View / Why Africa’s emerging markets need their own stablecoins

In 2025, it’s still common for a business owner in Lagos to wait days for a payment from Accra in Ghana — just a short flight away. That delay, and up to 10% in fees, is the price of routing payments through a complex web of correspondent banks in New York and London.

Global trade still runs on trust — but that trust is increasingly gated. While domestic real-time payment systems like Brazil’s Pix, India’s UPI, Nigeria’s NIBSS, and the Philippines’ InstaPay have made sending money locally seamless, cross-border settlements remain trapped in opaque, exclusionary systems. Access is costly, and the rules are inconsistent and often unclear.

Even legitimate payment flows from emerging markets are frequently flagged for investigation under the guise of compliance, slowing their transfer. In mid-2024, US-based Mercury Bank abruptly cut off dozens of African startups. A year earlier, Wells Fargo restricted access for Philippine remittance firms managing $36 billion in annual flows. Faced with multibillion-dollar fines, major banks have exited entire regions deemed “high risk,” effectively blacklisting entire economies.

This is not regulation — it’s avoidance.

Global banks aren’t necessarily acting out of malice. But the compliance systems they rely on are outdated and expensive to modernize. Updating those frameworks to accommodate new markets often isn’t worth the cost. In startup terms, it’s a sector begging for disruption.

And disruption is arriving.

Entrepreneurs are building new financial infrastructure based on permissionless blockchains. At the heart of this transformation are stablecoins, digital tokens pegged to currencies like the US dollar. Unlike balances stored in bank or mobile money databases, once a stablecoin is on-chain, it becomes globally accessible, programmable, and interoperable. Developers can build with it. Users can send and receive it across borders instantly.

Stablecoins don’t threaten the US dollar — they reinforce it. In fact, stablecoins like Tether (USDT) and Circle’s USDC are helping expand the dollar’s reach into corners of the world long underserved by the traditional banking system.

Today, the US accounts for just 13% of global trade, yet the dollar is used in over 40% of fiat-based cross-border settlements — and over 99% of on-chain settlement. Stablecoins now have a combined market cap exceeding $250 billion and are projected to become the largest buyers of US Treasury bonds by 2030. In 2024, Tether was the seventh-largest holder — ahead of countries like Mexico and Germany.

US regulation is catching up under the GENIUS Act, recognizing stablecoins as part of financial infrastructure that supports — not undermines — public finance.

Emerging markets, like those in Africa, should pay attention. Local-currency stablecoins, backed by short-term government debt, could offer a vital tool for monetary resilience. If these countries don’t move fast, they risk ceding monetary sovereignty as capital and control shift to decentralized systems.

Stablecoins can deepen domestic capital markets, increase the utility of local currencies in global trade, and restore sovereign agency in an increasingly programmable financial world.

The future of money is already here — and it’s on-chain.

Wale Ayeni is the managing partner of Helios Digital Ventures, which has invested in disruptive technologies including blockchain companies. Prior to that he led venture capital investments in emerging markets for the International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank Group.