Stablecoins are moving beyond crypto trading to become part of how African businesses move money across borders, panellists said at Moonshot by TechCabal in Lagos.

The session, “The New Payment Backbone”, brought together Mercy Emmanuel, stablecoin and blockchain vertical lead at Flutterwave; Tayo Oviosu, group CEO of Paga; and Ife Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Juicyway. Vivian Mbene, chief operating officer of Breet, moderated.

The case for stablecoins starts with speed. A payment from Lagos to Nairobi has often travelled through correspondent banks in New York or London, taking days to clear and stopping for weekends and bank holidays. Stablecoins, digital tokens pegged to currencies such as the US dollar, skip those stops.

“Stablecoins essentially collapse this journey, as a high-speed train would,” Emmanuel said. “Settlement happens in seconds; it happens in minutes.”

Oviosu said customers care about the result. They want payments that are fast, cheap and arrive when promised, and most will never know a stablecoin was involved. Building stablecoins into everyday payment systems, he said, makes cross-border transfers simpler without asking users to learn anything new.

He also said the industry will have to build it together. “No one company is going to solve it on their own,” he said. “There are going to be multiple companies that have specific solutions that will target different audiences.”

Regulators have shifted too, Oviosu said. “Three, four years ago, who could have said CBN will support stablecoins, and NCC welcomes the idea?” Johnson said companies need to keep building trust with regulators as the market grows.

Shared infrastructure was the panel’s common thread. Stablecoins can make cross-border payments faster and cheaper, but only if payment companies, banks and regulators connect their systems. For millions of African businesses that pay suppliers abroad, that would mean settlement in minutes in place of days.