Nigeria Already Uses Stablecoins; Export Firms Are Still Waiting on Banks

Data through September 30, 2026

This Week in a Glance

• The Federal Reserve invites public consultation on stablecoin regulation, clarifying issuance requirements for the banks it supervises.

• The United States is weighing the overseas promotion of dollar-pegged stablecoins to reinforce the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency.

• Open Standard disclosed for the first time the core stakeholders behind its sprawling industry consortium.

Stablecoin & Payments: This Week in Data

Stablecoin Market Overview

• Supply Remains Stable: As of September 30, the global on-chain stablecoin supply stood at US$316.7 billion (across 155 tokens), up 0.1% over the past 30 days. Supply rose month-on-month for the sixth consecutive period, though growth narrowed further to remain largely flat compared to the last period. Daily active addresses totaled 5.1 million (MoM +7%).

• On-Chain Retail Transactions Decline: Over the past seven days, adjusted daily transfer volume averaged US$233.7 billion, and adjusted daily transactions came in at 13.08 million. Real retail transaction volume stood at approximately US$1.8 billion (MoM -10%), with transaction count totaling 40.1 million (MoM -10%).

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

Everybody is now using stablecoins, and everybody wants to issue stablecoins.

1. Federal Reserve Opens Consultation on Stablecoin Capital and Issuance Rules

• What Happened: On September 24, the Federal Reserve released two proposals for public consultation on the supervision of stablecoins. The first would require Board-supervised payment stablecoin issuers to fully back their tokens with high-quality liquid assets such as short-term US Treasuries, and would clarify which stablecoin-related activities are permissible for banks under Federal Reserve supervision. The second would establish a dedicated application process for Board-supervised banks seeking to issue stablecoins. The comment period for the proposals runs for 60 days.

• Why It Matters: The GENIUS Act is set to take effect on January 18, 2027, after which no party may issue a payment stablecoin in the United States without a federal or state license. The Federal Reserve's rules give banks a relatively clear supervisory pathway for issuing stablecoins. The market expects the framework to channel substantial domestic deposits and foreign capital into Treasury-backed stablecoins, structurally increasing demand for short-term US government debt.

2. US Weighs Promoting Overseas Use of Dollar Stablecoins

• What Happened: On September 24, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that the United States is considering promoting the overseas use of dollar-pegged stablecoins to reinforce the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency and to boost market demand for US Treasuries. According to those people, one option under consideration by the Trump administration is to establish joint ventures between the government and private-sector firms. The effort could span multiple federal agencies, including the Treasury Department, the State Department and the US International Development Finance Corporation.

• Why It Matters: For every dollar of a dollar stablecoin in circulation, the issuer must hold an equivalent amount of cash or short-term Treasuries in reserve. Therefore, if the government promotes the adoption of dollar stablecoins abroad, it would redirect offshore dollar demand currently held within the eurodollar system into the compliant, onshore Treasury market, reinforcing global demand for dollar reserve assets.

3. Open Standard Defines Corporate Governance Structure and Founding Partners

• What Happened: On September 25, Open Standard unveiled its governance structure. Zach Abrams, a co-founder of the company, will step down as Chief Executive Officer of Stripe to become the full-time Chief Executive Officer of Open Standard. Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa are the founding partners of the stablecoin consortium company, and will invest more than US$1 billion to establish the initial supply of OpenUSD. A limited number of additional founding partners will be named at a later date.

• Why It Matters: OpenUSD was launched on June 30 by a consortium of more than 140 companies. Three months on, the market can finally see which players within that sprawling alliance are the funding and governance core. Led by card networks and payments companies, Open Standard has also signaled clearly its strategy of positioning OUSD as a consumer payment instrument.

4. HSBC Launches Compliant Hong Kong Dollar Stablecoin HSBC RedCoin

• What Happened: On September 30, HSBC announced the forthcoming launch of HSBC RedCoin, a compliant Hong Kong dollar stablecoin it will issue in Hong Kong. The first phase will focus on person-to-person (P2P) and person-to-merchant (P2M) payments, expanding later into commercial banking and corporate uses. HSBC had previously expected its stablecoin to debut in the second half of 2026; alongside the naming, it has not yet specified a launch date.

