Africa now leads the world in stablecoin adoption, with ownership among crypto-active users reaching 79 percent, but industry experts are warning that the infrastructure underpinning that growth remains uneven and structurally fragile, leaving millions of users exposed when systems fail.
The caution comes from two senior figures in the decentralised finance space. Alvin Kan, chief operating officer of Bitget Wallet, and Will Harborne, founder and chief executive of London-based decentralised finance platform Rhino.fi, both argue that the real challenge in Africa is no longer persuading people to use stablecoins but ensuring the rails they run on are reliable enough to carry essential financial flows.
Stablecoins such as Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC) now account for an estimated 43 percent of all cryptocurrency transaction volume across sub-Saharan Africa, according to Chainalysis data. In markets including Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa, they are being used not for speculative trading but to preserve savings, pay suppliers, receive cross-border income, and move money more cheaply than traditional remittance channels. World Bank estimates put average remittance fees in African corridors at between 6 and 9 percent, a cost gap that stablecoins are increasingly filling.
Kan describes the shift as fundamentally behavioural. Users in African markets are treating stablecoin wallets the way they once treated bank accounts, checking balances, making transfers, and spending on daily purchases. Bitget Wallet is now extending that logic into physical commerce with the launch of a crypto card across Africa powered by Mastercard through a partnership with Immersve, allowing users to spend USDC directly from a self-custodial wallet at merchants worldwide. USDC is converted to fiat at the point of sale, removing the need for users to manually swap assets before spending.
But Harborne identifies serious structural weaknesses beneath the surface of that adoption. He points to liquidity fragmentation, chain fragmentation, and inconsistent local off-ramp infrastructure as the most critical vulnerabilities in the current stablecoin stack. In many markets, he notes, the backbone of low-cost transfers runs on USDT on the TRON network, which works well in isolation but creates complexity for businesses needing interoperability across multiple chains and treasury systems.
“In remittance-heavy markets, reliability matters because users are often moving essential household money, not speculative capital,” Harborne said. When stablecoin systems fail, he argues, the burden falls immediately on the user or the fintech closest to the customer, not on the global infrastructure providers whose systems caused the disruption.
Both executives acknowledge that African fintechs remain exposed to external dependencies, including offshore stablecoin issuers and foreign banking partners, which creates concentration risk and limits financial sovereignty. Kan notes that regulatory complexity compounds the challenge, with Africa presenting multiple distinct compliance environments rather than a single market. Bitget Wallet manages Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements, transaction monitoring, and eligibility rules on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis.
Despite these pressures, Harborne sees genuine infrastructure being built in Africa rather than speculative capital chasing a narrative. He argues that African markets are solving the real-world utility problem earlier and more directly than developed economies, and that lessons from the continent on mobile-first design, low-cost cross-border settlement, and stablecoin-native financial products are likely to shape how digital payments evolve globally.
The question for Ghana and the wider region is whether regulatory frameworks and infrastructure investment can keep pace with adoption before the gap between usage and resilience becomes a systemic risk.
