In many African markets, stablecoins are gaining traction where traditional cross-border payments remain slow, expensive, or difficult to access. Businesses use them to source dollars, pay suppliers, manage treasury balances, and settle across corridors where correspondent banking can add cost and uncertainty.

The scale is now large enough to show up clearly in regional onchain data. Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in onchain value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52% year-on-year increase that made it the third-fastest-growing digital asset market in the world. Stablecoins account for roughly 43% of the region’s total cryptocurrency transaction volume, while smaller-ticket transfers are more common than elsewhere: more than 8% of crypto transfers in the region were for $10,000 or less, compared with about 6% globally.

Nigeria anchors the picture as the continent’s largest stablecoin market, having processed nearly $22 billion in stablecoin transactions between July 2023 and June 2024. Adoption is also growing in markets such as Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, Ethiopia, and Uganda, where dollar access, currency depreciation, and cross-border payment costs continue to shape demand.

Operator data points in the same direction. Yellow Card, a licensed stablecoin infrastructure provider serving more than 30,000 businesses across 20 African countries, reports that 99% of its transactions now involve stablecoins. The leading business use cases are treasury management, supplier payments, and cross-border trade — areas where dollar access, settlement speed, and payment reliability directly affect day-to-day operations.

That operating reality shaped the fourth session of Utila’s Stablecoin Builder Series, which focused on stablecoin use cases across African markets. The conversation looked at where stablecoins are already being used in production, what still limits institutional adoption, and how operators are thinking about liquidity, counterparty risk, regulation, and wallet infrastructure.

That backdrop framed Utila's fourth Stablecoin Builder Series session. Moderated by Lauren Buchholz, who leads fintech growth and partnerships at Utila, the session featured operators working across settlement, liquidity, blockchain infrastructure, banking products, and regulatory coordination:

• ​Ryan Zega, Head of Structured Finance, Aptos Labs

• Jack Chong, Co-founder & CEO of Checker

• ​Mouloukou Sanoh, Co-Founder & CEO of Mansa

• ​Paul Joe, Co-Founder of Daya

• ​Jude Anumudu, Founder of Web3 Global Conference & Ambassador at Stablecoin Standard

Their accounts, drawn from the markets each operates in, point to where stablecoins are solving real problems and where the infrastructure underneath them still has to mature. Here are the major takeaways.

Where Cross-Border Payments Stall

For institutions outside the region, the case for stablecoins is easy to misread, because the domestic experience in several markets already works. Several panelists made this point about their own operating environments rather than the continent as a whole.

Sanoh and Joe both described fast local rails: M-Pesa clears transfers within Kenya in seconds, and Nigeria's interbank system settles domestic payments quickly. In their view, the harder problem begins at the border, when funds have to be sourced in dollars and routed across jurisdictions.

Sanoh recounted sending a payment to Indonesia that disappeared into the correspondent banking chain, with no intermediary able to confirm where it sat. Outbound corridors out of these markets can carry fees in the high single digits to low double digits, plus delays and settlement uncertainty.

Paul Joe echoed these points with a similar pain point: Nigeria's interbank connection can move money between domestic bank accounts faster than US wires, but paying a supplier abroad means sourcing dollars first, and that is the function stablecoins took on earliest. For an African business, a US dollar-backed stablecoin supports three jobs at once.

It can be used to facilitate payments internationally, it preserves dollar value as local african currencies depreciate, and it holds working capital that would otherwise lose purchasing power in a local-currency account. Sanoh argued that this demand, rather than yield paid to users, is what built Tether into one of the most profitable companies in finance, a reading that not everyone in the market shares.

For operators, the practical implication sits at the treasury layer: holding and moving dollar liquidity reliably depends on wallet and settlement infrastructure that can keep pace with the speed stablecoins promise. That dependence becomes clearer in how settlement actually clears.

Settlement Depends on Liquidity

International payments are often described as a messaging problem, with SWIFT as the reference point. Sanoh reframed settlement as a balance-sheet problem, and the distinction explains why stablecoin rails clear flows that bank transfers stall on.

"Payments is a capital game," he said. If a dollar arrives in one country, a dollar has to be available in the other, or the trade does not complete. SWIFT passes messages between banks; the funds themselves travel through a chain of intermediary banks that pre-fund accounts and add days. Mansa holds its own balance sheet in USDT and settles each transaction instantly for the payment company, removing the pre-funding requirement.

Two conditions make the model work, by Sanoh's account: speed of execution, and a balance sheet large enough to absorb local liquidity restrictions. Because Mansa supplies the onchain infrastructure while a licensed payment company performs final settlement, it has avoided direct regulatory exposure on collections and payouts.

Sanoh said the network has processed over $400 million in onchain volume and roughly $200 million in payouts across emerging markets, with its heaviest concentration on Africa-China and LATAM-China corridors routed through Hong Kong.

The same balance-sheet logic shapes what institutions need internally. Running stablecoin settlement at volume turns liquidity management, treasury visibility, and reconciliation into core operational requirements, and each depends on wallet infrastructure that can track positions across chains and counterparties.

That last point - counterparties - surfaced as the constraint operators rated highest.

Counterparty Risk Limits Scale

Asked what limits the scaling of stablecoin payments across these corridors, most operators would name liquidity depth or banking access. Chong located the constraint elsewhere, and his reasoning runs directly into how institutions should hold value.

