Table Of Content
Key Takeaways:
- Onafriq has partnered with Privy to build regulated stablecoin infrastructure for banks, fintechs, and enterprise customers.
- The partnership focuses on backend services such as treasury management, settlement, embedded wallets, and cross-chain stablecoin transfers.
- Rather than launching another consumer crypto product, Onafriq is investing in the infrastructure layer that powers institutional payments.
- The announcement reinforces a broader trend: African payment companies increasingly see stablecoins as settlement rails rather than speculative assets.
Onafriq, which describes itself as Africa’s largest payments network, has partnered with Privy, a stablecoin infrastructure provider, to build out digital asset capabilities for the businesses on its network. The initial phase focuses on cross-chain stablecoin transfers, as well as treasury and settlement workflows. Both companies describe the partnership as a foundation for future cross-border payment and liquidity products.
Onafriq’s Luke Kyohere, the company’s Group Chief Product and Innovation Officer, said the partnership gives the company a building block for faster settlement and better liquidity management. This statement frames it as part of a continued investment in payment technology. Privy co-founder and CEO Henri Stern said real-world stablecoin adoption depends on infrastructure that’s secure and simple to implement, and that the Onafriq partnership helps build that foundation across Africa and beyond. Onafriq says the wallet capabilities will roll out subject to regulatory approval in each market.
This Isn’t Just Another Partnership — It’s Part of a Bigger Strategy
In April 2025, Onafriq partnered with Circle to connect its network of roughly a billion mobile wallets to USDC rails. In February 2026, it partnered with Conduit to use stablecoins for treasury operations, enabling it to convert USDC into dollars via off-ramp channels and rebalance liquidity faster than correspondent banking allows. Then in July 2026, Visa, M-Pesa Africa, and Onafriq launched a live pilot in the Democratic Republic of Congo that settles M-Pesa wallet top-ups in stablecoins behind the scenes via Visa Pay.
Each of these deals adds a different layer to the same underlying strategy. Onafriq is building stablecoin-powered infrastructure underneath Africa’s existing payment ecosystem rather than trying to replace it with something new.
Stablecoins Are Becoming Invisible Infrastructure
In the DRC pilot, Visa executives were explicit that stablecoins operate in the background while keeping customer experience the same. The goal was to have people still use M-Pesa the way they always have. That part—the invisibility of the infrastructure is the direction Onafriq’s broader strategy points in.
Stablecoins increasingly power treasury operations, liquidity management, cross-border settlement, FX optimization, bank-to-bank transfers, and merchant payouts, largely invisible to the end user. Consumers may never interact with a stablecoin directly. This means fintechs do not have to worry about users becoming familiar with crypto and the potential friction that might arise. The blockchain does its work underneath a banking app, mobile wallet, or fintech platform they already know.
Why African Payment Companies Are Building Their Own Rails
The structural problems these deals target are well documented. More than 80% of intra-African payments still route through correspondent banks outside the continent and settle in foreign currencies. The World Bank has put average remittance costs into Sub-Saharan Africa at close to 8% of the transfer amount, making it the most expensive corridor in the world. Settlement often takes days through multiple intermediary banks. Liquidity gets trapped across jurisdictions in the process.
Stablecoins address several of these pain points at once. They provide near-instant, 24/7 settlement instead of multi-day banking cycles. It reduces intermediary costs and allows for treasury management that doesn’t depend on pre-funding accounts in every market.
Regulation Is Becoming a Competitive Advantage
What’s notable across Onafriq’s stablecoin moves, and those of other African fintechs, is how central compliance and licensing have become to the pitch.
Yellow Card has pursued regulatory approvals across multiple jurisdictions, including in Switzerland. Circle has built partnerships with Flutterwave, which is also improving its regulatory footprint, alongside Onafriq. Visa has run parallel stablecoin pilots with Yellow Card, and Mastercard has done the same.
Quidax, the first in Nigeria to receive a provisional license from the Securities and Exchange Commission, is also building stablecoin payment rails for compliant, everyday use cases rather than for trading.
What This Means for African Banks and Fintechs
For banks and payment firms, this infrastructure build-out could translate into access. This could be access to embedded wallets, stablecoin settlement rails, treasury optimization tools, faster regional transfers, and lower FX costs. These institutions wouldn’t need to build blockchain capability themselves.
It also reframes the relationship between traditional finance and crypto-native infrastructure. Banks and mobile money operators now look like participants in stablecoin-powered payments rather than competitors being disrupted by them.
Why This Matters
The more useful question isn’t whether stablecoins will disrupt African finance; plenty of pilots already show they can speed up settlement. It’s which companies end up owning the infrastructure layer that stablecoin-enabled financial services run on.
Between its Circle, Conduit, Visa/M-Pesa, and now Privy partnerships, Onafriq is positioning itself as one of the foundational players connecting traditional African payment rails to blockchain-based settlement, under regulated conditions rather than around them.
