Africa's Rails Start Carrying Trade

Data through September 23, 2026

This Week in a Glance

• SoFi became the first national bank to go live with real-time stablecoin settlement across Mastercard’s global network, with plans to migrate its card programme of US＄25 billion.

• Circle’s Arc mainnet launched with BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Visa, Mastercard and Standard Chartered among its founding validators, and Binance invests US＄100 million alongside a five-year USDC distribution renewal.

• The European System of Central Banks (ESCB) proposed scrapping MiCA’s rule forcing stablecoin issuers to hold up to 60% of reserves in banks.

• Absa switched on Africa’s first bank-grade digital asset custody service.

Stablecoin & Payments: This Week in Data

Stablecoin Market Overview

• Supply Growth Continues, but at a Slower Pace: As of September 23, the global on-chain stablecoin supply stood at US＄316.3 billion (across 155 tokens), up 0.7% over the past 30 days. Supply rose month-on-month for the fifth consecutive period, though growth narrowed from +1.7% last period to +0.7%, marking a slower pace of expansion.

• On-Chain Activity Diverges: Daily transfer volume averaged US＄263.7 billion (MoM +5.0%), daily transactions came in at 74.9 million (MoM -6.3%), and daily active addresses totaled 5.0 million (MoM +4.4%). Transfers and active addresses extended their uptrend, while daily transaction count turned negative — active addresses rose even as transaction frequency fell.

Stablecoin Transaction Overview

• Adjusted Volume at 4.9%: Over the past seven days, nominal transaction volume reached US＄1.1 trillion (accounting for 4.9% of nominal volume), with adjusted real transaction volume at US＄53.4 billion; total transactions were 293.7 million, with adjusted real transactions at 29.0 million.

• Nominal Volume Pulls Back: Over the past seven days, nominal transaction volume was US＄1.1 trillion across 293.7 million transactions, down from US＄1.7 trillion and 426.2 million the previous week.

Sources: Artemis, Visa, OSL Research

Definitions: Adjusted figures exclude arbitrage, fund transfers, market-maker round-trips, and similar noise. Visa classifies individual transactions below US＄250 as retail and those of US＄250 or above as non-retail.

This Week in Stablecoin Payments and Infrastructure

The rails didn’t change this week. The infrastructure underneath them did.

1. SoFi Becomes First National Bank to Settle Card Volume in Stablecoin on Mastercard’s Network

• What Happened: On September 22, SoFi Bank said its debit and credit card programmes had gone live with SoFiUSD settlement across Mastercard’s global payments network, and that it plans to migrate card programmes with annualised volume above US＄25 billion to blockchain settlement. Merchants are not required to hold stablecoins or change existing operational processes. SoFi describes itself as the first national bank to go live with stablecoin settlement on the network.

• Why It Matters: Stablecoins have moved from cross-border transfer into the clearing layer behind conventional card payments. The commercial opportunity sits behind the card rather than on it — 24/7 settlement, liquidity provision and compliant custody for banks, acquirers and large merchants — and the design principle is that on-chain complexity stays hidden behind processes enterprises already run. The cost falls on the issuing bank, which absorbs reserve management, on-chain operations and a new class of failure handling.

2. Circle’s Arc Mainnet Goes Live With Institutional Validators

• What Happened: On September 16, Circle launched the public mainnet of Arc, an EVM-compatible Layer 1 that uses USDC to pay network fees and offers sub-second deterministic settlement, with private transactions and round-the-clock FX planned. Founding validators include BlackRock, DTCC, Intercontinental Exchange, Mastercard, Visa, Standard Chartered and SBI Group. Circle said more than 100 institutions and ecosystem builders participated in the launch.

• Why It Matters: Circle is extending from issuance into a full stack — issuance, chain, FX and developer tooling. If Arc establishes institutional liquidity and compliance network effects, exchanges and custodians face fresh decisions on chain support, capital allocation and partnership priority; the cost is continued ecosystem fragmentation and rising multi-chain support overhead. The measures that will matter are real transaction volume, cross-chain fund flow and participation from Asian institutional nodes.

3. Binance Commits US$100 Million to Circle in Five-Year USDC Deal

• What Happened: On September 22, Circle announced Binance had made a US＄100 million investment and renewed the firms’ commercial agreement for five years. The partnership focuses on expanding access to, promotion of and use of USDC across the Binance platform, with Circle supplying related infrastructure services.

• Why It Matters: The deal puts exchange distribution back at the centre of stablecoin competition. USDC gains long-term global reach, particularly in emerging markets, and Circle reduces its dependence on any single distribution partner. Platforms without an issuance advantage of their own will need to differentiate through fiat channels, regional licences, institutional clients and local settlement.

