Sub-Saharan Africa pulled in more than $205 billion in on-chain value in the year to June 2025, a 52 percent jump that made it the world’s third fastest-growing crypto region, according to Chainalysis. Increasingly, the currency behind those transfers isn’t bitcoin. It’s a stablecoin, and the businesses using it aren’t traders. They’re importers paying suppliers, exporters covering payroll, and finance teams defending a balance sheet against a currency in freefall.
Raj Kamal, founder and chief executive of cross-border payments firm TransFi, reads that growth as a verdict on the alternatives available to African businesses. “When formal channels serve businesses well, businesses use them,” he said. What stands out to him isn’t the headline total but its shape: transfers under $10,000, the size of an invoice or a payroll run, made up 8 percent of the region’s value against 6 percent globally.
Why remittances stay expensive
Kamal traces the region’s high transfer costs to network structure rather than missing technology. Sending $200 into Sub-Saharan Africa still costs an average of 8.46 percent, according to World Bank data, and sending money between African countries costs more still: outbound remittances from South Africa averaged 15.65 percent in the third quarter of 2025. “That figure shows the cost living inside the structure of the network itself,” Kamal said, arguing that a transfer crossing three or four correspondent banks picks up a new price for liquidity, compliance and currency risk at every hop. Thin corridor volumes and a decade of banks retreating from African correspondent relationships, he said, stripped out the competition that would normally squeeze those margins down.
The layer that actually matters
Kamal splits a cross-border payment into two problems. Moving a digital dollar between wallets, he said, is now a solved engineering problem that costs almost nothing. The hard part sits at the edges, where digital value becomes spendable local currency, which requires licences in every market, pre-funded liquidity, live connections into bank and mobile money rails, and compliance staff who understand each jurisdiction. TransFi operates across more than 70 countries and 250 local payment methods built on exactly that groundwork. “None of that came from writing better code,” Kamal said. “It came from years of regulatory work and a balance sheet that carries local currency.”
That thesis is already playing out in how major payment networks treat the technology. In a pilot between Visa, M-Pesa Africa and Onafriq in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a customer tops up a mobile wallet and the transaction settles behind the scenes in stablecoins, while the customer sees only M-Pesa and the merchant receives Congolese francs. Kamal called it the same design logic banks applied to card networks a generation ago: once the infrastructure disappears from the user experience, the argument over whether it belongs in mainstream finance is effectively over.
Ghana’s regulatory bet
Kamal pointed to Ghana’s Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, 2025 (Act 1154) as a workable regulatory model for the sector. Ghana’s Parliament passed the law in December 2025, splitting oversight between the Bank of Ghana and the Securities and Exchange Commission and opening a policy sandbox ahead of full licensing; mandatory registration for virtual asset providers began in March 2026. Kamal argued the sequence, registration first, licensing second, lets regulators observe the market before writing permanent rules, and he expects other countries in the region to follow it.
He was careful to bound what the technology can deliver on financial inclusion. Stablecoins improve cost, speed and access to dollar liquidity for businesses shut out of official foreign-exchange channels, he said, but “do not create credit, verify identity or provide consumer protection,” which remain the job of banks and regulators. With Ghana recording 81.8 million registered mobile money accounts as of February 2026, he argued inclusion strategies succeed by settling stablecoins onto the payment rails people already trust rather than asking them to learn new ones.
Where central bank digital currencies fit
Kamal doesn’t see central bank digital currencies competing with privately issued stablecoins so much as answering different questions. The Bank of Ghana said in May 2026 that its e-Cedi had completed its pilot phase and moved into design work for cross-border settlement, and Ghana has already tested the interaction directly: Project DESFT settled a trade transaction using the e-Cedi alongside a Singapore-issued stablecoin. Kamal read that as evidence the two can share infrastructure, with interoperability standards, not competition, as the real work ahead.
His five-year forecast is specific: by 2031, he expects most formal cross-border business payments into Sub-Saharan Africa to settle on stablecoin rails, with senders largely unaware the technology is there at all. “The contest will be fought on local licences, liquidity depth and payout reliability,” he said. Those factors, he argued, will separate the firms that build lasting infrastructure from those that merely announce partnerships.
