Mambo 👋,
A few weeks ago, we shared our thesis that most traditional African fintechs will not reinvent the wheel when it comes to stablecoins.
They will not wake up and try to become crypto companies. They will not all build new standalone stablecoin products from zero.
Most will do what fintech has always done: integrate better infrastructure into products customers already use.
There are many reasons for that. Regulation is still unclear in many markets, crypto comes with risks, and stablecoin native companies have already spent years building that expertise.
We also said something else: Most Africa’s stablecoin native companies will probably not outcapitalize companies like Flutterwave, M-Pesa, or other large fintechs. Their biggest advantage cannot be money. It has to be technology.
Look at Nala
Nala built a remittance company first, raised more than $40 million in equity, and recently secured $50 million in debt to prefund stablecoin payments.
Very few stablecoin native companies in Africa can access that kind of capital quickly.
That is why infrastructure matters.
A few months ago, Flutterwave announced a partnership with Polygon. Three weeks ago, Caliza said it is powering stablecoin infrastructure for Flutterwave. This week, Nilo announced Flutterwave as a customer.
What we are seeing is a unicorn with millions of merchants working with multiple stablecoin infrastructure companies instead of trying to rebuild everything internally.
And that tells a story
When you are a company valued in billions, changing direction overnight is not easy. You need to understand your real advantages: customers, licenses, capital, brand, relationships, and talent.
Sometimes the smarter move is not building everything yourself. It is partnering with people who have spent years solving that specific problem.
Building stablecoin infrastructure internally is not just a technology decision. It needs a separate structure, regulatory thinking, liquidity, compliance, and focus.
Even Nala, when building Rafiki, structured it separately from the main Nala consumer business.
That kind of bet is not for everyone.
Yellow Card is another interesting example
They had a consumer crypto app with more than one million users. They later shut it down and shifted focus to B2B stablecoin infrastructure, partnering with companies like Mastercard.
The easy conclusion is: maybe consumer crypto economics were hard.
But there is another question:
What if reaching users through platforms they already trust is simply a better strategy?
Running a crypto consumer app in Africa means you are constantly explaining to users what stablecoins are, why they should trust them, and why they need a new app for something they already do with M-Pesa or their bank
Instead of spending years convincing millions of people to join a new crypto platform, you can power the banks, fintechs, payment companies, and businesses those people already use.
Maybe the biggest stablecoin companies in Africa will not be the ones with the most consumer downloads.
Maybe they will be the ones quietly powering everyone else.
The wheel is already there. Stablecoins may just make it move faster.
Written from inside Africa with love 🇹🇿💚
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