Before joining PawaPay, I didn't think much about digital money. I thought it was a fad. Bored Ape territory. Then I came up against the visceral friction of executing even a "simple" cross-border transfer, and realised I'd need to get up to speed. If the plumbing for traditional finance is creaky in G-12 markets, Africa hasn't even been connected to the mains. Moving money to and from the continent on conventional rails is cumbersome, slow, and expensive. The whole system feels engineered specifically to profit the money movers and ignore non-reserve currencies.

Which is why Africa's stablecoin "moment" is less of a moment than the headlines suggest.

A twenty year head start

If you've been tracking LinkedIn lately, or mapping the correlation between stablecoin sponsorships and Padel tournaments across the continent, you'd be forgiven for thinking Africa discovered digital money around December 2024, post-COVID and pre-image generation on ChatGPT.

Stablecoins are the latest chapter in a multi-decade arc of African financial innovation and digitisation. Africa leads the world in fintech not because it chased trends, but because it had problems that needed solving, and the conventional finance sector ignored it.

Tokenised money took off on the continent in 2007, when M-Pesa launched mobile money in Kenya. Mobile money replaced cash in economies that were chronically underbanked, democratising security, convenience, and financial inclusion. It removed frictions to commerce and grew exponentially, fundamentally transforming economies. Easy to cash in and cash out via a vast agency network, fast, fully traceable, instantly transferable, cheaper than alternatives, and always on.

The numbers from the GSMA's 2026 State of the Industry Report tell the rest of the story. In 2025, $1.4 trillion flowed through mobile money in sub-Saharan Africa, roughly two-thirds of the $2 trillion global total. A tokenised money asset with exponential growth in a region overlooked by traditional finance players. Sound familiar?

PawaPay emerged six years ago to solve the next layer of friction: one API into a billion mobile money wallets, unifying access across a famously fragmented MNO ecosystem. The digital nature of mobile money means we can process hundreds of transactions every second, with value settled instantly and accurately.

So what about stablecoin?

Across the continent, SWIFT, 50-year-old technology, still takes days or weeks to settle a cross-border transfer. FX markets remain absurdly and stubbornly cumbersome. Against that backdrop, Africa's embrace of stablecoins is obvious.

Chainalysis put on-chain value received in sub-Saharan Africa at $205 billion between July 2024 and June 2025, up 52% year-on-year.

Before the cocktail receptions and conference lanyards, we'd been using stablecoins as a compliant and core component of our global treasury stack for years. For PawaPay, it's a rational extension of the digital financial infrastructure we were born into.

Mobile money digitised local economies. PawaPay unified access to that infrastructure. Stablecoins are now connecting Africa's economies to each other and to the rest of the world. Each layer builds on the last in a way that is logical and, in hindsight, inevitable.

Banking and regulation

On a monthly basis we speak to major African banks about how they can integrate with PawaPay and, through us, the continent's native digital payments infrastructure. The banks missed the boat twenty years ago when mobile money quietly ate their lunch. Today, while fiat remains the only viable endpoint and a fundamental cog in the gears of commerce, they are once again at risk of architecting their own obsolescence.

Regulators also face a challenge. Legislation runs on a timeline measured in years, while the technology moves in weeks. Digital assets straddle several regulatory domains: consumer protection, financial institution licensing, AML, securities law, and tax. This results in rules that are assembled piecemeal by different bodies that aren't always joined up.

On a regional basis there's a dispiriting lack of cohesion between jurisdictions, with each country drafting (or not drafting) its own answer to roughly the same question. Kenya's Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, which received assent in November 2025, is one of the more substantive moves so far. It places oversight jointly with the Central Bank of Kenya and the Capital Markets Authority, though the licensing regime is not scheduled to be operational until late 2026.  Ghana is in a similar place. 

None of this changes the direction of travel. Stablecoins in Africa are already infrastructure, not speculation. Like mobile money, they're an inevitability because they reduce real friction. Our job, as it has been for six years, is to keep building and connecting alongside it.

What this means for businesses

If you're doing international business with Africa, chances are you're either using stablecoins directly, benefiting from a "stablecoin sandwich" where one provider executes the digital asset leg in a contained way, or,  at the very least, fungibly intertwined with the hundreds of billions in stablecoin flows already moving across the continent. Either way, Africa is leapfrogging again. The flows aren't waiting for the rest of the conversation to catch up.

About the author

Aaron Markowitz-Shulman is CFO at PawaPay, where he leads financial strategy, capital planning and commercial discipline as the business scales its payments infrastructure across Africa.

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