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 But the compliance systems they rely on are outdated and expensive to modernize.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.

Source: Semafor