Stablecoins are moving from consumer remittance tools to treasury rails for corporate cross-border trade as African enterprises seek dollars amid a severe foreign exchange (FX) crunch, says Ryan Kirkley, CEO and co-founder of Global Settlement Network (GSN).
GSN is an enterprise blockchain firm that builds settlement infrastructure for regulated institutions.
In an interview with ITWeb Africa, Kirkley says this enterprise pivot is now the most significant trend shaping the continent's financial landscape.
Citing Chainalysis data, Kirkley says Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52% year-on-year increase, with stablecoins accounting for 43% of regional crypto transaction volume.
African Development Bank data shows that FX scarcity was the primary constraint on trade finance growth for 36% of African banks between 2020 and 2024, double the 18% recorded in the previous five years. Commercial banks intermediated just 23% of Africa's total trade over the period, down from 40% in 2011-19.
"Remittances started the story, but the bigger driver now is businesses that cannot get hard currency through the banking system when they need it," Kirkley says. "When an importer in Lagos or Nairobi waits weeks for a dollar allocation, or loses several percent to spreads and correspondent fees, a dollar stablecoin that settles in minutes becomes a treasury tool, not a crypto experiment. At GSN, that is the demand we see from banks and corporates: settlement certainty, predictable cost, and access to dollar liquidity."
Nigeria accounts for the bulk of this momentum, receiving more than $92 billion in on-chain value in the period — nearly three times South Africa's — and driving 40% of all Sub-Saharan stablecoin inflows.
"South Africa is the more institutional market, with banks such as Absa moving into digital asset custody and the Financial Sector Conduct Authority licensing crypto providers under a financial-products regime," he says.
Kenya, Ghana and Ethiopia round out the top five, with Ethiopia recording a 180% year-on-year surge in retail-sized stablecoin transfers. Early adopters span importers of consumer goods, electronics and machinery, commodity traders, logistics companies, and fintechs and payment companies serving small and medium-sized enterprises.
GSN expects corporate stablecoin volumes to eclipse retail remittances across the continent within the decade.
ITWeb Africa reported in June that the International Monetary Fund had urged Nigeria to bring stablecoins under formal oversight, and in August that the Central Bank of Nigeria had opened a second regulatory sandbox cohort with a dedicated track for virtual asset service provider solutions covering stablecoin, payment, settlement and custody infrastructure.
"The math is simple: remittances into Sub-Saharan Africa run at roughly $55 billion a year. African merchandise trade is well over a trillion dollars, and the continent's unmet trade finance gap alone is estimated at $74 billion to $92 billion a year. Even a single-digit share of B2B flows moving onto stablecoin rails would overtake remittances in value," Kirkley says.
Mainstream adoption rests on three pillars, he says: deep local-currency liquidity for enterprise-scale transactions, bank-grade compliance (including travel-rule enforcement), and seamless integration into corporate enterprise resource planning systems and banking portals.
Solving intra-African trade bottlenecks requires abandoning legacy routing, Kirkley argues.
Intra-African trade accounts for just 15-16% of total continental trade, largely because moving funds across Africa's 40-plus currencies has historically required routing through dollars or euros via correspondent banks in London or New York.
Instead of fragmented payment networks or single-country central bank digital currencies, Kirkley argues, Africa requires a unified architecture: a shared settlement layer, commercial-scale local-currency liquidity, portable verified identity, and regulatory harmonisation under the African Continental Free Trade Area.
"The pieces exist: Pan-African Payment and Settlement System for local-currency clearing, licensed stablecoin infrastructure, and a new generation of institutional-grade settlement networks. If we get it right, African businesses will use stablecoins without ever thinking of themselves as crypto users," he says.
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