Circle taps ex-Yellow Card executive to lead Africa expansion
Circle Internet Group, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)-listed issuer of the dollar-backed USDC stablecoin, has appointed Gillian Darko, a former Yellow Card executive, as its Vice President and Head of Africa, deepening its push into the continent’s expanding digital payments market.
The move comes as Circle seeks to expand stablecoins’ use in cross-border payments, remittances, and business transactions across emerging economies.
“I’m more than thrilled to announce that I’ve joined Circle as Vice President, Head of Africa,” Darko wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. “I love this ecosystem. I love stablecoins. And I am bullish about the future of digital finance on this continent.”
Darko previously served as Group Vice President of Strategy at Yellow Card, where she helped shape the company’s commercial expansion, revenue strategy, and partnerships with banks, telecom operators, and global financial institutions. She joined Yellow Card in 2024 as Chief of Staff and Director of Strategy before rising through its leadership ranks. She left the company in October 2026.
Her appointment also strengthens Circle’s regional leadership, signalling that Africa is emerging as an important market for dollar-backed stablecoins, even as several African regulators move to tighten oversight of foreign issuers. Nigeria’s proposed rules require foreign issuers to secure regulatory recognition, while Kenya’s framework gives the Central Bank the authority to suspend or delist non-compliant foreign-issued stablecoins.
Such restrictions could disrupt access to dollar liquidity for merchants and businesses that are reliant on stablecoins for cross-border trade and settlement. Between 2022 and 2026, stablecoin transfers through peer-to-peer (P2P) channels in Sub-Saharan Africa surged more than sixfold to $14.6 billion, according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.
Circle, the US company that trades on the NYSE under the ticker “CRCL,” has been expanding its partnerships across the continent. In March, the company partnered with Sasai Fintech, part of Cassava Technologies, the pan-African technology group owned by Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa, to broaden access to USDC through African payment networks.
In July, its venture arm invested in Nigerian payments company Flutterwave to support the integration of USDC settlement into its payment infrastructure, allowing merchants to collect payments locally and settle transactions in digital dollars.
The push comes amid growing demand for faster and potentially cheaper international transactions in a region where fragmented payment systems, currency volatility, and limited access to dollars have created opportunities for digital asset providers.
Circle reported $73.3 billion in USDC circulation at the end of Q2 2026, up 19% from the previous year, while quarterly on-chain transaction volume surged 151% to $14.8 trillion.
Darko’s move from Yellow Card, which provides infrastructure for accessing and transferring stablecoins, to Circle, which issues USDC through its regulated affiliates, places her at the centre of the growing competition to connect African financial institutions and payment providers to dollar-denominated digital assets.
Darko will be tasked with helping expand USDC’s reach across African payment networks while navigating regulatory requirements that could determine how widely foreign-issued stablecoins can be offered in some of the continent’s biggest markets.
Her career spans traditional finance and financial technology, including roles at JPMorgan Asset Management, global consulting firm PwC, and African fintech JUMO. She has also held board and governance responsibilities across several African markets, including Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia.
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Luno, the UK-headquartered cryptocurrency firm that operates in four African countries, spent much of its first decade building a retail crypto exchange.
Now, Ayotunde Alabi, chief executive officer and country manager for Luno Nigeria, says the company is pursuing a bigger ambition: selling digital asset infrastructure to banks, asset managers, fintechs, and large enterprises.
Luno wants to give institutions the tools to offer digital assets to their own customers, issue stablecoins, and move money across borders, Alabi told TechCabal in an interview.
“Luno would be the rail [on] which they [institutions] can come into the virtual asset space. For example, asset managers, banks—if a bank wants the ability to mint a stablecoin, they can plug into our rails [to do that],” Alabi said.
The strategy marks a shift for the 13-year-old digital asset company, whose business has centred on retail customers buying and selling cryptocurrencies over the years. Retail remains part of Luno’s strategy, but institutions are becoming another major customer segment for the infrastructure it has built.
In July, Luno cut its global workforce by 20%, according to Bloomberg. The layoffs affected the company’s South African team and 5% of its employees in Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda. Following the restructuring, James Lanigan, Luno’s chief executive officer, said the company would continue investing in retail products while expanding its business-to-business (B2B) offering.
At the centre of the new strategy are three related businesses: Luno itself, stablecoin issuer BlockTower, and payments company GTXN, which Luno acquired in September. Alabi declined to disclose the value of that deal.
Luno remains the exchange where customers can buy and sell cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. BlockTower, which Alabi said operates as a Luno subsidiary, issues stablecoins. GTXN provides the payments infrastructure needed to connect those digital assets to the traditional financial system, including local collections, payouts, foreign exchange (FX), virtual accounts, and settlement.
“We see GTXN less as another exchange and more as part of the financial plumbing required to make cross-border payments work effectively,” Alabi told TechCabal in an interview.
