HashKey MENA, Aptos, and Daya Pilot Stablecoin Payments Corridor for Africa-UAE Trade

What To Know:

• HashKey MENA, Aptos Foundation, and Daya have launched a pilot initiative to explore regulated stablecoin-powered trade settlement between the Middle East and Africa.
• The pilot will initially focus on B2B payment flows using stablecoins on the Aptos blockchain.
• Daya will provide African payment infrastructure, including Naira on/off ramps, virtual accounts, payment APIs, and liquidity routing.
• The initiative aims to reduce the cost, friction, and settlement delays associated with traditional correspondent banking networks.

On June 4, HashKey MENA, Aptos Foundation, and African payments platform Daya signed a Corridor Pilot Agreement to test regulated stablecoin settlement for business payments between the UAE and Africa.

The initiative, an early-stage pilot rather than a live production network, is one of the most structured attempts yet to build a compliant stablecoin infrastructure specifically for Africa-Middle East trade flows.

What The Stablecoin Corridor Does For Businesses

The pilot is designed for B2B payments. Users, in this case, businesses, will be able to fund transactions by converting local currency into stablecoins at one end of the corridor. This payment will be settled on the Aptos Layer-1 blockchain and converted back to local currency at the destination.

HashKey MENA provides regulation-compliant AED/USD and multi-currency on- and off-ramps on a first-party basis. This will enable regional businesses to move between local fiat and digital assets.

Daya acts as the local payment infrastructure partner. In this agreement, they’d provide on- and off-ramp connectivity through their proprietary smart routing engine to maximise liquidity across African markets. Daya’s full-stack API includes virtual Naira accounts, SWIFT and bank wire capabilities, payment APIs, and third-party payouts.

The initial focus is on the Nigerian Naira, with additional African currencies planned for later phases.

Why Traditional Trade Corridors Fall Short

Higher costs and FX friction often burden traditional remittance and FX corridors. They also have longer settlement timelines through traditional banking channels. In Africa, these remittance costs are especially high, more than anywhere else in the globe.

For businesses moving money between Africa and the Gulf, those delays and markups become slower trade cycles and tighter margins.

Stablecoins offer a potential workaround. They provide near-instant settlement, reduced cost, programmable payment flows, and reduced reliance on correspondent banking chains.

The infrastructure to make the stablecoin solution practical for enterprise payments remained underexplored in most African markets. This pilot is an attempt to address that gap directly.

The Regulatory Layer

HashKey MENA already possesses a VASP license from Dubai’s Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority. The license covers spot trading and OTC services. The pilot is structured to operate within VARA’s rigorous licensing framework and in accordance with its broader regulatory requirements.

Operating within this framework is central to the initiative’s positioning. It is designed from the outset as a compliant payment rail, not a workaround to existing financial regulation.

How this partnership will function within the African regulatory space, or how it will navigate it, remains to be seen.

Africa Joins HashKey’s Asia Connect Network

This partnership is an expansion of HashKey’s Asia Connect network into Africa.

Hashkey launched its inaugural stablecoin corridor between Hong Kong and the Philippines in mid-2025. That same year, HashKey Global announced the launch of HashKey MENA, marking its extension into the Middle East.

The network has integrated nodes across Southeast Asia, including a collaboration with CAEX, and Vietnam’s VP Bank announced in April 2026.

Daya’s role fits within that architecture. In the words of Daya cofounder, Paul Joe, “Africa is already a frontrunner in stablecoin adoption. What’s been missing is the regulated infrastructure and scalable liquidity to connect that demand to the rest of the world.”

He’s not wrong. Between July 2023 and June 2024, Nigeria, the continent’s largest crypto market, recorded $22 billion in stablecoin transactions. According to BVNK’S Stablecoin Utility Report, 79% of active crypto users on the continent hold stablecoins. 75% of users also plan to increase their stablecoin holdings.

This adoption is driven primarily by access to dollars and remittances. The challenge has never been demand but infrastructure.

Why Aptos Foundation As a Partner

The Aptos Foundation acts as an ecosystem partner, helping fund more cost-efficient execution across the protocol.

Aptos was designed for high throughput and fast transaction finality, practical requirements for a payments corridor that needs to process business transactions reliably.

The partnership adds a concrete trade finance use case to Aptos’ growing enterprise strategy.

Why this matters: the challenge has shifted from demand to infrastructure and liquidity

This initiative joins a wave of recent projects tackling that problem from different angles.

Flutterwave’s stablecoin infrastructure work, Tempo’s European-African rails, and Telcoin’s mobile payment integrations are all indicative of stablecoins moving from speculative instruments to settlement infrastructure.

The more pointed question now is which companies will own the regulated rails connecting African businesses to global markets, and on what terms.

HashKey’s expansion into Africa through a compliance-first framework suggests that the answer may increasingly come from institutional digital asset players rather than traditional remittance providers.

Whether this pilot scales into a full B2B trade settlement network will depend on enterprise adoption, liquidity depth across additional African currencies, and regulators’ responses on both sides of the corridor.