4. ESCB System Proposes Rewriting MiCA’s Stablecoin Reserve Rules

• What Happened: On September 22, the European System of Central Banks recommended in its MiCA review that the requirement for significant stablecoin issuers to hold 60% of reserves in bank deposits be abolished, replaced by a minimum share of reserves maturing within one to five business days. They also noted substantial enforcement difficulties where non-compliant firms can still reach EU customers.

• Why It Matters: Regulators are shifting from telling issuers what to hold, to asking whether they can pay customers back quickly. That spreads risk away from banks, but issuers will be judged on how fast reserves turn into cash. The opinion also notes non-compliant firms still reach EU customers — the next fix may target market access instead.

This Week in Brief

• On September 17, the US Securities and Exchange Commission issued an “Innovation Exemption“ allowing Tokenized Securities Venues to trade tokenized National Market System stocks through automated market makers and liquidity pools without exchange registration. The framework includes volume limits, equivalent shareholder rights, auditable smart contracts and trading halts aligned with underlying stocks.

• On September 18, Singapore-licensed dtcpay completed a US＄25 million Series A, with SBI Group joining as a strategic investor. The funds will expand its stablecoin payment products and merchant network. Asian stablecoin payments are consolidating around a combination of licence, merchant network and financial-group capital.

• On September 21, the ECB launched Pontes, a Eurosystem platform enabling wholesale tokenised-asset transactions to settle in central bank money. Thirteen banks joined at launch, including Deutsche Bank, Santander, Société Générale and the European Investment Bank, with full implementation expected by 2028. The move reinforces the ECB’s view that trusted central bank money will remain critical as finance becomes increasingly digital.

• On September 21, Absa Corporate and Investment Banking launched Absa Digital Asset Custody, which the bank describes as a digital first for Africa. Built on Ripple’s custody technology, the service provides a regulated environment for safeguarding digital assets for institutional clients across the ten markets in which Absa operates.

• On September 22, reports circulated that both Apple and Google had posted job listings seeking candidates with stablecoin and digital-payments experience, prompting speculation that both companies may be exploring stablecoin payments products.

• On September 23, Georgetown University’s Psaros Center hosted its Financial Markets Quality Conference in Washington under the theme “Innovation and Integrity in Financial Markets,” with a Tokenized Finance panel featuring BlackRock, Bullish and DTCC, and a digital-assets session with Tyler Williams, former Treasury digital-assets counsellor, and Patrick Witt of the President’s Council of Advisers for Digital Assets.

Analyst Deep Dive: Africa’s Rails Start Carrying Trade

Eleven-fold growth on the continental payment network, Africa’s first bank-grade digital asset custody service, and a naira stablecoin settling an IPO subscription — three signals that the rails built over four years are now carrying trade.

Let’s start with the number nobody expected this year. At a media briefing in Lagos on September 11, PAPSS chief executive Mike Ogbalu III told reporters the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System had grown transaction volumes roughly 1,000% year on year. Values rose about 120%. The network now reaches more than 30 African countries across all five regions, connecting 24 central banks, over 200 commercial banks and payment providers, and 16 domestic switches. Ten countries joined in 2026 alone, with 38 expected by December.

The performance figures are the part worth pausing on. PAPSS puts per-transfer savings at 92% to 95%. Settlement completes within 120 seconds against a legacy baseline of three to five days. Netting cuts the foreign exchange a corridor needs by up to 80%. Four years ago this may have been simply a policy plan inside a presentation deck. It is now a working switch that a Nigerian importer and a Kenyan supplier can clear a payment across.

Stability Arrived, and Demand Held

That progress is arriving alongside a macro picture that has quietly improved. On September 22, the Central Bank of Nigeria cut its policy rate by 350 basis points to 23%, the largest single reduction in roughly two decades. Governor Olayemi Cardoso called it an operational reset rather than an easing cycle, but the conditions behind it were real enough: inflation easing for a third straight month to 15.39% in August, and gross external reserves at US＄55.25 billion on September 18 — an eighteen-year high, worth about 11.3 months of imports.

Conventional wisdom says this should be bad news for stablecoins. If dollar scarcity drove African adoption, stability should drain it. The evidence from the past fortnight points firmly the other way, and the reason is that the market has commercial use is broadening beyond the distress trade. Businesses are not buying a hedge. They are buying a corridor.

Four Banks Moving in the Same Direction

Look at who is building. On September 21, Absa Corporate and Investment Banking switched on Absa Digital Asset Custody, which the bank positioned as a digital first for Africa. Built on Ripple’s custody technology, the service spans the ten markets in which Absa operates, serving more than twelve million customers, and took roughly three years to move from experimentation to production. Custody is the foundation rather than the destination: the strategic target is wallet infrastructure that lets institutional clients operate in a broader digital asset ecosystem from inside a regulated bank.

