Everyone suddenly wants access to Africa…
Stablecoin companies. VCs. Payment infra players. Crypto exchanges. AI labs. All circling the continent like it just appeared on the map. 😂
The question nobody’s asking loud enough: is this genuine or is Africa just the next extraction zone?
Let’s be real about what’s actually happening on the ground.
Sub-Saharan Africa moved over $200 billion in onchain value in the past year. Stablecoins account for 43% of all crypto transactions on the continent. Nigeria alone did nearly $22 billion in stablecoin volume. Ethiopia’s retail stablecoin transfers grew 180% year over year after a 30% currency devaluation. It’s obvious by now that. this isn’t speculation or narrative, but a real conviction that people are solving real problems with whatever tools actually work because the traditional system has failed them time and time again by design.
Sending $200 to Sub-Saharan Africa costs an average of 8.78% in fees. Only 12% of intra-African transactions are fully processed on the continent… 👀The rest route through New York!!!
African money, moving between African countries, flowing through American correspondent banks. Make it make sense.
Stablecoins aren’t manufacturing demand, but instead, they’re showing up where the banking system refused to.
So when Circle, Tether, Visa, and every payments startup suddenly “discovers” Africa, you have to ask who actually benefits. There’s a version of this where stablecoin rails genuinely replace extractive correspondent banking, slash remittance costs, and give businesses real-time dollar liquidity they’ve never had access to.
There’s another version where Africa becomes a customer acquisition market for Silicon Valley’s next growth story. From what I’ve observed as a founder raising for a product that’s built for African payments, both are happening simultaneously.
The VC picture tells you where things really stand.
African tech startups raised $4.1 billion in 2025, up 25% year over year.
But 72% of that capital went to just 4 countries. Between 2019 and 2024, just 28 startups absorbed nearly half of all VC funding continent-wide.
That’s doesn’t seem to be a self-sustaining ecosystem but instead just a handful of bets dressed up as an “investment thesis”.
I believe the structure is shifting though:
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Debt financing hit $1.6 billion last year, up 63%.
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Over 50 startup acquisitions happened, with African banks and telecoms stepping up as acquirers.
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2 tech-linked IPOs on the Johannesburg and Casablanca exchanges.
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Secondary liquidity is finally becoming real.
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Exit pathways are opening slowly, but they’re opening.
That changes the entire calculus for capital allocation.
Stablecoins sit at the center of all of this because they touch everything: payments, treasury, cross-border trade, FX hedging, payroll, trade finance. M-Pesa partnered with a blockchain layer backed by a $240 billion UAE conglomerate. The AfCFTA Secretariat is piloting USDT-based trade settlement. Yellow Card is working with African banks on local currency stablecoins. Onafriq just integrated stablecoin infrastructure across a network connecting a billion mobile money wallets and 500 million bank accounts.
None of this is theoretical anymore.
But here’s the tension nobody wants to name.
Most of these infrastructure plays are built by non-African companies. The rails get laid, the fees get collected, and the value accrues…but where exactly?
A food producer in West Africa using stablecoins to pay Swiss suppliers is a win. But if the infrastructure layer capturing margin on every transaction is headquartered in Delaware, you’ve just swapped one form of financial dependence for another.
So then the real signal isn’t the capital, but the regulation.
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South Africa has licensed over 300 crypto asset service providers.
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Kenya signed its VASP Bill into law.
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Nigeria, Botswana, Namibia, Mauritius all have live licensing regimes.
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Sandboxes are active or incoming across Rwanda, Zambia, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania.
That regulatory momentum matters more than any VC check because it’s the difference between a market that gets built on and a market that builds for itself. At this point, compliance becomes a moat.
Africa doesn’t need saviours.
It needs partners who understand that building here means building with, not building for. The stablecoin opportunity is massive but the payments gap is real.
VC outcomes will improve as exits mature and local capital deepens. But the people who treat this continent like a growth hack instead of a market with agency will get exactly the outcomes they deserve… 🤷♂️
The next decade of financial infrastructure gets defined here and there’s only. small window to do it. The only question is who ends up owning it, right?
Well, it’s not much of a question anymore because that’s been answered by Zynta.
