Lagos To Accra Via London
Accra and Lagos are an hour apart by plane. A shipment of processed cocoa can leave one and clear the other inside a working week.
The payment for it takes longer and travels further.
Cedis convert to dollars at a bank in Ghana – The dollars move through a correspondent bank in London or New York – Somebody converts them into naira at the other end.
A payment from Accra to Lagos, two cities an hour’s flight apart, has traditionally routed through correspondent banks in New York or London, converting cedis to dollars to naira, adding days, fees and a hard-currency dependency to a transaction that never left West Africa.
The goods take an hour, but the money takes a week and visits two continents.
Why the money goes to London:
Simply, there is no market.
Africa currently has approximately 42 individual currencies. Most pairs among them have no meaningful direct market. There is no deep cedi-naira book anywhere in the world, because there has never been enough two-way flow to sustain one, and there has never been enough flow partly because there is no book.
So both currencies do what currencies without a direct pair always do; They price against the dollar.
The dollar becomes the bridge, and the bridge is in New York.
Where stablecoins fit:
The usual framing is competitive. PAPSS versus stablecoins, public rails versus private ones, sovereign infrastructure versus crypto.
That framing is wrong, because they are solving the same problem with the same insight. Both are attacking the requirement that a dollar sit in the middle of an African transaction. PAPSS does it through central bank netting.
Stablecoin corridors do it by making the middle leg a ledger entry that anyone can settle against.
Where they differ is reach and permission.
PAPSS goes where central banks and member banks have taken it, which is expanding but partial. Stablecoin rails go wherever there is a licensed entity willing to settle locally, which includes mobile money endpoints and markets no central bank agreement covers yet.
Whichever rail carries the middle, the last mile does not change. Value still has to arrive in a Ghanaian mobile money wallet or a Nigerian bank account, under a name, against a reference, with a settlement record. That still needs a licensed local entity, local currency already in position, and a live connection to the domestic rail.
That is the layer Zynta builds, and the reason we route across rails rather than betting on one. A payment from Lagos to Accra should not care which pipe it took. It should care that it arrived, that it arrived today, and that there is a document proving it.
The goods have always taken an hour; there is no good reason left for the money to take a week.