• Why It Matters: With HSBC's reveal of RedCoin, both issuers granted stablecoin issuer licenses by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority this April have now disclosed their respective products and operating strategies. Whereas Standard Chartered-backed Anchorpoint Financial chose to focus first on business-to-business use cases, HSBC has opted for the mass-retail, business-to-consumer path more familiar to the bank. That strategy mirrors the market playbook it used years ago to launch PayMe, its instant-transfer e-wallet.

This Week in Brief

• On September 28, Citi announced an expanded collaboration with Coinbase to jointly launch two payment services that convert digital assets into fiat. Through Citi, Coinbase introduced Virtual Accounts, giving clients a bank-account-like experience in which incoming fiat is automatically converted into stablecoins. Separately, Citi's settlement platform Spring will integrate Coinbase's payment technology, letting institutional clients receive stablecoins directly at checkout, with Citi automatically converting them into fiat to complete settlement.

• On September 29, MoonPay reportedly established a subsidiary in South Korea, aiming to make the country a hub for its Asia-Pacific expansion. The company has already reached agreements with KakaoBank, Woori Bank and KB Financial Group, spanning cross-border payments, Korean won stablecoin distribution, e-wallets and on- and off-ramps for digital assets.

• On September 29, Morgan Stanley reportedly set up a Digital Asset Lab to test blockchain technologies including stablecoins, tokenized deposits, central bank digital currencies, tokenized money-market funds and decentralized finance, in an environment isolated from its core banking systems.

• On September 29, the government of El Salvador announced a collaboration with startup Modveon to develop a government-backed platform called Sivar, marking a shift in the country's sovereign digital-currency focus from Bitcoin toward stablecoins. Sivar will provide digital financial services on the Base network, allowing citizens to securely send and hold stablecoins and to conveniently receive cross-border remittances. The platform also offers civic-participation services built on a government digital-identity system, enabling domestic and overseas users to post social media content and to vote in local elections, among other functions.

• On September 30, AllUnity, a licensed European stablecoin issuer, launched USDAU, a US dollar stablecoin compliant with the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCAR). It is the company's fourth fiat-backed stablecoin, following its euro, Swiss franc and Swedish krona stablecoins. USDAU maintains a 1:1 peg to the US dollar through segregated reserves and launches initially across six blockchains: Ethereum, Solana, Base, Tempo, Arc and Polygon.

Analyst Deep Dive：Nigeria Already Uses Stablecoins; Export Firms Are Still Waiting on Banks

Nigeria has long since completed its user education; what the market needs now is whoever can turn stablecoins into a cross-border payment tool that businesses can use with confidence.

Trade between Nigeria and Asia is accelerating, but as goods move faster, the money does not always keep pace. According to the UN Comtrade database, Asia is Nigeria's largest market for merchandise trade, and Southeast Asia is a core export destination. In 2024, Nigeria's one-way exports to Indonesia alone reached US$2.69 billion, with an annualized growth rate above 7% over the past five years. Along this two-way, complementary corridor, Nigeria exports large volumes of commodities such as oil, natural gas and cocoa beans to Southeast Asia, and imports enormous quantities of light manufactured goods, pharmaceutical products and machinery from Southeast Asia, India and other Asian economies.

This expanding bilateral corridor between emerging markets plays a critical role in regional and global supply chains. But once trade reaches the finance department of an import-export firm, the problem turns concrete: the invoice has been issued and the goods are ready to ship, yet the U.S. dollar allocation, the banking route, the settlement timing and the final exchange rate are often difficult to lock down efficiently, on time and in full.

Complex Settlement Layers and High Fees

Nigerian importers usually price their goods in naira, but they must pay suppliers in U.S. dollars or in the currency of the Asian supplier's home market. A single ordinary-looking payment may pass through a local bank, a U.S. dollar correspondent bank, an offshore intermediary bank and the receiving bank. Each additional layer brings another round of compliance review, another fee deduction and another chance of mismatched information.

