No one company will make stablecoins mainstream, says Paga’s Tayo Oviosu

Stablecoins will not become mainstream by one company

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.

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.