Africa’s Stablecoin Moment: A New Financial Frontier
A wholesaler in Ghana can now pay a Nigerian supplier in real time, in local currencies, without routing money through New York or London. That single transaction, once a multi-day ordeal eaten up by fees, captures what is quietly shifting across the continent.
For centuries, Africa’s financial destiny was shaped by systems designed elsewhere. Banking required proximity to physical branches and documentation many could not provide. Savings meant cash under a mattress, earning nothing. Mobile money changed that equation, moving $1.4 trillion through sub-Saharan African wallets in 2025 alone, out of a global $2.1 trillion total. Now another shift is underway, and those watching the continent’s fintech evolution say it could dwarf what mobile money achieved.
The problem persists despite mobile money’s reach. Chris Maurice, co-founder of Yellow Card, a fintech infrastructure company, points to a structural misalignment: “Mobile money businesses make a lot of money on transfer fees.” Sending $200 to sub-Saharan Africa in the first quarter of 2025 cost an average of 8.78% of the transaction value, nearly 2.3 percentage points above the global average. A 2022 survey found that around 90% of transactions across the region remained cash-based, a telling indicator of how incompatible the current ecosystem remains with the continent’s actual needs.
Into this fragmented landscape steps a new tool: stablecoins. These are cryptocurrencies pegged to traditional currencies like the U.S. dollar, South African rand, or Kenyan shilling. Using blockchain technology, they enable near-instantaneous cross-border payments at minimal cost. For a continent receiving over $90 billion in remittances annually, and where foreign exports account for more than 80% of domestic trade, the potential savings in both time and money are substantial.
Maurice believes the impact will exceed mobile money’s transformation. “It’ll be an even bigger leap than mobile money,” he told Forbes Africa. “When we look back 20 years from now, the banks that are doing well are going to be the ones that actually implemented this technology today.” Nkahiseng Ralepeli, director of strategic operations at BlockTower, which issues ZARU and other African currency-pegged stablecoins, frames the distinction differently: “Where mobile money built new closed, friction-heavy networks, stablecoins provide an open network that any system can plug into.”
The current global financial architecture forces emerging economies into costly workarounds. Nearly 90% of global foreign exchange transactions settle using the U.S. dollar, according to the Federal Reserve. This means African businesses must convert domestic currency through financial hubs like New York or London, a process taking days or weeks while administrative fees accumulate. Stablecoins operate differently. They are borderless by nature, moving directly between sender and receiver. A pharmacy in South Africa could purchase dollar-pegged stablecoins with South African rands and send them instantly to American suppliers, bypassing traditional intermediaries entirely.
This democratization of foreign exchange could reshape how African economies interact with the world. Maurice describes it as making it easier for African nations to “interact with the world economy as a whole” without the delays and costs that currently characterize such transactions.
Institutional adoption is accelerating. In October 2025, Absa Bank, operating across 12 African countries, partnered with Ripple to provide “scalable and secure storage for tokenized assets, including cryptocurrencies.” Standard Bank, present in over 20 African nations, launched a joint proof-of-concept with South Korea’s Shinhan Bank to issue stablecoins pegged to their national currencies. In May 2025, Mastercard and Yellow Card announced a co-project to implement stablecoin infrastructure aimed at bridging the over $100 billion trade corridor connecting Africa, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.
Maurice reveals that Yellow Card is already working with 10 tier-one African banks. His approach deliberately differs from the industry’s typical skepticism toward banking partnerships. “A lot of the industry is hesitant to work with banks,” he explains. “We’ve taken a different approach, which is that banks have the end user already, so why don’t we just make it better for them via the bank?” He envisions a future where users unknowingly utilize stablecoin infrastructure through standard bank applications, much as WhatsApp users remain unaware of the end-to-end encryption protecting their messages.
