every new bank, buyer, or border.

2007 onward

Mobile money digitizes payment

M-Pesa and its successors proved that a lightweight, mobile-first rail could reach populations formal banking never had. It solved moving money — not proving identity or history.

2021 onward

National digital ID arrives

Programs like Ethiopia's Fayda are digitizing who you are at population scale — foundational identity infrastructure, built as a public good rather than a single vendor's product.

Now

The missing layer: verifiable business trust

Identity answers "who." Nothing yet answers "what has this business actually done, and who did it consent to share that with." That's the gap ADULIX is built to close.

Illustrative timeline, not archival photography — ADULIX doesn't yet have a public visual history of its own to show.

Rails, not an app

Roads and the internet are useful because everyone can build on them without asking permission from whoever paved them. DPI applies that idea to digital systems: identity, payments, and — with ADULIX — verifiable trust, as shared infrastructure rather than a product one company controls.

Open by design

Documented, versioned API (see the live spec) — any institution can integrate without needing ADULIX's permission or a bespoke contract.

Tamper-evident, not just trusted

Every fact is hash-chained to the one before it. Anyone can independently verify the whole history hasn't been altered — no need to just take our word for it.

Consent-controlled

The MSME grants and revokes exactly who can see what. Data doesn't move without a recorded decision — visible in the same ledger as everything else.

Four steps, one ledger underneath

Every fact — a registration, a verification, a consent decision, a credential — becomes one more hash-chained entry. The demo walks this exact loop end to end.

01

Register

An MSME creates a permanent, tamper-evident record — the anchor everything else attaches to.

02

Verify

Identity (Fayda) and business registry (eTrade) checks append verified facts to the same record.

03

Consent

The MSME grants a specific party access to a specific scope of its data — and can revoke it just as explicitly.

04

Credential

A verifiable trust credential is issued from that history — something a lender or partner can check instantly.

Built for everyone the informal economy already involves

MSMEs

Build a trust record once, reuse it with every bank, buyer, and program that follows — instead of starting from zero each time.

Lenders & financial institutions

Cheaper, faster underwriting backed by a verifiable history, not a manual document pile you have to trust on faith.

Government & regulators

Visibility into the formal economy's growth without needing to centralize sensitive business or personal data to get it.

Donors & development partners

Fund infrastructure that outlives any single program — reusable rails, not another siloed pilot database.

This only works as shared infrastructure

ADULIX is an early, open prototype — the architecture is real and running, the demo is live, and the parts that matter most now are the ones no single team can build alone: real institutions to integrate, real communities to represent, and funding that treats this as public infrastructure rather than a startup bet.

Communities & MSME networks

Help make sure this reflects how trust actually works on the ground — not just how it looks from a dashboard.

Talk to us →

Donors & institutional partners

Fund the infrastructure layer, not a one-off pilot — open, reusable, and built to outlast any single grant.

Partner with us →

Developers & integrators

The API, source, and OpenAPI spec are open. Read the code, run it yourself, or send a pull request.

View on GitHub →