Mambo! Here is John 👋
I run a fintech company in Tanzania called Swahilies. We help SMEs manage their bookkeeping and pay international suppliers, using stablecoins as the payment infrastructure behind the scenes.
Most of our volume goes to China and settles into Alipay and WeChat, not bank accounts. For many small African importers, that is how trade actually works today.
After running a successful pilot with our first 20 SME customers, helping them process $1 million in payments, we started looking for a stablecoin partner who could help us scale the operation.
We needed a partner who could accept our stablecoin settlements, pay Chinese suppliers directly, and integrate via API.
The goal was simple: automate the process, grow faster, and stop handling payments manually.
So we spoke to multiple African stablecoin companies. The answer was almost identical every time.
“We can support you. But let’s start with OTC. APIs will come later.”
OTC (Over The Counter) — which is really just the stablecoin version of having a forex bureau guy saved in your contacts. Instead of a clean automated app or API, you are on WhatsApp negotiating foreign exchange rates, sending screenshots of receipts, and waiting for someone on the other side to manually process it. It’s digital, but it’s definitely not modern.
The first time I heard it, I assumed it was one company’s limitation. Then I heard it from a second company. Then a third.
One of them had raised around $90 million.
I have heard this answer enough times that I have stopped being surprised.
We still have not found the right API partner. That problem is still open. And it reveals something important about where Africa’s stablecoin market actually stands today.
Why OTC dominates
It is the quickest way to operate cross-border payments without a license. It does not mean you are licensed, but it does mean you can operate with a lower chance of attracting attention from regulators. With no Payment Service Provider (PSP) license, no lengthy regulatory approvals, and no compliance team required, you can message a broker and start moving money the same day.
The best API partners with the strongest technology exist, but they require heavy licensing to onboard. We experienced this at Swahilies. A fully automated and reliable payout partner with excellent APIs refused to onboard us because we are not yet a licensed Payment Service Provider (PSP). They would not even allow us to leverage another partner’s license to work with them. When the best automated door is locked, OTC becomes the remaining option.
Many OTC partners simply do not have APIs yet. These partners are reliable and trustworthy, but they are essentially modernized bureaus. The challenge is not a lack of willingness, it is that the technical infrastructure has not been built yet. Manual processes are the only option they can offer. We have partners who can move money across the entire African continent but have not built a single API.
OTC also compresses complexity into one relationship. One broker handles the FX rate, settlement, and payout in a single conversation. Building that same flow through APIs requires multiple integrations, multiple compliance layers, and significant technical resources. For a business without a strong engineering team, OTC is operationally simpler.
Stablecoins processed over $33 trillion in 2025, with B2B payments becoming their largest real world use case. While Stripe is acquiring stablecoin platforms for $1.1 billion to automate global payments, the African last mile is still being negotiated over a WhatsApp voice note.
Stablecoins account for 43% of all crypto transaction volume in the region. In Nigeria alone, nearly $22 billion in stablecoin transactions were processed between July 2023 and June 2024.
That number is roughly the size of Tanzania’s entire 2025 national budget.
All of this is happening in a continent that still faces dollar shortages, high cross-border payment fees, and slow settlement through banks. Stablecoins should have been the perfect solution. But the way the market currently operates, mostly through OTC desks, is creating new problems.
The $100K Minimum
When stablecoin companies operate through OTC desks, they naturally prioritize large customers. If you are moving money manually, you would rather do one $100,000 trade than twenty $5,000 trades.
African SMEs make up 95% of all registered businesses and contribute roughly half of Sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP.
Most of them make relatively small import payments. A trader importing clothes from Guangzhou may send $1,000 to $5,000 per order, far below the ticket size OTC desks typically prefer.
That quietly excludes the very people who need this infrastructure the most. A trader in Kariakoo 🇹🇿, Lagos 🇳🇬, or Nairobi 🇰🇪, trying to pay a supplier for a small shipment suddenly discovers that the new financial rail is still built primarily for large players.
Three years of payments. Zero Credit History
OTC transactions are harder to track. When payments move through chats, brokers, and manual settlement, the data disappears. That makes it harder even for regulators to understand the market and harder for policymakers to design smart rules around it.
For business owners, it creates another problem. These transactions do not build financial history. A business owner who has been moving $200,000 annually through OTC brokers for three years may still be financially invisible. She cannot access a loan. She cannot prove her trading history. She cannot scale beyond what her personal broker network can handle.
The Hidden Tax
Stablecoins promise cheaper payments. But OTC markets are far less transparent. Rates vary depending on the broker, the relationship, or the urgency of the transaction. SMEs often pay 5 to 8% spreads through OTC brokers, compared with roughly 1 to 2% in mature crypto markets or around 3 to 5% through traditional correspondent banking corridors.
The cost advantage stablecoins promised starts to disappear. What remains is the same expensive system with a different interface.
The Vulnerability
Licensed stablecoin companies operating OTC at least maintain some compliance standards. But when those companies turn away small businesses, the market does not disappear. It simply moves underground.
SMEs who cannot access licensed platforms turn to unlicensed OTC operators. No KYC, No recourse, No protection.
Across East and West Africa, many stablecoin fraud stories follow the same pattern. Small business owners, unable to access regulated providers, hand their money to an informal OTC broker and lose everything.
Globally, crypto-related scams cost victims over $5.6 billion in 2023. In emerging markets with informal OTC networks, enforcement becomes even harder.
Hours, Not seconds
Every stablecoin pitch deck promises the same thing: instant settlement, real-time payments, the future of money.
Then reality arrives.
A business owner in Kinshasa 🇨🇩 messages her OTC broker. He quotes a rate. She negotiates, sends payment, and waits. He manually confirms receipt, contacts his payout partner, who then manually executes the transfer.
A blockchain transaction settles in seconds. An OTC-mediated payment can take hours or even a full business day.
Stablecoins are instant.
But the infrastructure around them in Africa still is not.
The continent is running a digital dollar economy on manual rails.
Not because the technology is missing. Because access to it is locked behind licenses most operators do not have, APIs most payout partners have not built, and ticket sizes most SMEs cannot meet.
I started Stablekoin because I could not find what I needed as an operator. Something honest. Something written from inside the market, not from a stage or a report. Something that tracks what is actually moving, what is breaking, and what is being built across Africa’s stablecoin economy every single week.
Every Monday — what happened across Africa’s stablecoin economy.
Every Thursday — one deep idea worth your time.
236 people are already following this from the inside. Join them at stablekoin.africa .
Written from inside Africa with love 🇹🇿💚