Realizing this vision requires continental alignment. Europe operates as a single market under unified rules. Africa comprises 54 nations, each with individual regulatory frameworks. This fragmentation prevents foreign capital from spreading evenly across borders. The African Continental Free Trade Area agreement, ratified by 49 African countries, seeks to address this, but success depends on enabling cross-border payments that move at the speed and cost of domestic transactions.
The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, an African Union initiative developed by Afreximbank, aims to link central banks to commercial banks, payment service providers, and fintechs. Mike Ogbalu, PAPSS CEO, told Forbes Africa that the system employs “private permissioned blockchain infrastructure” to facilitate direct African currency exchanges. Having onboarded around 28 African countries, Ogbalu projects PAPSS will connect 80% to 85% of the continent within three to five years.
The path forward also requires digitizing Africa’s cash-heavy informal market. Ogbalu notes that central banks resist lowering account documentation requirements, yet small, medium, and micro enterprises cannot afford to maintain formal banking relationships. He is working with central banks to present data showing that these businesses represent the greatest value created by the system, and that excessive documentation requirements simply push them toward cash transactions across borders.
Challenges remain substantial. Professor Iwa Salami, author of Financial Technology Law and Regulation in Africa, warns that the dominance of U.S. dollar-backed stablecoins “may weaken demand for local currencies, and reduce central banks’ ability to transmit monetary policy.” The U.S. GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, creates a federal stablecoin payment framework that Salami believes grants dollar stablecoins “greater legitimacy” and intensifies concerns about capital flight and regulatory dependency, particularly in Nigeria, one of Africa’s leading stablecoin markets.
Nigeria received approximately $59 billion in crypto-asset inflows between July 2023 and June 2024, accounting for around 60% of sub-Saharan African stablecoin inflows since 2019. A 2026 survey by BVNK, Coinbase, Artemis, and YouGov found that 95% of Nigerian respondents preferred receiving payments in stablecoins over local currency. The naira’s volatility, constrained dollar access, and high cross-border payment costs drove this preference, intensified after the Central Bank stopped facilitating cryptocurrency transactions in 2021, shifting market concentration toward peer-to-peer channels.
Salami argues that if USD stablecoins dominate domestic markets, “monetary supremacy” could shift “away from African monetary authorities and toward U.S.-regulated issuers, U.S. reserve assets and U.S. compliance architecture.” Her warning is stark: “The danger is that African businesses gain transactional freedom while African economies lose monetary autonomy.” She does not dismiss stablecoins’ potential, only insisting they be “governed through African regulatory frameworks that preserve monetary sovereignty, financial stability, and consumer protection.”
Technical barriers also impede adoption. Blockchain’s immutability, while secure and transparent, creates irreversible risks. Maurice explains that stablecoin transactions involve long strings of letters and numbers representing wallet addresses. A single missed character means the money is gone forever. “We’ve seen this happen many times,” he notes, describing the technology as “not the most intuitive or user-friendly.” Mass adoption requires users to develop a native understanding of these complex environments.
Access itself remains a uniquely African constraint. Some 600 million sub-Saharan African residents lack electricity. Even if the continent’s entire banking ecosystem integrated crypto-pegged currencies tomorrow, a substantial population would remain excluded. A renewable energy boom is gradually diminishing Africa’s power crisis, suggesting this barrier may not prove permanent.
By contrast, rising institutional integration signals a region increasingly embracing stablecoins. By anchoring digital money to traditional currencies, stablecoins normalize cryptocurrency in ways Bitcoin and other volatile assets have not. Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations theory, developed over 60 years ago, describes adoption as progressing slowly then suddenly, moving from innovators through early adopters to the early majority. The current climate suggests Africa may be entering that early majority phase, the 34% who adopt once technology is proven.
Stablecoins were once dismissed as outlandish. Today they command global attention. The deeper question is whether the regulatory frameworks African governments build now will be strong enough to ensure that the transactional freedom stablecoins offer does not come at the cost of monetary sovereignty.