Luno’s institutional offering has three parts. The first is Crypto-as-a-Service, which would allow banks and asset managers to offer digital asset products without building their own trading, custody, and wallet infrastructure. The second is a cross-border settlement network powered by GTXN’s payments capabilities. The third is stablecoin issuance through BlockTower.
Ayotunde Alabi, chief executive officer and country manager for Luno Nigeria, says the company is shifting beyond its retail crypto roots to sell digital asset infrastructure to banks, asset managers, and other institutions. Image Source: Luno.
The stablecoin plan is not limited to one global token. Alabi said Luno plans to work on stablecoins backed by local currencies in different markets. According to him, the company is mulling plans for a Malaysian ringgit-backed stablecoin, as well as potential local currency stablecoins for African markets, including a possible naira-backed digital currency.
“There are two sister companies: GTXN and BlockTower. BlockTower is the vehicle Luno uses to issue stablecoins, and the plan is to issue stablecoins across different key African regions,” Alabi said. “We are thinking about Nigeria as well, with a naira-backed stablecoin. The infrastructure will allow us to use the different stablecoins to move [money] across borders in Africa.”
Through its local subsidiary BlockTower South Africa and a consortium of South African financial institutions, such as digital bank Lesaka Technologies, Luno issues and distributes ZARU, the South African rand-backed stablecoin launched in February.
For Luno, and like most digital asset businesses now focusing on institutional sales, selling to businesses and large enterprises creates a more predictable revenue stream, often with bigger ticket sizes. Unlike retail trading, institutional sales, especially when built around stablecoins increasingly pitched for mainstream finance, are less erratic.
The approach is similar to how several other global crypto companies evolved. Coinbase, the US crypto company, started in 2012 as a Bitcoin wallet, allowing users to buy and sell the cryptocurrency. By 2014, it had expanded into merchant processing for companies like tech original equipment manufacturer Dell and US-based hotel booking company Expedia, and a year later added an order-book trading exchange.
Now, Coinbase offers Crypto-as-a-Service to banks, fintechs, and other businesses that want to add digital assets without building the trading and custody infrastructure themselves.
Another example is Payward, the parent company of the US-based crypto exchange Kraken, which has paused its planned US IPO. In March, Payward launched Payward Services as a B2B infrastructure platform to offer institutional clients a single integration for stablecoin payments, trading, custody, funding, and settlement.
In 2025, Payward expanded into the tokenisation sector by acquiring Backed Finance, the infrastructure operator behind xStocks, which allows crypto companies to distribute tokenised US stocks. Luno capitalised on this ecosystem by launching tokenised US stocks in 2025 through a direct partnership with xStocks.
Yet, to entice institutions, Luno also needs the network and ecosystem that has taken it years to build. A stablecoin is useful only if businesses can exchange it, settle with it, and convert it into local currency. Luno wants to connect the tokens to its exchange liquidity and GTXN’s regulated payout infrastructure.
For example, a Nigerian business paying a supplier in South Africa could use naira to acquire a rand-denominated stablecoin. Instead of moving money through several banks and converting naira into dollars before converting again into rand, the business could use the stablecoin as the settlement asset. GTXN would then facilitate the payout to the supplier in local currency, according to Alabi.
Luno would also need sufficient liquidity for customers to buy and sell the tokens, adequate local currency reserves to support redemption, and enough demand from businesses willing to use them. This is where retail distribution plays a key role.
Regulation would be its next moat. Luno needs regulatory approval in its key stablecoin distribution markets to build a business that attracts institutional interest. Luno is currently licenced as a crypto-asset service provider (CASP) in South Africa, while in Malaysia, it is registered with the Malaysian Securities Commission (SC) as a Recognised Market Operator for a Digital Asset Exchange (RMO-DAX).
In Bermuda, Luno holds a Class F Digital Asset Business licence from the Bermuda Monetary Authority. In Nigeria, the crypto firm has been admitted into the country’s Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Programme (ARIP), allowing it to operate its crypto exchange and infrastructure service provider business under an approval-in-principle.
Alabi said that the company’s Crypto-as-a-Service and stablecoin issuance offerings are already drawing interest from banks and asset managers.
“There is data available,” Alabi said. “We’ve seen a lot of interest, a lot of [people] knocking on the doors to say, ‘Look, we like what you’re doing. We’re seeing your engagements with regulators. We want to be a part of this.’ We’ve seen banks and asset managers come into the conversations, and a lot of things are unfolding very soon.”
Luno sees institutional servicing as the strongest moat for its business, and stablecoins will play a key role. But importantly, retail is also evolving to remain a layer that deepens activity and informs that institutional buy-in. In February, Alabi told TechCabal that the company was pushing deeper into digital asset-based retail investment. That remains its long-term plan for retail customers as it aggressively chases enterprise clients.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that Luno’s engagement in Malaysia is with two asset managers and does not involve Malaysian authorities.
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