Opera’s MiniPay Card Makes Stablecoins Spendable Across Africa

Key Takeaways: 

• MiniPay has launched a Visa debit card that lets users spend stablecoin balances at over 175 million merchant locations worldwide.
• The card is powered by Gnosis Pay and built on the Celo blockchain, with merchants receiving standard fiat settlement and no crypto-specific setup required.
• Supported stablecoins include USDT, USDC, and mUSD, with cashback rewards in Tether Gold (XAUt0), USDT, and USDC in selected markets.
• The MiniPay card is available across 46 countries in Africa, Europe (EEA), Latin America, and Southeast Asia.
• Since launching in 2023, MiniPay has grown to over 16 million activated wallets across 65+ countries.

For years, the story of stablecoins in Africa has been about holding and sending. People saving in USDT and USDC to protect against currency volatility. Migrants sending money home through faster, cheaper rails. Freelancers getting paid in cryptocurrencies and keeping the balance because local conversions were expensive or slow.

What nobody solved well is the last step. What do you actually do with the stablecoins once you have them?

Opera’s MiniPay Answered The Question

On June 23, MiniPay launched a Visa debit card in collaboration with Gnosis Pay, enabling users to spend stablecoin balances at over 175 million Visa-affiliated merchants across 46 countries. 

It didn’t require a bank transfer or crypto conversion. All the MiniPay card required was stablecoins in your wallet. 

This product update seems to be the missing piece in Africa’s stablecoin stack. 

MiniPay Takes Stablecoins Beyond Transfers 

The MiniPay Card connects the wallet’s stablecoin balances — including USDT, USDC, and mUSD — directly to Visa’s global merchant network through Gnosis Pay’s payments infrastructure. Users can spend in person or online wherever Visa is accepted, and merchants receive payment in their local fiat currency with zero crypto-specific setup on their end.

The card also integrates with Apple Pay and Google Pay for contactless mobile payments, carries no monthly or annual fees, and charges only a nominal FX fee on transactions.

In select markets, users earn cashback in digital assets—specifically Tether Gold (XAUt0), USDT, and USDC. It’s a design choice that rewards customers in assets built for utility rather than short-lived promotional credit.

Friederike Ernst, founder of Gnosis, framed it directly; 

For someone in Lagos or Nairobi already holding savings in digital dollars, the missing piece isn’t the wallet. It’s the ability to spend those balances at a checkout in another country without the merchant needing to know or care about crypto. The MiniPay card closes that gap.

Stablecoins Finally Reach the Checkout Counter

The problem has never been holding stablecoins; rather, it has been spending them with ease. MiniPay is proving that this distinction matters. 

Africa already has stablecoin users. MiniPay alone has surpassed 16 million activated wallets in 65+ countries since its launch in 2023, with particularly strong uptake in Africa. Chainalysis data shows Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain crypto value between mid-2024 and mid-2025. Stablecoins accounted for a growing share of that activity. 

People are not struggling to acquire stablecoins. They are struggling to use them without first jumping through three additional steps.

The old flow looked like this: earn or receive stablecoins, sell them on an exchange, transfer the fiat proceeds to a bank account, wait for settlement, then spend. 

Every step added time, fees, and friction. For a freelancer trying to pay rent or a student paying school fees, that friction is not a minor inconvenience. It’s the reason stablecoins stop at the wallet.

Africa Doesn’t Need More Stablecoin Wallets. It Needs Spending Infrastructure

The bigger argument behind this launch is one the industry has been building toward for a while without quite landing it.

Stablecoin adoption in Africa is no longer an access problem. The wallets exist, the on-ramp integrations exist, the demand exists. What has been missing is utility at the point of sale.

Rather than launching another wallet, MiniPay is tackling the last mile of the stablecoin experience. The card doesn’t ask users to change how they hold money. It changes what they can do with the money they already have.

This launch also fits into a broader pattern developing across African fintech. Flutterwave partnered with Ripple and Tempo to expand stablecoin payment infrastructure across the continent. Paga and Crossmint partnered to connect African businesses directly to global stablecoin networks. Yellow Card has been building institutional settlement rails. Now MiniPay is facing the consumer end and everyday purchases. 

When put together, it paints a broader picture: Africa is evolving from holding digital assets to using them to meet everyday needs. 

Why More Payment Companies Are Racing Toward Stablecoins

The stablecoins race has been gearing up in Nigeria and Africa for a long time now. 

MiniPay’s Visa card is not an isolated product decision. It’s part of a broader industry recalibration.

Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, PayPal, Circle, and Ripple are all building or expanding stablecoin payment products right now. 

The reasoning is increasingly similar across all of them: stablecoins solve problems that legacy payment rails haven’t. Cross-border transfers are cheaper. Settlement is faster. FX costs are lower. Treasury management becomes more flexible.

Visa confirmed the direction in a statement tied to the launch. Dan Roesbery, VP of Global Crypto Partnerships at Visa, noted the goal of creating trusted, familiar payment experiences that connect users in high-growth markets to everyday commerce.

The keyword there is familiar. The strategy isn’t to ask users to think about crypto at the point of sale. It’s to make stablecoins invisible behind infrastructure they already understand.

What This Means for Everyday African Consumers

The practical implications are easiest to see in specific groups.

Freelancers who earn in USDT can now spend that balance directly without converting first. Digital nomads with crypto savings can now use a single card whether they’re in Lagos, Nairobi, or anywhere within the card’s 46-country coverage. 

Families receiving remittances through the MiniPay ecosystem can spend those funds immediately rather than waiting to convert them.

For travelers, the card simplifies cross-border payments by eliminating the need to carry multiple currencies or manually manage exchange rates. The stablecoin balance, denominated in digital dollars, becomes a consistent spending asset regardless of location.

The user experience is deliberately straightforward: add the card to your phone’s wallet, tap to pay. And it doesn’t require any additional crypto knowledge. 

What This Means for African Fintech

The MiniPay Card signals a structural shift in what payment products will compete going forward.

The traditional payments stack runs through banks and card networks: Bank → Card → Merchant. 

The emerging alternative increasingly looks like: Stablecoin → Wallet → Card → Merchant, with the blockchain layer invisible to the merchant and nearly invisible to the user.

As more users begin transacting directly from blockchain-based balances, banks risk losing payment volume not because they’re excluded but because they’re no longer necessary for the transaction to complete. Stablecoin infrastructure will eliminate FX conversion, settlement delays, and account requirements. 

Future competition in African fintech won’t center on who lets users buy crypto. It will center on who makes crypto invisible. 

Why This Matters 

The biggest challenge for stablecoins has never been convincing people to hold them. Across African markets, that case was already made by currency volatility, high remittance costs, and the limitations of local banking infrastructure.

The challenge was always utility. What do you do with digital assets next?

MiniPay’s Visa card marks one of the most direct answers yet from within the African fintech ecosystem. Creating an infrastructure that meets stablecoin holders exactly where the old system always fell short.

If the adoption trend continues, what MiniPay is building won’t feel like crypto infrastructure at all. It will just feel like normal card remittance.