Spending and regulation hold back stablecoins in Africa, Moonshot panel says

Stablecoins in Africa are held back by spending

Stablecoins already move money in and out of Africa faster and more cheaply than banks. What keeps them from the mainstream is that people still can’t spend them easily, and regulators still can’t see where they go.

That was the view from “The Adoption Gap”, a panel at Moonshot by TechCabal on Thursday, October 29. Shalom Osiadi, founder and CEO of Esca Finance, a foreign exchange company serving businesses in emerging markets, and Demilade Olugbenga, B2B business development manager at Breet, a Nigerian crypto payments platform, discussed with moderator Nnanna Ijezie why adoption still lags.

“Some people use stablecoins, but they’re not able to spend them in the applications they use daily,” Olugbenga said. “Say I’m a freelancer and someone wants to pay me in stablecoins. If I look around and there’s no stablecoin option, I will tell whoever is paying me, ‘Sorry, I can’t accept this now.’”

Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain crypto value between July 2024 and June 2025, with Nigeria taking in $92.1 billion, according to Chainalysis. Stablecoins made up about 43% of the region’s crypto volume over that period.

Olugbenga said sending anything from $5 to $500,000 on Breet costs 10 cents, while a bank transfer can take days and eat up to 8% of the amount. Banks charge that much, Osiadi said, because African currencies can move before a transfer lands, so they build wide margins into their exchange rates.

Central banks need to know where money comes from, where it goes and how it is used, Osiadi said, and privately issued stablecoins give them no such view. Nigeria has tried two routes. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) launched the eNaira, Africa’s first central bank digital currency, in October 2021, but in 2023 the International Monetary Fund found that 98.5% of eNaira wallets went unused in any given week.

cNGN, a naira-pegged stablecoin issued by private company WrappedCBDC, went live in February 2025 under the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) regulatory incubation programme. Osiadi said the CBN should either issue a stablecoin or partner with issuers such as cNGN.

Most of Osiadi’s business customers, he said, do not care what moves their money. Esca, which says it processes between $75 million and $120 million a month for clients including NALA and MoneyGram, routes payments through stablecoins its corporate clients rarely see. “Truth be told, what we’re starting to learn now is nobody really cares,” he said. “They just care about value: how value arrives and how value is created for their business.”

Breet’s next step is making stablecoins spendable where people already pay. If TechCabal wanted Moonshot attendees to pay in stablecoins, Olugbenga said, Breet would take the payment, convert it and settle TechCabal in dollars or naira. “I can sit here and tell you with confidence that stablecoins are solving major business problems that currently exist,” she said.

Both panellists expect adoption to grow as more banks enter the market. “This thing isn’t going anywhere,” Osiadi said, urging regulators to work with operators. The SEC has proposed rules that would require foreign-pegged stablecoins to win its approval before they can be listed or held on regulated Nigerian platforms. However, once those rules land, they will shape the next phase of adoption as much as anything product builders do.

Obiex says Nigeria’s stablecoin market is far more efficient than it was in 2018 and 2019, when the gap between buying and selling a dollar of crypto in naira ran as wide as ₦20 to ₦30. Demand has scaled since, but the supply behind it is still spread across many small sellers.

That’s the current state of Nigeria’s stablecoin market, according to Temitayo Sadique, managing director of Obiex Business, the business arm of Nigerian crypto exchange Obiex.

“Because of the exceptional need for stablecoins from cross-border trade and remittances, and crypto exchanges cropping up every day, we’ve seen demand scale,” Sadique said at Moonshot by TechCabal. “But supply, on the other hand, has remained scattered.”

Sadique said $19 billion in stablecoins came into Nigeria in 2025. The country has taken about 60% of sub-Saharan Africa’s stablecoin inflows since 2019, according to a June report by the International Monetary Fund.

Scattered supply makes that volume expensive to move. A company filling a $1 million order might deal with 10 peer-to-peer (P2P) traders, Sadique said, each selling a slice at a slightly higher rate: ₦1,400 per dollar, then ₦1,402, then ₦1,403. By the end, its average price is worse than the first quote. As volumes grow, he argued, platforms that can fill large orders at one price will set the terms for everyone else.

Obiex has built its business on that bet. It began in 2016 as Paylot, a crypto payment gateway, before shifting to converting crypto into naira when it saw that was what users wanted. It has never raised venture funding.

Sadique said 105,000 merchants in Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon now trade on Obiex, alongside more than 100 businesses, from exchanges and remittance companies to fintechs. By his count, $1 of every $10 in stablecoins that moved through Nigeria last year went through Obiex.

For Sadique, liquidity means delivering money on time. Promising someone $100 next week means little if the money isn’t there when the week comes, he said. “It’s kind of like a supply-chain question, where you’re answering: can I fulfil this obligation now, when the customer needs it?” Obiex’s answer includes credit that lets clients take liquidity today and settle tomorrow, and price locks while crypto deposits are still confirming.

For large trades, Obiex offers a quote system that fixes the rate on orders of $1 million to $10 million. “We don’t just give you an average price to execute your transaction; we give you a quote and lock in that price for you,” Sadique said.

Regulation is already pushing the market toward bigger players. Since January, Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission has required crypto exchanges and custodians to hold ₦2 billion in minimum capital, up from ₦500 million, a bar many smaller platforms will struggle to clear.

In Sadique’s view, an efficient stablecoin market is one where a $1 million order clears at a single price, and that depends on who can supply liquidity when it is needed.