OP-ED: Stablecoins and Africa’s Fintech Future—Efficiency, exclusion, and the price of progress
As stablecoins promise fast, cheap transfers, African businesses must weigh efficiency against surveillance risks and shifting gatekeepers in a new digital financial order.
We've all been there. You're at a great restaurant, the food is exceptional, the company is sublime, but the table wobbles incessantly. Every time you reach for your drink, it rocks.
Every bite of food becomes an exercise in careful coordination. The solution is simple—slide a matchbook under the short leg—but somehow no one ever does it. Instead, we spend the entire evening managing around the dysfunction, accepting the irritation as part of the experience.
The global financial system suffers from the same wobbly table problem, only instead of disrupting dinner, it's costing African businesses billions and perpetuating economic exclusion on an industrial scale. The matchbook solution might finally be at hand, in the form of stablecoins. But the questions surrounding this fix demand careful scrutiny.
$286 billion 'blind spot'
The USD 286 billion trade corridor between Africa and China represents an enormous market served by infrastructure that treats African businesses as an afterthought. Ola Oyetayo, Nigerian co-founder and CEO of Verto, revealed during a recent African Tech Roundup Podcast conversation that 96-97% of business cross-border payments still flow through traditional banks. It’s a statistic that exposes the profound resistance built into global finance.
“Traditional banks have no incentive to fix this,” Oyetayo observed. “The current system works perfectly well for developed markets. Why would they engineer solutions for markets they’ve systematically excluded?”
African Tech Roundup
This exclusion isn’t accidental; it’s architectural. Correspondent banking relationships, designed when emerging markets were peripheral to global trade, remain stubbornly unchanged despite those markets’ growing centrality to the future of global trade. Banks close on weekends. Settlement periods stretch interminably. Capital controls create regulatory mazes.
Since coming out of Y Combinator (YC) in 2019, Verto has grown into what Oyetayo calls a profitable, cashflow-positive B2B fintech company playing across several African markets. The firm recently made waves after bagging the prestigious USD 1 million Milken-Motsepe Prize in FinTech.
When asked what prepared him for cross-border payments work, Oyetayo’s response was telling: “The honest answer is none of those [previous finance] roles. Sometimes the people that end up solving bigger problems are folks that literally fall into it very naively.”
Perhaps naivety is required because anyone who truly understands the system recognises that the dysfunction serves specific interests.
Deliberate dysfunction
The system isn't broken, it's working as intended. Financial institutions operate through closed networks of trust, brand, and credibility built over time. This isn't about competence; it's about control and access. Controlled access.
The traditional financial system creates a privilege paradox: markets needing alternative payment solutions most have the least access to infrastructure that makes adoption seamless, while markets with seamless traditional finance have little incentive to adopt alternatives.
Walking through the City of London, where Oyetayo built his institutional finance career, you realise how small that world actually is. Yet this small bubble controls trillions in global flows. The exclusion of African businesses from efficient cross-border payments isn't a bug—it's a feature preserving existing power structures while extracting maximum fees from those with the fewest alternatives.
Andile Masuku
Enter stablecoins—with strings attached
This is where stablecoins become seductive, though not necessarily liberating. Opera Browser's MiniPay has attracted over 7 million wallets across 50+ countries, enabling dollar transfers for less than USD 0.01 in under two seconds. For comparison, traditional remittances in Africa can cost up to 20% of transaction value.
Fintech leaders have praised stablecoins for their potential in addressing cross-border payment challenges the world over. However, Oyetayo offers a contrarian insight:
“Stablecoins solve liquidity, volatility, and capital control challenges that banks simply ignore, but there’s no case for them in developed markets. People talk about disrupting Visa and MasterCard—I don’t see that coming anytime soon.”
Stablecoins don’t appear to challenge the fundamental architecture of global finance. They do, however, make it more efficient while concentrating control. They address pain points without necessarily tackling power structures, solving immediate problems but potentially creating longer-term dependencies.
Mar-a-Lago whispers
Behind closed doors, more ambitious theories circulate. The rumoured Mar-a-Lago Accord—described as the strategic foundation of Donald Trump's tariff-led trade policy—could theoretically involve stablecoins to maintain US dollar dominance through a proposed sovereign wealth fund.
This theory suggests widespread stablecoin adoption could enable a coordinated global reset, allowing heavily indebted nations to restructure obligations thereby preserving the dollar's reserve currency status.
Foreign holdings of US Treasuries could be converted into long-term bonds, easing fiscal pressures as stablecoins take over commerce flows. Such speculation remains unverified, with no concrete evidence of such coordination surfacing just yet.
Surveillance premium
Stablecoins' efficiency comes with a surveillance premium. In a digital economy where every transaction can be monitored, we're courting scenarios that erode financial privacy and personal freedoms. Traditional cash transactions, for all their inefficiencies, preserve anonymity. Stablecoins enable platforms and governments to map economic relationships and scrutinise financial decisions comprehensively.
MiniPay’s user-friendly interface, with onboarding via Google or iCloud accounts, simplifies access but raises privacy concerns. The service is built on Celo, a public blockchain where transactions are fully trackable and transparent. While non-custodial, the setup could still enable transaction tracking, creating a potential panopticon where every economic move is visible.
Innovator’s dilemma
Meanwhile, for cross-border payments fintech businesses like Verto, stablecoins represent a Faustian bargain. Their business model navigates the wobbly table of traditional finance, but the stablecoin “solution” replaces it with one owned by different interests.
Oyetayo, an early advocate for stablecoins, remains optimistic. But the question for me isn’t whether stablecoins will disrupt his cross-border payments orchestration business model—it’s whether that disruption will prove liberating or merely transfer control to new gatekeepers.
Opera’s MiniPay, by abstracting crypto complexity and focusing on usability, creates a parallel financial system that bypasses traditional infrastructure yet fostering dependencies on Silicon Valley platforms and American monetary policy.
Price of efficiency
What are we willing to sacrifice for stability? Stablecoins might democratise access to global finance, enabling African businesses to participate in international trade without traditional gatekeepers. But they also create sophisticated dependencies, tying emerging markets to dollar-denominated systems controlled by American interests.
Both narratives may hold true: stablecoins could solve immediate pain points for African businesses while reinforcing structural dependencies. They might reduce transaction costs but at the cost of surveillance and control. They might enable financial inclusion even as they facilitate new forms of exclusion.
The matchbook solution is here, promising to stop the table from wobbling. But when we slide it underneath, we might discover we've traded one dysfunction for another—this time, with monitoring capabilities built into every transaction. As African businesses navigate expensive, slow, and unreliable cross-border payments, the promise of sub-cent transfers in under two seconds proves irresistible.
But in our rush to fix the wobbly table, we should ask who's designing the replacement, and what they plan to do with all the data it will inevitably collect.
Editorial Note: A version of this opinion editorial was first published by Business Report on 27 May 2025.