African fintech has absorbed a wave of stablecoin-linked capital over the past year, much of it arriving through unconventional structures: strategic equity from a stablecoin issuer, credit facilities from bank-affiliated private lenders, seed rounds co-led by crypto infrastructure firms rather than traditional venture funds. The transactions are frequently described in coverage as a single trend — “stablecoins are having a moment in Africa” — without distinguishing between what the underlying companies actually do.
They do not all do the same thing. A review of the sector’s most prominent 2026 transactions shows capital clustering around three identifiable business models, each with a different customer, a different revenue logic, and in some cases a different regulatory exposure.
Model one: consumer remittance distribution
The clearest model is the consumer-facing remittance app that uses a stablecoin as an invisible settlement layer behind a conventional user experience.
LemFi, a cross-border payments platform serving diaspora communities in the UK, US, Canada and Europe who send money to recipients in Africa and Asia, received a strategic investment from Tether in May 2026. The deal integrates USD₮ as a settlement mechanism behind LemFi’s existing product, replacing multi-day correspondent banking chains with near-instant blockchain settlement. Customers continue to interact with local currencies on the app’s front end; the stablecoin operates entirely on the back end. Tether’s chief executive Paolo Ardoino framed the investment as part of a broader push to extend the stablecoin’s reach beyond crypto-native trading into everyday remittance use, a description consistent with Tether’s prior emerging-market investments.
Sorted Wallet occupies a more explicitly crypto-facing position within the same model. The Hong Kong-headquartered company, with major operations across Africa, builds a non-custodial stablecoin wallet compressed to run within 10 megabytes, designed for feature phones and low-cost smartphones rather than the higher-specification devices most fintech products assume. It closed a $4.4mn seed round in May 2026 co-led by Tether — which had previously made a smaller investment in the company in 2024 — and Gnosis, with additional participation from Movement, Angel Invest and a group of angel investors. Unlike LemFi, Sorted Wallet exposes the stablecoin directly to users, who hold USDT balances and cash out through mobile money networks including M-Pesa. The company reports more than 500,000 downloads concentrated in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Bangladesh.
Both companies monetise the same underlying proposition: dollar-denominated stablecoins are frequently more stable and more accessible than local currency alternatives for cross-border transfers, and cheaper than the fee structures of incumbent remittance operators. Neither company sells anything to businesses.
Model two: business-to-business settlement infrastructure
The second model inverts the customer relationship entirely. Rather than serving individual senders and recipients, these companies sell liquidity, payment rails or settlement infrastructure to other businesses. It is also, on the evidence gathered for this article, the largest of the three categories by deal count: at least six African or Africa-focused companies raised capital for a B2B stablecoin model across 2025 and 2026.
Mansa, a Dubai-based fintech founded in 2023, provides stablecoin-backed credit lines to payment service providers, remittance companies, virtual card issuers and foreign exchange platforms operating across Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. Its product addresses a structural problem in cross-border payments known as prefunding: operators must typically hold capital in each destination market before a transaction can clear, tying up working capital across multiple corridors. Mansa fronts stablecoin liquidity at the point of settlement instead, allowing clients to avoid holding pre-positioned reserves. The company raised $10mn in a February 2025 seed round split between $3mn in equity, led by Tether with participation from Faculty Group, Octerra Capital, Polymorphic Capital and Trive Digital, and $7mn in liquidity sourced from decentralised finance protocols, quantitative funds, family offices and hedge funds. By its own reporting, Mansa’s clients have included payment platforms in Nigeria and Ghana and it had processed several hundred million dollars in payment volume within eighteen months of launch.
Daya, a Lagos-based company founded in October 2025 by former Circle and Helicarrier executives, raised $2.4mn in an oversubscribed pre-seed round in June 2026, led by digital-asset investor Hivemind Capital with participation from Lattice, Alliance, Globelink and the Aptos Foundation. One of its investors, Hivemind’s Kayla Phillips, described Daya as a business-facing stablecoin neobank, offering companies virtual dollar accounts, payment cards and treasury tools rather than a consumer product. The company has since piloted a payment corridor between Africa and the UAE built on the Aptos blockchain in partnership with the Aptos Foundation and Dubai-based exchange HashKey MENA.
