Stablecoins Are Already Here. Africa’s Regulators Must Decide What to Do Next

Across Africa, stablecoins are financing trade and filling gaps left by conventional banking - often faster than regulatory frameworks can keep pace. A closed-door roundtable at the 2026 3i Africa Summit made clear that the question is no longer whether to regulate this space, but how to do so without destroying the utility that makes it valuable.

By Pat Patel | CEO, MEA, USA, LATAM & Forums, GFTN

Consider the Accra-based perfume maker who needed to pay a supplier in Singapore urgently. Her supplier would ship immediately against stablecoin, but not against a SWIFT transfer whose arrival he could not verify. Unable to access a licensed platform, she handed cash to a local intermediary who claimed he could help. She was defrauded. Her supplier never received payment. This account, offered at a closed-door roundtable I moderated at the 2026 3i Africa Summit, illustrates the central problem: the consumer who cannot access a regulated platform does not stop using stablecoins. She finds someone in her neighbourhood who can and bears all the risk that follows.

A market that has not waited for permission
Africa's stablecoin market has scaled faster than the regulatory frameworks designed to support it. Operators around the table described businesses settling cross-border trade through channels that predate formal frameworks, workers paid in US stablecoins with no clear route to send funds home, and informal digital dollar flows whose effect on local foreign exchange reserves central banks are only beginning to measure. One participant - an operator with nearly six billion dollars in volume across twenty African jurisdictions since 2019 - noted that ninety-nine percent of activity has been in USD stablecoins, and that the company had closed its retail operation not because demand was absent, but because serving it responsibly was too difficult without regulatory clarity. Licensed, accountable players are constrained. The risk falls on consumers.

Two problems, often confused
The most useful distinction to emerge from the discussion was between regulating stablecoin utilisation and regulating stablecoin issuance, two related but distinct challenges that produce dysfunctional frameworks when conflated. Utilisation is the more urgent need: if an institution is already licensed and supervised for payments activity, requiring a separate virtual asset licence to use a digital payment rail is disproportionate. As one participant put it plainly: a one-to-one dollar-pegged instrument used to settle a trade invoice is a payment instrument and should be regulated as one.

Issuance is more complex and, potentially, Africa's largest structural opportunity. Local currency stablecoins, backed by in-country reserves, could offer diaspora investors a route into domestic bond markets and mobilise capital that conventional instruments cannot reach. But this workstream requires more deliberate architecture -- particularly around reserve management and cross-border fund treatment. The EU's MiCA experience, which requires reserve funds to sit in European banks regardless of where token holders are located, was offered as a cautionary example of issuance rules designed without cross-border use in mind.

Regulate the activity, not the technology. A stablecoin used for payment should be regulated as a payment instrument - not as a crypto asset.

The passporting imperative
Virtual assets are borderless by design. Regulation is national by default. Several participants argued that Africa has a time-limited opportunity to build cross-border regulatory frameworks for digital assets from the ground up, rather than harmonising divergent national regimes retrospectively, as Europe was forced to do after years of regulatory arbitrage, attracted capital to the most permissive jurisdictions.

The lesson is clear: build passporting in from the beginning. Any virtual asset framework developed now should contain explicit mutual recognition provisions, so that a licence granted in one jurisdiction carries weight in another. The Ghana-Rwanda passporting framework, already operational for fintechs, provides a working model. As one central bank leader observed, if African countries are developing virtual asset guidelines, the passporting component should be embedded from day one, because virtual assets are borderless in nature, even if regulation is not.

What good regulation looks like
No single blueprint emerged from the roundtable, but several principles stood out. Regulate the activity, not the technology. Build passporting in from inception. Maintain a genuine open door: operators said consistently that what they need most is not perfect legislation but a credible dialogue process - a regulator willing to hear about new use cases before deployment and respond at the speed the market demands.

And close the literacy gap at every level: in regulators who must supervise technology they did not train for, in operators navigating shifting compliance environments, and in the consumers who, as the perfume maker in Accra discovered, are making high-stakes financial decisions with little protection and even less information.

Three commitments to take forward
The first to formalise regular structured engagement between central banks and fintech operators. Ghana’s model of convening industry actors, not just banks and insurers, in structured dialogue was cited as an approach worth replicating. Regulators cannot design frameworks for markets they do not understand, and understanding requires conversation before legislation, not after.

The second is to embed industry consultation into the law-making process itself. One central bank leader described how, when drafting their virtual assets legislation, they sat with operators first to understand concerns on the ground, and designed the resulting framework to address those concerns alongside the regulator's own. The outcome was a law the market could work with.

The third is to build a coalition of central banks committed to scaling harmonised regulatory MoUs. The Ghana-Rwanda passporting agreement demonstrates that bilateral harmonisation is achievable. The question is how to extend that model, to more jurisdictions, faster, and with virtual assets explicitly in scope. The question is no longer how to build the coalition but whether the will exists to commit to it.

The challenge is not whether to act. It is whether to act together, and at the speed the market has already set.

Roundtable participants
This session was held under Chatham House rules. Participants included:

• Andrea Petrolati, Chief of Product, Hercle
• Craig Stoehr, General Counsel, Yellow Card
• Ebenezer Ghanney, Chief Executive Officer, WeWire
• Hatim Hussain, Digital Assets Regulatory Specialist, Fii; Research Affiliate, University of Cambridge, Financial Innovation for Impact
• Ike Anison, Country Director, Onafriq Ghana LTD
• Kwamena Afful, Founding Director, Pave Financial
• Larry Cooke, Africa Head of Legal, Binance
• Hon. Nick Barigye, Deputy Governor, National Bank of Rwanda
• Nicolai Eddy, Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer, Nala
• Olugbenga Agboola, Founder and CEO, Flutterwave
• Owureku Asare; Head, Fintech and Innovation, Bank of Ghana
• Pat Patel, Chief Executive Officer, MEA, USA, LATAM & Forums, Global Finance & Technology Network (GFTN)
• Philip Kwaw Sebuabe, Head of Virtual Assets Department, Bank of Ghana
• Rupertus Rothenhaeuser, Chief Commercial Officer, AllUnity
• Dr. Zakari Mumuni, First Deputy Governor, Bank of Ghana