Table Of Content
Key Takeaways:
- Visa, M-PESA Africa, and Onafriq have launched a stablecoin-powered cross-border payments pilot in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
- The pilot will use stablecoins as the settlement layer for mobile money transactions, while users continue interacting with familiar M-PESA wallets.
- Rather than introducing crypto directly to consumers, the project tests whether stablecoins can modernise the infrastructure behind Africa’s payment systems.
- The initiative reflects a broader shift in which global payment giants are embracing stablecoins as financial infrastructure rather than speculative assets.
Global payment giant Visa, alongside M-PESA Africa and pan-African payments network Onafriq, has launched a stablecoin pilot program in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The pilot will settle cross-border mobile money transactions using U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins.
The goal is to test whether blockchain-powered digital assets can solve the problems associated with remittances in Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, the focus is on the high cost and operational delays that make international money transfers slow and expensive.
The pilot targets scenarios such as cross-border mobile wallet top-ups, international commercial transactions, and everyday remittances.
While the announcement involves digital assets, this is not a consumer crypto wallet launch. Consumers will still interact with their familiar M-PESA wallets and view balances in local currencies.
What will happen is the integration of stablecoins behind the scenes as the settlement layer beneath existing financial systems.
The Bigger Story: Stablecoins Are Becoming Invisible Infrastructure
Visa’s stablecoin pilot and the underlying logic are not new to Africa. In fact, Africa is currently witnessing a structural shift in remittances and the utilization of stablecoins.
More fintechs are developing similar systems, with blockchain technology becoming an invisible layer. This evolution mirrors the early days of online internet payments.
When consumers make a purchase online today, they do not think about TCP/IP or the underlying network protocols that transfer data packets. They simply expect the payment to go through instantly. Stablecoins are entering the same phase of industrial maturity.
Its use case in cross-border settlement arises from the fact that stablecoins allow financial institutions to bypass slow, multi-layered intermediary networks. All of that without requiring the end-user to know anything about digital wallets, private keys, or gas fees.
The market might end up favoring fintechs and financial institutions that seamlessly embed stablecoins into widely used networks without disrupting the customer experience.
Why Mobile Money Is the Perfect Partner for Stablecoins
The African market’s widely used network in this case is mobile money, a system pioneered by M-PESA on the continent.
In 2025, there were over 2 billion registered mobile money accounts, 268 million more than the previous year. The majority of the new accounts came from Sub-Saharan Africa.
The global value of mobile money transactions surged 23% to $2.1 trillion. Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for nearly 70% of that figure, processing $1.4 trillion in 96 billion transactions.
Africa has already solved domestic digital payments through mobile money. However, cross-border settlement remains a major hurdle.
While mobile money functions perfectly within national borders, sending funds across and to sub-Saharan Africa remains expensive, fragmented, and operationally complex.
The average cost of sending $200 to sub-Saharan Africa was 8.78 %. The global average cost is only 6.49%.
Stablecoins solve an entirely different problem than mobile money. Mobile money excels at the local retail layer; stablecoins excel at the global wholesale layer.
The partnership between Visa, M-PESA, and Onafriq makes sense because it pairs a highly successful domestic rail with a technology designed for international movement.
Why Visa Is Moving Now
Visa has steadily expanded its stablecoin settlement capabilities. This expansion coincides with the rise in stablecoin settlement volumes within Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
This pilot also builds directly upon Visa’s previous regional partnerships. In June 2025, Visa announced a collaboration with African crypto fintech Yellow Card to explore stablecoin treasury management and liquidity solutions.
Visa is also part of a consortium that recently announced plans to issue OpenUSD, a new dollar-pegged stablecoin.
It also coincides with a massive rise in tokenized transactions, indicating a growing institutional appetite for secure, programmable payment infrastructure.
Visa is not attempting to replace traditional payment rails or displace mobile money networks. Trying the latter is almost futile; instead, it is modernizing the settlement layer. All while preserving the existing customer interfaces that users already trust.
This signals that global companies might view blockchain as a complementary tool rather than as direct competition to their businesses.
Why DR Congo Matters
Infrastructure gaps often create the clearest opportunities for financial innovation. The DRC presents a unique combination of rapid mobile money adoption alongside a massive underbanked population. Formal financial inclusion estimates sit at around 30 percent of the adult population.
Furthermore, the DRC handles vast remittance inflows and outflows. An estimated 81% of these transactions happen outside formal channels. Average remittance costs from Belgium to the DRC are roughly 8.5% using formal networks. With informal networks, those costs drop to 5%.
Launching a pilot in a market with these characteristics allows the partners to test the technology under high-demand, high-friction conditions.
Interestingly, this pilot introduces an intriguing regulatory dynamic. The Central Bank of Congo has actively sought to reduce the heavy dollarization of the DRC economy and boost the use of the local Congolese franc.
The introduction of USD-pegged stablecoin-powered settlement rails implicitly embeds a digital version of the U.S. dollar into the nation’s fastest-growing mobile transaction network.
How this will sit with regulators remains to be seen, but it is one trend that regional regulators across the continent will undoubtedly monitor closely.
What This Means for African Fintechs
As traditional giants begin to utilize blockchain settlement, one can expect regulatory frameworks and pathways to become clearer or more structured. This opens doors for startups to build complementary B2B services.
However, the entry of traditional payment networks means competition is no longer limited to crypto-native startups. With legacy names like Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe actively building around stablecoins, the barrier to entry has risen.
Startups can no longer survive solely on the novelty of offering digital asset rails; they must offer superior localized services or focus heavily on interoperability.
The greatest long-term opportunity for African fintechs lies in building the bridges that connect banks, mobile wallets, local payment networks, and stablecoin settlement rails into a single, cohesive financial ecosystem.
How This Fits Africa’s Stablecoin Trend
When viewed alongside other recent developments across the continent, the pilot program shows a structural convergence between traditional finance and blockchain infrastructure.
Major pan-African payment firms like Flutterwave have explored integrations with digital assets such as Ripple’s RLUSD. Paga has developed specialized strategies for stablecoin infrastructure.
Concurrently, consumer-facing applications like Opera’s MiniPay are making stablecoins directly spendable. Platforms like AEON are creating direct bridges between crypto rails and domestic mobile money networks.
Even central banks are engaging with this trend, as seen in Nigeria’s ongoing push for domestic programmable payment tokens like the cNGN.
If this pilot succeeds, it will demonstrate that the ultimate utility of stablecoins could be providing the invisible, high-speed settlement rails needed to connect Africa’s fragmented payment ecosystem.