Paycrest, a Nigerian project, raised $404,000 in pre-seed funding in January 2026 from Hashed Emergent, StarkWare, Lava VC, Microtraction and Sunny Side Venture Partners to build decentralised infrastructure that coordinates fragmented stablecoin and fiat liquidity into predictable cross-border settlement. Rather than selling to consumers, Paycrest licenses its routing protocol to other fintechs — its own materials cite Hurupay, a payments company, as a client using Paycrest as an off-ramp partner across African corridors.
Stabyl, which emerged from stealth in June 2026 with $2.7mn in pre-seed funding led by Nigerian e-commerce group Konga, occupies a related but distinct corner of the same model. Rather than lending liquidity to fintechs, as Mansa does, Stabyl runs a central limit order book that lets banks, payment service providers and other financial institutions post and match foreign-exchange orders directly with one another, replacing the bilateral phone calls and manual rate-checking that currently govern institutional FX sourcing in Nigeria. Settlement runs across both naira rails, through Konga’s payments arm KongaPay, and stablecoins, primarily USDT and USDC, via wallet infrastructure from custody provider DFNS. Its founders — one a former co-chief executive of Konga, the other a former Wall Street analyst — say the company deliberately treats existing stablecoin-payments providers such as Yellow Card, Onafriq and Fincra as customers rather than competitors, positioning Stabyl as liquidity infrastructure sitting beneath the payments layer rather than a payments product itself. Its revenue model is a transaction fee rather than a currency spread, a structural choice the founders say is intended to route more institutional volume through the platform.
Two further companies extend the model in different directions. Ezeebit, a South African company, raised $2.05mn in a December 2025 seed round led by Founder Collective and Raba Partnership to give merchants infrastructure for accepting crypto payments, offering instant stablecoin settlement with next-day local-fiat payouts — structurally close to IvoryPay, and using the funding to expand into Kenya and Nigeria. Kulipa, a Paris-based company, sits a level further down the stack: rather than serving merchants or consumers directly, it sells stablecoin-native card-issuing infrastructure to other fintechs, letting them launch Visa- or Mastercard-branded payment programmes funded directly from stablecoin balances without building card-issuing capability themselves. It raised $6.2mn in a seed round in 2026 co-led by 1kx and Flutterwave-backer Flourish Ventures, with participation from White Star Capital and Fabric Ventures, and lists Flutterwave among its more than 20 enterprise clients.
Revenue for these startups comes mostly from fees, spreads or rails embedded in transactions initiated by other businesses, positioning them closer to wholesale infrastructure providers than to payments brands.
Model three: the hybrid, consumer-and-infrastructure stack
The third model does not fit cleanly into either of the first two. It also contains, by a wide margin, the largest transaction identified for this article.
Flutterwave, Africa’s most valuable payments company, announced in June 2026 that Ripple had taken a strategic equity stake as part of its Series E round, at a valuation the two companies put at between $3.2bn and $3.3bn. Neither the size of Ripple’s stake nor the portion of the round it represented was disclosed. The deal is structured to integrate Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin RLUSD, the XRP Ledger and Ripple’s own global payments network directly into Flutterwave’s infrastructure, with Nigeria as the initial rollout market. Critically, the integration spans both sides of the model split examined in this article simultaneously: RLUSD is being embedded both into Flutterwave’s merchant-facing payment rails, used by businesses to accept and settle payments, and into Send App, Flutterwave’s consumer remittance product. Ripple’s Middle East and Africa managing director, Reece Merrick, said the investment would establish RLUSD within Flutterwave’s infrastructure and deepen the company’s role as a settlement layer for payments across the continent. Flutterwave has processed more than $50bn in transactions since launch and had previously raised in excess of $500mn prior to this round.