What makes the launch significant is the direction it reveals. European banks largely entered digital assets through trading and investment products. South Africa’s big four are entering through stablecoins, treasury and cross-border settlement — the plumbing, not the speculation. Absa estimates the overwhelming majority of balances on South Africa’s five largest exchanges are stablecoins, mostly USDT. Nedbank has been working on rand-to-USDC conversion and dollar liquidity for trade, remittance and treasury operations. FirstRand moves dollars between group entities around the clock, in near real time, using J.P. Morgan’s Kinexys. Standard Bank has already pushed more than R1 trillion — roughly US＄61 billion — through Aroko, its blockchain-enabled settlement rail, and is the sole African member of a 21-institution consortium planning a dollar stablecoin for the first half of 2027.

Across 2026, South Africa’s four largest banks independently move in the same direction within the same quarter, the debate about whether corporates will use these rails is effectively settled. The question now is which rail carries which leg.

Which Rail Carries Which Leg

Here the PAPSS numbers tell a second story. Volumes up elevenfold against values up 2.2 times means the average payment has shrunk to roughly a fifth of its former size. The network is winning small tickets first — remittances, retail, SME transfers, exactly the flows that domestic instant-payment integrations and PAPSSCARD were designed to capture. That is healthy: mass adoption almost always starts small. But large B2B invoices, from US＄50,000 to US＄5 million, often involve an overseas leg, where local payment networks cannot follow. BCG made the same observation in Beyond Payments this March: Africa’s first fintech wave built formidable domestic rails, and the task now is making them economically productive for B2B and trade flows.

That is the opening stablecoins are filling, and the data says it is the right one. FXC Intelligence’s corridor mapping ranks sub-Saharan Africa the highest-potential region in the world for stablecoin-settled inbound payments, on the combination of very high costs and very low speeds. Artemis/ McKinsey finds B2B the largest stablecoin payment category globally, running near＄226 billion a year. Yellow Card reports around 30% of its customers are now using stablecoins for business operations — contractor payroll, supplier invoices, treasury — and its explanation is about access: more than 70% of African countries have faced FX shortages declared as crises, and in many markets local cards do not work abroad and banks cannot process cross-border payments at all.

The architecture those businesses are working around is the deeper problem: over 80% of intra-African payments still detour through correspondent banks in New York or London.

The Local-Currency Layer Is Live

Meanwhile the local-currency layer is coming alive faster than most forecasts allowed. cNGN, Nigeria’s regulated naira stablecoin, gained a Solana liquidity pool on Orca this week, its second decentralised venue inside a month. It arrived days after GetEquity began issuing tokens for the Dangote Refinery IPO on Solana and Base, with subscriptions settled in cNGN. A naira stablecoin clearing a domestic capital markets transaction is a different beast entirely from a dollar token used to exit the naira. Add the PAPSS African Currency Marketplace, which matches African currency pairs directly rather than through a hard-currency intermediary, and the shape of a two-layer system comes into focus: local-currency rails for the African leg, regulated dollar settlement for the global one — the mirror image of Europe, where the ECB’s Pontes launch this week puts central bank money underneath tokenised settlement instead.

Regulators are moving to meet it. Kenya’s VASP Regulations 2026, which took effect on July 22, created ten licence categories across the Central Bank of Kenya and the Capital Markets Authority, including a purpose-built stablecoin issuance regime, with a November 4 transition deadline. Nigeria’s SEC has proposed a tighter perimeter for digital asset firms. South Africa’s draft exchange-control framework, which would bring certain crypto transfers into capital-flow reporting and set out permissions for authorised service providers, closes for comment at the end of this month — a change that could give regulated banks a clearer route to offering cross-border digital asset services. Several major African markets will enter 2027 with materially clearer rules where two years ago there was ambiguity.

What It Means for Businesses

For businesses, the practical work is straightforward and increasingly rewarding. Map corridors rather than regions, because regional averages hide routes clearing near 1% alongside routes still costing double digits once the spread is counted. Match the rail to the leg: PAPSS and domestic instant-payment networks where they reach, regulated stablecoin settlement where the correspondent chain is slow and opaque. Check licensing at both ends. And favour the structure that holds up under audit — fiat on both ends, digital speed in the middle. It is the same principle behind SoFi’s card settlement launch this week, where merchants hold no stablecoins and change nothing, and behind OSL Business Payments’ collaboration with Waka on Africa-to-global trade corridors.

Africa spent four years proving a continental payment network could be built. September suggests the harder part is now underway: trade actually moving over it.

Sources: Afreximbank/PAPSS; Central Bank of Nigeria; Absa CIB; Blockstories; World Bank Remittance Prices; Swift, Insights into the African Payments Landscape (2026); BCG, Beyond Payments (March 2026); FXC Intelligence; Artemis/ McKinsey; Yellow Card; Mariblock; Kenya Legal Notice 134 of 2026; SARB; OSL Research