Mambo 👋
This week, LemFi partnered with BVNK to to move cross-border settlements onto regulated stablecoin rails.
On its own, that is not surprising.
What caught my attention is who keeps making these announcements.
Flutterwave.
LemFi.
Yellow Card.
NALA.
Paga.
Over the past few months, these same companies have announced multiple stablecoin partnerships.
At first, I thought it was a coincidence.
Now I think it is a pattern.
They all have something in common.
They already solved the hardest problems in payments.
Licenses.
Distribution.
Compliance.
Liquidity.
Customer trust.
LemFi moves more than $1 billion every month.
Flutterwave already serves businesses across dozens of markets.
Yellow Card spent years building regulated on and off ramps.
NALA recently raised $50 million to strengthen its liquidity network.
These companies are no longer trying to prove they can move money.
They already do.
So if you are Circle, Ripple, BVNK, Tether, or another global stablecoin company, why build another payment network from scratch when these companies already have the customers, the licenses, and the infrastructure?
That may explain why the same names keep appearing.
The original stablecoin story was about disruption.
Many believed stablecoins would replace banks and fintechs.
Instead, those same fintechs are becoming the preferred distribution partners.
Ripple invested in Flutterwave.
Circle invested in Flutterwave.
Tether invested in LemFi.
The more I watch the market, the more I think stablecoins are not replacing payment companies.
They are strengthening the ones that already solved distribution.
So What Happens Next?
My prediction is that the industry is going back to the basics.
A few years ago, many founders believed stablecoin technology alone was enough to build a competitive advantage.
Today, that no longer looks true.
The companies attracting the biggest partnerships already spent years building what is hardest to replicate: licenses, compliance, liquidity, distribution, and customer trust.
That leaves newer startups with two choices.
They either become stablecoin infrastructure providers for the larger fintechs and financial institutions, or they begin the much harder journey of building regulated businesses with licenses, customers, and distribution of their own.
Neither path is easy.
Selling technology to large financial institutions has never been simple. Banks usually buy critical infrastructure from established enterprise providers with deep compliance capabilities and long track records.
That means African stablecoin startups are not only competing with one another.
They are increasingly competing with global payment infrastructure companies, core banking providers, and enterprise software vendors that are also watching this shift closely.
It will be interesting to see how those global players enter the market and how African startups build an advantage once stablecoin technology itself becomes easier to access.
At the same time, many of Africa’s largest fintechs and banks may realize they have been sitting on one of the biggest opportunities in payments.
They already have the licenses.
They already have the customers.
They already have the trust.
Adding stablecoins is often just another infrastructure upgrade.
That is why I expect more incumbents to enter the stablecoin economy over the next few years.
All of this is happening while most Africans still do not know what a stablecoin is.
To most people, an address is where someone lives, not a wallet address.
For now, that does not matter.
Stablecoins are increasingly being used behind the scenes while customers continue using the apps they already know.
Whether majority of people eventually hold and use stablecoins directly is still an open question.
But today, the biggest stablecoin story in Africa is not consumers adopting stablecoins.
It is fintechs adopting stablecoins for consumers.
Written from inside Africa with love 🇹🇿💚
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