AbaPay DOCS & FAQ

Three ways, all running the same payment engine. In this app: pick the service, enter the number, confirm, and sign in your wallet. By chat: message AbaPay on Telegram, WhatsApp or X in plain language — "send ₦500 airtime to 08012345678". Through an AI assistant: connect AbaPay as a tool over MCP and just ask it to pay.

Chat and AI payments need a spending allowance approved first (or they'll send you a signed link to pay yourself, one time).

Yes — add the bot to a group and tag it (@AbaPayAgentBot) to use it there. Anything sensitive (balances, receipts, PINs) is always sent to you privately, never posted where the group can see it.

One group-only trick: ask it to pick a few phone numbers that were posted in the chat recently and recharge them — e.g. "recharge 5 random numbers from the last 30 minutes, 200 each", or the same with data instead of airtime. It confirms the total and asks for your PIN by DM first, then posts the result (numbers, amounts, proof) back in the group once it's done. Electricity and cable aren't included in this — there's no safe way to tell a meter or smartcard number apart from any other number someone posts, so those still need you to name the account directly.

MiniPay (Opera Mini's Celo wallet), Valora, MetaMask, Coinbase Smart Wallet / Base Account, and any other wallet reachable over WalletConnect or injected into your browser. AbaPay also runs as a Farcaster Mini App.

Wallets that support smart-account gas sponsorship on Base get it automatically — the app detects the capability and batches the token approval and the payment into one sponsored transaction. Every other wallet just pays normal network fees, with no difference in behaviour.

Celo and Base — those two, plus their public test networks, and nothing else. USD₮ and USDC work on both; cUSD/USDm is Celo-only.

The token picker filters itself to whatever chain your wallet is on, so you can't accidentally choose one that doesn't exist there. Sending funds to our contract by hand, on another network or in another token, is not a payment and can't be matched to an order.

The blockchain part confirms in roughly a few seconds on both Celo and Base. Utility delivery normally follows immediately after confirmation — electricity tokens and education PINs appear on the receipt itself. If a provider is slow, the transaction sits in a PENDING state and our webhook keeps chasing it rather than declaring failure.

No. There's no AbaPay balance to top up, and we never hold your keys. Your stablecoins stay in your own wallet until the moment you pay a bill, and they go straight into the payment smart contract. We can't move your funds without either your signature or an allowance you explicitly approved on-chain.

Yes, and they're always shown in the total before you confirm. There's a small flat platform fee on electricity, cable TV, education and bank transfers. Airtime, mobile data and international top-ups carry no platform fee at all.

Blockchain gas is separate, goes to the network rather than to us, and depends on your wallet and chain — Base smart wallets are often sponsored, so free.

Airtime, mobile data (including SME bundles), electricity (prepaid and postpaid), cable TV (DStv, GOtv, Startimes), education PINs, bank transfers, and international airtime/data.

The providers inside each category are pulled live from our payment providers, so the list only ever shows what can genuinely be bought right now. If a provider disappears from the picker, it isn't purchasable at that moment — which is deliberately better than letting you pay for it and fail afterwards.

Type the destination account number — we check it against every Nigerian bank automatically and tell you whose account it is, so you don't need to know or select the bank yourself. If more than one bank has an account under that exact number, we show you the short list of matches so you can confirm which one is yours.

Once confirmed, the transfer settles in real time as an actual bank payout, not a top-up voucher.

Not right now, honestly. WAEC result-checker and WAEC registration PINs work — in the app, in chat, and through a connected AI agent. JAMB is fully built on our side, but it isn't enabled on our current merchant account with our payment provider, so it doesn't appear in the live product list and can't be bought.

If that changes at their end it will simply start appearing, with no update needed from us.

Every country our payment provider currently covers — including Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, the UK and the US. We deliberately don't publish a count, because we read that list live from the provider rather than keeping our own copy of it, so it can change without us knowing.

Pick the country in the app (or just name it in chat) and you'll see its own operators, plans and local currency. If a country isn't in the live list, the agent will tell you so instead of promising something that would fail at delivery.

Yes — just say so in chat: "every Tuesday buy ₦200 MTN airtime", "pay my meter on the 28th every month", or a one-off "top up 08012345678 in an hour". Ask to "show my schedules" or "cancel my airtime schedule" the same way.

Automatic execution is opt-in per schedule; by default a schedule only reminds you. When it is on, it's still bounded by your on-chain allowance and our per-transaction and daily caps, runs at most once per due date, and pauses itself after repeated failures.

On the receipt, immediately after a successful payment — shown in full, and shareable as an image or saveable as a PNG/PDF. It's also in your History tab, and sent by email where we have your address.

In the app, you sign every payment in your wallet — nothing moves without that signature. With an agent, you approve an on-chain spending allowance once from the Agent Hub, for one specific chain and one specific stablecoin. After that the agent can pay without a fresh signature each time, but only up to what's left of that allowance.

The cap is enforced by the smart contract itself, not by our servers, so it cannot reach the rest of your wallet no matter what goes wrong on our side. Our own per-transaction and daily limits sit on top of yours.

Open the Agent Hub tab, pick the chain and stablecoin you want the agent to be able to use, and approve a limit — that's an on-chain transaction only you can sign. To revoke, set the limit back to zero; it takes effect on-chain immediately. Note that unlinking a chat account stops that channel but does not by itself zero your allowance, so do both if you want a full stop.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the standard that lets an AI assistant like Claude use AbaPay as a tool. A connected assistant can describe what AbaPay supports, list real purchasable plans with real prices, read your balance and remaining allowance, and — with your PIN — pay a bill.

It reaches exactly the same engine as chat: same on-chain allowance ceiling, same PIN gate with lockout, same kill switches, same operator caps, same spend alerts. It is not a looser door.

OAuth if your client supports it: you authorize once in the browser and the connection is remembered, so there's no credential to paste into every new conversation. The API key you create in Agent Hub → MCP is the fallback for clients that can't do the OAuth flow.

Both can be revoked instantly from the Agent Hub, and revoking kills every token issued against that link. An expired or revoked authorization makes the assistant ask you to reconnect rather than quietly failing.

Yes — every single payment, every time. Authorizing the connector means 'this assistant may act for me'; it never means 'this assistant may spend'. Without the PIN a connected assistant can only read your balance and the plan catalogue. If something claims it can pay without asking for your PIN, treat that as a red flag.

No, and it's important not to confuse them. Your wallet password and recovery phrase belong to your wallet app and we never see them. Your AbaPay PIN is a separate 4–6 digit code you set when linking a chat account or creating an MCP credential.

It gates one thing: authorising a payment through those channels. It can't move funds on its own — it only unlocks spending inside the allowance you already approved on-chain. Repeated wrong PINs lock the channel out.

It can't, for the services where that would matter. Data bundles, cable packages and education products all require a real plan code, and the connector exposes a list_plans tool that returns the actual purchasable plans, codes and current prices from our payment provider. If an agent can't get a real code, the payment is refused before any money moves rather than settling on-chain and failing at delivery.

It checks first. If there's no allowance for that chain and token, it says so and gives you the choice — approve a limit now in the Agent Hub, or complete just that one payment via a secure signed link. If another stablecoin on the same chain already has both the balance and the approved limit to cover it, it will tell you that too, so you can just use that one instead.

Yes — Telegram, WhatsApp and X can be linked independently to the same wallet, alongside one or more MCP credentials, and each can be managed or unlinked separately from the Agent Hub.

No, and that's deliberate. Bank transfers move money to a third party, so they must be confirmed with your own wallet signature in the app. The agent will refuse and point you there rather than spending from an allowance.