Visa, MasterCard ,Paypal are making moves to mainstream virtual asserts , what is Africa’s response!

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By Ethel Cofie

CEO, EDEL Technology Consulting  |  blog.ethelcofie.com

Africa Must Not Become the Cash-Out Point of the Stablecoin Economy

While we have been locked in debates about whether to ban, bless, or regulate crypto, the world’s biggest payment giants have quietly moved past the argument. They are treating stablecoins as the new plumbing of global finance  and Africa needs to respond accordingly.

The real danger for Africa is not that stablecoins are coming  they are already here. The danger is a massive shift in control. Regulation asks who is allowed to operate. Infrastructure asks who actually controls how the money moves. If African banks and central banks do not align quickly, the continent risks being reduced to a passive cash-out point: carrying all the regulatory burden while global platforms capture all the value.

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1. What the Global Giants Are Actually Doing

Look at the timeline of recent moves. These are not experiments  they are infrastructure plays designed to rewire how money moves internationally.

• Visa (April 2026): Expanded its stablecoin settlement pilot to nine major blockchain networks, allowing financial institutions to settle card obligations natively using USDC completely bypassing traditional banking hours and legacy rails.
• Mastercard (March 2026): Signed a definitive agreement to acquire BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure firm, for up to $1.8 billion  stitching digital-asset rails directly into its global merchant network.
• MoneyGram (June 2026): Launched MGUSD, its own asset-backed dollar stablecoin on the Stellar network, issued via Stripe-owned Bridge. MoneyGram is turning its massive physical agent footprint into a global digital-dollar distribution network.
• Stripe (February 2025): Closed its $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge, enabling automated, programmable business treasury tools so companies can hold balances and pay global vendors instantly, 24/7.
• PayPal (since 2023): Scaled PYUSD across Venmo and Xoom, enabling zero-fee cross-border transfers to approximately 160 countries and stablecoin settlement for mainstream merchant checkouts.

This is not a temporary crypto trend. It is a fundamental rewriting of global payment rails  and it is happening now.

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2. Africa Is Moving But in Silos

To be clear, African institutions are not asleep. Across major hubs, brilliant engineering and sharp regulation are happening. But they are happening in isolated silos.

• In Nigeria: The African Stablecoin Consortium launched the cNGN stablecoin under the 2025 Investments and Securities Act, backed by commercial bank reserves. A compelling tool for instant clearance  but built by private tech firms rather than a unified banking alliance, so it lacks systemic scale.
• In Ghana: Parliament passed the VASP Act on December 19, 2025, and the Bank of Ghana established the Virtual Assets Regulatory Office (VARO), aggressively forcing informal peer-to-peer players into official, compliant channels to protect the cedi.
• In South Africa: Regulators brought crypto into the formal net under the FAIS Act. However, a cautious joint SARB-FSCA communication in May 2026 clarified that stablecoins are not recognised as legal tender and still sit outside the National Payment System Act.

Every country is writing its own playbook. But while we build separate regional sandboxes, global networks are building a single, unified ocean.

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3. What Africa Loses Without a Shared Plan

If individual African markets try to interface with the global payment stack alone, the continent faces five structural losses:

1. Currency sovereignty: If dollar stablecoins become the default settlement layer for African e-commerce because they are faster and cheaper, local currencies are practically downgraded to coupons used only for taxes and pocket change.
2. The lion’s share of revenue: Foreign exchange margins (3–7% on African corridors), merchant acquiring fees, and treasury float yields will be captured offshore. Local institutions will be left with thin last-mile cash-out fees.
3. Monetary visibility: If capital circulates indefinitely between foreign digital wallets and multinational stablecoin treasuries, central banks lose sight of true money supply (M1 and M2), crippling inflation management.
4. The data goldmine: Payment infrastructure generates dense, predictive data on supply chains and consumer behaviour. Without a native architecture to capture it, that intelligence sits in foreign data centres  leaving African banks unable to underwrite local businesses.
5. Continental bypassing: Millions of dollars of political capital have gone into building PAPSS to drive intra-African trade in local currencies. If regional commerce defaults to foreign-issued digital dollars, PAPSS and national switches risk being structurally sidelined.

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4. The Architecture of Intervention

The solution is not protectionism or a blanket ban. It is architectural design  allowing global stablecoins where they solve real problems, but forcing them to plug into African-governed infrastructure. Here is what that looks like in practice.

1. Central Banks: The Locally Hosted Ledger Mandate

Regulators must transition from licensing individual apps to dictating native settlement design. Any global stablecoin provider executing domestic volume should be required to pass through an API-tied regulatory reporting node. If a transaction originates or terminates within national borders, the provider must maintain a physical liquidity ledger with a licensed domestic financial entity. Offshore netting of domestic African payments must be designated a structural violation of currency sovereignty.

1. Interbank Switches: The Native Liquidity Gateway

National switches  NIBSS, GhIPSS, Interswitch  can no longer operate solely as domestic fiat routers. They must become multi-rail orchestrators. Instead of allowing Stripe/Bridge or Mastercard/BVNK to plug straight into individual fintech APIs, global networks should route through a central national gateway. That gateway verifies the stablecoin layer, triggers a real-time FX instruction, and clears value instantly into local bank accounts.

1. Commercial Banks: Programmable Corporate Vaulting

Banks must stop acting as passive liquidity destinations. They should deploy tokenisation layers atop their core banking systems and issue stable corporate settlement tokens linked to real-time treasury management  keeping mid-market trade, SME B2B invoices, and the data that comes with them inside the banking system rather than letting them escape into foreign USDC wallets.

1. PAPSS: The Continental Ledger Bridge

PAPSS must serve as the final defensive layer. By leveraging its newly launched African Currency Marketplace (PACM), PAPSS can intercept global stablecoin transactions at the settlement layer and programmatically match them inside a continent-wide, peer-to-peer liquidity pool  so the front-end enjoys stablecoin velocity while the back-end clears between local African currency pairs under central bank oversight.

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5. The Bottom Line

The future of financial power will not belong to those who move money the fastest. It will belong to those who own and govern the infrastructure through which that money moves.

Africa’s regulators, banks, and switches already understand the technology. The next step is executing a unified architecture  together  to ensure the continent remains an owner of the network rather than just a cash-out point.

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About the Author

Ethel Cofie is CEO of EDEL Technology Consulting, a technology entrepreneur, board director and one of Africa’s leading voices on digital and financial infrastructure. She serves on the boards of GIFEC and Old Mutual Insurance Ghana, and is Chief Strategic Advisor to the Ghana Fintech and Payments Association. She is Curator of the Future of Finance Dialogues Africa, a platform convening senior leaders across central banking, commercial banking, fintech, payments and policy to shape the future of African finance. Her advisory work spans Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, Sierra Leone and Liberia.