NALA, a Tanzanian-founded fintech, shows the same pattern at a smaller scale and over a longer runway. Originally built as a consumer remittance app, it has since built a parallel business-to-business infrastructure product called Rafiki, which connects enterprise clients to a network the company says spans more than 249 banks and 26 mobile money services across 16 countries. In May 2026, NALA secured up to $50mn in credit financing from Liquidity, an AI-driven private credit provider, structured through Mars Growth Capital, a joint venture between Liquidity and Japan’s MUFG Bank. The facility began as an initial $25mn tranche with an option to scale to $50mn or more.
The company’s own disclosures describe both sides of the business operating simultaneously and profitably: its consumer segment reported 64 per cent gross margins in the month preceding the announcement, while Rafiki reported 80 per cent gross margins over the same period. NALA’s founder, Benjamin Fernandes, said demand from enterprise customers had accelerated sharply over the prior year, and that the credit facility — rather than a fresh equity round — was structured specifically to fund that growth without further diluting existing shareholders, given that the company still held more than half the capital raised in its 2024 $40mn equity round.
HoneyCoin, a Nairobi-based company founded in 2020, shows the pattern at a third scale, in between NALA and Flutterwave. It raised $4.9mn in an August 2025 seed round led by Flourish Ventures, with participation from Visa Ventures, TLcom Capital, Stellar Development Foundation and others, to expand a payment orchestration platform it describes as serving both consumers and businesses. By its own reporting, the company processes more than $150mn in monthly transaction volume across more than 350 enterprise clients and over 326,000 consumers using its Peer app, with B2B volumes growing 16 per cent month-on-month against 5 per cent for the consumer side, and most of its revenue coming from B2B settlement. As with NALA, the consumer product and the enterprise infrastructure are reported as a single operation rather than as separate business lines, and the faster-growing, larger-revenue side of that operation is the business-facing one.
Together, these ventures suggest the hybrid model is not a marginal case at either end of the market. It appears in a company barely a year old raising a $2.4mn pre-seed and in a company valued at $3.3bn taking on a strategic investor — which argues against treating it as a stage-specific phenomenon that companies grow out of, or into, as they scale. For at least these three companies, consumer distribution and business infrastructure are being built and monetised as one integrated system rather than as sequential phases.
The connective investor and the offshore reality
Across the three models, Tether appears in the consumer camp (LemFi, Sorted Wallet) and the infrastructure camp (Mansa, a Dubai-based fintech that raised $10mn in 2025 to provide stablecoin-backed credit lines to other payment firms). No other investor in the dataset holds a comparable cross-model position.
The investor geography, however, tells a parallel story. Tether is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. Circle is a US company. Ripple is US-based. The NALA credit facility flows through Israel and Japan. Almost none of the stablecoin-linked capital in the dataset originates from African institutions. The monetary plumbing is being funded by offshore treasuries, with local founders operating the distribution layer.
Regulatory exposure varies by model
The three models face different regulatory risks. Consumer-facing stablecoin wallets and remittance platforms sit squarely in the sights of financial conduct authorities and central banks, which are increasingly treating dollar-pegged tokens as quasi-deposit substitutes. Business-to-business settlement services may escape direct retail regulation but remain exposed to foreign exchange controls and trade finance rules. Hybrid platforms carry both exposures.
No African jurisdiction has yet enacted a comprehensive stablecoin framework comparable to the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation or Singapore’s licensing regime. However, Nigeria recently introduced rules that would impose a transaction levy and withholding tax on crypto-related gains. Ghana’s central bank has taken a restrictive posture toward international money transfer operators and crypto. The Bank of Ghana recently imposed a sweeping new wave of regulatory controls on cross-border financial flows, issuing twin directives that tighten oversight of international money transfer operators while simultaneously severing the financial system’s links to unauthorised cryptocurrency platforms offering dollar-denominated wallet services.
Nevertheless, the absence of clear regulatory frameworks across much of Africa is, for now, what enables such rapid deployment.