Mambo 👋,
Last month we argued that stablecoin payments cannot be zero fees in Africa. The reasons were the cost of onramping, offramping, and the infrastructure layers between the protocol and the end user.
Today Nala announced a $50 million credit facility, structured specifically to prefund its stablecoin payment flows. Nala’s Founder and CEO, Benjamin Fernandes explained;
“We grew faster than we could handle prefunding.”
That announcement is not a contradiction of the stablecoin story. It is the most honest confirmation yet of what we said last month.
The stablecoin narrative should not be “zero fees.” The real conversation is “how much lower can fees go?”
The Africa is different
In the US and some developed markets, you can build a pure stablecoin neobank where users hold stablecoins directly and send money to each other without touching fiat often. In that environment, fees can move close to zero because there is little need for constant currency conversion.
But in Africa, the average user or merchant still operates in local currency. Salaries, suppliers, transport, food, rent, and taxes are paid in naira, shillings, cedis, or rand, not USDT or USDC.
That means stablecoins almost always need on-ramping from fiat, off-ramping back to fiat, and liquidity providers in between. And every step costs money.
Stablecoins were supposed to reduce prefunding because money can move instantly across borders instead of sitting idle in multiple bank accounts across different countries.
That part is true.
But Nala’s $50 million facility reveals something important: Stablecoins do not eliminate prefunding. They make prefunding more efficient but at scale you still need capital to move before customers pay. What stablecoins actually do best is reduce the time that capital sits idle.
But somewhere in the system, someone still needs capital and still needs to make money on that capital.
That changes who wins in Africa’s stablecoin market.
The Advantage Nobody Is Talking About
We have consistently argued that stablecoin adoption in Africa will not arrive through standalone crypto apps. It will arrive through platforms people already trust.
That gives existing fintech companies like Flutterwave, Nala, Paga, and others a major advantage because they already have licenses, distribution, user trust, operational infrastructure, and increasingly, access to capital.
Nala raising debt for prefunding is another signal that capital access itself is becoming a competitive advantage in stablecoin payments.
This creates a difficult reality for newer infrastructure startups.
If you are building stablecoin infrastructure for Africa, you are probably not going to out-capitalize companies like Flutterwave or large fintech incumbents.
Your edge has to come from building better technology, stronger infrastructure tooling, easier integrations, compliance systems, treasury optimization, or smarter liquidity routing.
The incumbents already have users and capital, and they still need to generate returns from both.
Many of them simply do not want to build stablecoin infrastructure from scratch. They would rather integrate it.
That means the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure companies may not win by becoming consumer apps. They may win by becoming the invisible infrastructure layer powering existing fintech platforms.
This is becoming a redefining moment in African fintech.
Not everyone should fight the same battle.
Written from inside Africa with love 🇹🇿💚
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