For large companies, this means funds must be set aside earlier and financial forecasting becomes harder. For small and medium-sized importers, it can turn directly into order risk. The quote's validity period expires before the payment arrives. The exchange rate moves during the wait, squeezing an already thin margin further. Intermediary fees are hard to confirm in advance, so the amount the supplier receives does not match the invoice, and the accounts must be reconciled again.

The same problem shows up in personal remittances. World Bank data show that in the third quarter of 2025, the average cost of sending small sums to Sub-Saharan Africa still stood at 8.46%, the highest of any region in the world. Personal cross-border remittance figures do not map directly onto corporate trade payments, but they do reflect the underlying cost of the local payment infrastructure today.

The problem, therefore, is not simply that fees are high. It is that a business cannot obtain four things at once: a certain price, a certain settlement time, a complete view of payment status, and a clean record it can hand to its audit and compliance teams.

Third in the World for Stablecoin Adoption

Stablecoins offer a different design. They do not require Nigerian companies to hold digital assets over the long term, nor do they ask Asian suppliers to change how they receive payment. Instead, they use a regulated stablecoin to carry value across the middle, between fiat currencies at each end.

An ideal transaction can run like this: the Nigerian importer pays naira to a licensed service provider; after the provider completes customer identification, source-of-funds checks and trade-background review, it converts the funds into a U.S. dollar stablecoin; the stablecoin moves in near real time to a partner institution on the Asian side over a blockchain network; and after the counterparty converts it, the supplier is paid in U.S. dollars, Indonesian rupiah or another local currency. The importer pays naira, the exporter receives fiat, and the stablecoin exists only in the intermediary settlement layer.

The most direct value of this model comes in three parts. Transactions need not be confined to traditional banking hours. The route and the fees can be locked in before payment. And the on-chain record makes payment status easier to track and reconciliation easier to automate.

This is not a paper exercise. According to Chainalysis, Nigeria ranks third in the world on the firm's Global Crypto Adoption Index, and stablecoins play a critical role in that standing. In the first quarter of 2024, Nigeria's stablecoin transaction volume approached US$3 billion. Stablecoins were not only the largest digital-asset category among transactions under US$1 million in the country; they also accounted for roughly 40% of total stablecoin inflows across Sub-Saharan Africa.

This shows that the local market has already completed the initial round of user education. The key to the next stage of competition is no longer whether businesses are willing to use stablecoins. It is who can package stablecoins into a payment service that businesses can use with confidence.

More Than a Transfer Address

What a business needs has never been a wallet address. It needs a payment or an incoming receipt that is secure, timely and traceable. Stablecoin payments, therefore, cannot solve only the on-chain transfer. They must also solve a series of problems with fiat currency at both ends, including liquidity, compliance and risk control, customer and beneficiary screening, transaction monitoring and refund mechanisms.

This is the dividing line between a stablecoin solution and an ordinary crypto transfer. The former starts from compliant trade, verifying contracts, invoices, payers and payees. The latter often cares only about whether an asset has moved from one address to another. For a business, fast settlement is only the baseline; whether problems can be traced and resolved is what decides whether the channel can be used over the long term.

The Central Bank of Nigeria has already placed a stablecoin regulatory framework, payment interoperability and consumer protection among its priorities for developing the payment system. But different Asian markets do not draw the regulatory boundaries around stablecoins, payment services and digital assets in the same place. A genuinely scalable solution, therefore, must be built corridor by corridor: defining which entities may receive funds, which currencies may be used for settlement, how money enters and exits, and how data and documentation are retained.

Stablecoins will not replace banks, nor can they eliminate trade fraud, documentation errors or counterparty risk. What they can do is compress value transfer that once detoured through multiple layers of correspondent banks into a shorter, more transparent, near-real-time settlement path.

For the high-frequency, small-batch trade between Nigeria and Asia, sensitive to both time and exchange rates, this change matters especially. A business may not care which chain sits behind a payment, but it certainly cares when the supplier confirms receipt, what the actual cost is, whether it can check the status of the funds in real time, and whether each transaction can clear compliance and audit.

The biggest opportunity in stablecoin payments, therefore, is not to bring more businesses into the crypto world. It is to let businesses barely notice that crypto technology is there at all. The goods are already moving at high speed between Nigeria and Asia. What needs fixing next is the cross-border highway the money travels on.