In his account, FX providers in the region have a history of going bankrupt or disappearing every few years, and contract enforcement is weaker than in some other emerging economies. Holding value in stablecoins through institution-controlled wallets gives a treasury team direct control without depending on an intermediary's solvency.

Chong's second warning was operational. Treasurers arriving from traditional banking assume one dollar equals one dollar regardless of counterparty, but on chain that assumption breaks down. USDT on Aptos, USDT on Tron, and USDC on Ethereum carry different settlement times, require different wallets, and can trade at different prices, behaving closer to separate asset classes. A team that overlooks the mismatch inherits reconciliation problems it did not plan for.

Chong also outlined the components a fintech needs in place before it can move money through these corridors at scale:

• Wallet infrastructure: Institutions need secure, policy-controlled wallets that support approvals, permissions, and reconciliation across multiple chains and counterparties, the foundation any cross-border product is built on.

• KYT and KYC providers: Transaction monitoring and identity verification sit between the business and its regulators, and gaps here surface fastest under scrutiny.

• Operational capacity: Someone has to book transfers, execute trades, and reconcile ledgers, work that in many markets runs over WhatsApp and Slack in OTC formats where pricing moves by direct message.

Assembling that stack still leaves a fintech licensed in one market unable to operate in the next, which Anumudu and Joe framed as the defining regulatory problem for builders across the region.

Regulation Remains Market-by-Market

Stablecoin adoption among banks and regulated institutions in the region has moved past the pilot stage. Anumudu placed it at the implementation phase, with companies asking how to integrate stablecoins rather than whether to. The barriers now are structural rather than conceptual.

The first is fragmentation. By Anumudu's count, only a handful of markets, among them South Africa, Ghana, Mauritius, and Kenya, have clear digital-asset regulation, while Nigeria carries some of the largest volume with no settled framework. A license in Ghana or South Africa does not transfer to Nigeria, so nothing resembling cross-border passporting yet exists.

Joe pointed to regional harmonization efforts, including the African Continental Free Trade Area, as a possible long-term path toward reducing that fragmentation; for now, operators still navigate licensing market by market.

Among the latest developments on the regulatory side, governments and central banks are moving in parallel: governments across the region are exploring their own digital currencies and payment infrastructure upgrades, and in Nigeria the SEC is developing a framework for naira-pegged stablecoins, fully backed by audited reserves and designed for cross-border trade and payments.

Anumudu noted that local stablecoins such as Nigeria's CNGN and a newer South African issuer are already being custodied by domestic banks, and that an institution like Standard Chartered has been examining stablecoins. He also described how far ahead South Africa runs in everyday commerce, where a stablecoin-linked card from RedotPay, working with local processor Stitch, converts to rand at the point of sale, a flow he said is not yet available in Nigeria.

For operators, the takeaway is that compliance cannot be solved once and reused everywhere. Multi-jurisdiction compliance integrations and configurable policy controls are what make operating across several of these markets feasible. The fragmentation also shapes a question the panel returned to repeatedly: whether local currencies will displace the dollar.

US Dollar Demand Still Leads

Local-currency stablecoins are multiplying across the continent, which raises a fair question about whether US dollar exposure stays central to the region's digital finance. The panel's answer leaned one way while acknowledging the contingencies.

Dollar-backed stablecoins remain dominant, the operators argued, because dollar access is scarce and the currency holds value where local currencies fall.

"If you ask somebody in Venezuela or in Zimbabwe what stablecoin they want, they're going to say USDT," Sanoh said. He has invested in local stablecoins personally and called them more complicated than they appear, with their usefulness resting on interoperability between the stablecoin, local banking, and local payment rails.

He illustrated his point with an example of a customer in Kenya: if a user cannot move from M-Pesa to a shilling stablecoin to USDT onchain, the local instrument adds little, and market makers such as Honeycoin and Kotani Pay already move millions between fiat and stablecoins without it.

Anumudu sees longer-term demand for local stablecoins tied to intra-African trade, where a Nigerian business might eventually pay a Ghanaian supplier in CNGN as those corridors and digital currencies mature. Both expected the dollar to lead over any near-term horizon, conditional on dollar supply and the pace of local interoperability.

What the session made clear for institutions building on these rails is a matter of sequencing. Stablecoins are clearing cross-border payments across these markets because the alternative is slower and more expensive at the border, and the operators gaining share treat wallets, compliance, liquidity, and settlement as financial infrastructure to build deliberately. Regulatory clarity is uneven across markets, counterparty risk persists, and the local stablecoins meant to reduce dollar dependence remain unproven at scale. None of those caveats has reversed the direction of the volume.

Build Wallet Infrastructure for African Stablecoin Operations

The session pointed to one practical conclusion: stablecoin adoption across these corridors is driven by concrete payment, treasury, and settlement needs, and the constraint for most teams sits at the infrastructure layer. For fintechs, banks, and payment companies, the work is building operations that can handle dollar liquidity access, counterparty risk, multi-market compliance, and reconciliation across chains.

Utila provides institutional-grade, non-custodial wallet infrastructure, multi-jurisdiction compliance integrations, policy controls, and treasury tooling for teams moving digital and crypto assets across complex markets. The platform is built for the operational realities the panel described, from securing dollar holdings to managing approvals and reconciliation at volume.

If you are building cross-border payment products, stablecoin-powered treasury workflows, or digital asset operations across African and global corridors, see what Utila can support for your team.

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