By Francesca Aliverti, Head of Middle East and Africa, Global Finance & Technology Network (GFTN)
There is a version of the stablecoin revolution that is genuinely exciting for Africa. Faster cross-border payments. Lower remittance costs. Financial access for the millions still sitting outside the formal economy. Real, meaningful progress on problems that have resisted solution for decades.
And then there is the version we do not talk about enough: the one where dollar-backed stablecoins quietly become the dominant medium of exchange across the continent‚ and African central banks lose the ability to run effective monetary policy.
Both versions are possible. Which one materialises depends on decisions being made right now.
These were the questions at the heart of Digital Currency Diplomacy: CBDCs, Stablecoins and the New Geopolitics of Money, a panel at the Inclusive FinTech Forum 2026 that brought together central bankers, fintech founders, and private sector innovators for one of the most candid conversations I have witnessed on this topic. The insights shared by the panellists inform much of what follows.
The Stablecoin Moment Has Arrived
Let's be clear about where we are. Stablecoins are no longer a niche instrument for crypto enthusiasts. US policy shifts have accelerated their legitimacy and reach at a pace few anticipated. Dollar-backed stablecoins - USDT, USDC and their successors - are already moving across African markets, often faster than regulatory frameworks can track them.
For payments, this is genuinely useful. Stablecoins eliminate the need for pre-funded accounts, reduce intermediary layers, and enable near-instant settlement across borders. For businesses and individuals navigating Africa's fragmented payment corridors, that is not a marginal improvement‚ it is transformative.
But speed and efficiency come packaged with something else: dollar exposure. And when dollars move through digital rails with limited local regulatory oversight, the effect on monetary sovereignty is not theoretical. It is direct.
The Dollarisation Risk Nobody Wants to Name
When a population begins to transact primarily in dollar-backed stablecoins, saving in them, pricing goods in them, preferring them over local currency‚ a central bank's ability to set interest rates, manage inflation, and respond to economic shocks diminishes. This is dollarisation. It has happened before, in economies under stress, and it has rarely ended well for the countries concerned.
The difference now is the mechanism. Previous waves of dollarisation were driven by hyperinflation and currency collapse. What we are seeing today is subtler: a technology-enabled drift, driven not by crisis but by convenience. Stablecoins are simply easier, cheaper, and faster. For ordinary people making ordinary transactions, that is reason enough.
This is not an argument against stablecoins. It is an argument for being clear-eyed about what unchecked dollar-backed stablecoin adoption means for the ability of African governments to manage their own economies.
As Nicolai Eddy, Co-Founder & COO of Nala, put it candidly: "When dollars are moving through digital currency with no regulatory oversight locally, that renders monetary policy ineffective across markets in Africa."
The Answer Is Not to Shut the Door
Prohibition is not the solution‚ and attempting it would be both futile and counterproductive. The direction of travel is set. What Africa needs is not a wall against stablecoins, but a strategy for ensuring that digital currency adoption serves African economies rather than gradually eroding them.
That strategy has two parts.
The first is building the sovereign alternative. CBDCs - central bank digital currencies - offer the same programmability, speed, and efficiency that make stablecoins attractive, anchored to local currencies and under domestic regulatory control. Rwanda's proof of concept, Ghana's pilot programme, and similar initiatives across the continent are not slow or behind the curve. They are doing something harder and more important: building infrastructure that delivers financial inclusion without ceding monetary sovereignty.
As Ingrid Cyuzuzo of the National Bank of Rwanda articulated: "What are you solving for? I'm solving for the last mile‚ for people who don't have access, allowing them to transact offline where needed, and delivering the cost efficiencies that digital currencies make possible."
That framing matters. The goal is not to have a CBDC. The goal is financial resilience and inclusion, and the technology should follow the problem, not the other way around.
Andrea Petrolati, Chief of Product at Hercle, framed the complementarity well: "By matching cross-border stablecoin settlement with the finality of CBDC, you can actually deliver a realistic framework to deliver funds." In other words, the two instruments do not compete, they complete each other.
The second part is local currency stablecoins. The stablecoin ecosystem does not have to be dollar-only. We are already seeing Rwandan franc-backed instruments in development, and equivalent initiatives in Latin America and Asia. Africa needs to accelerate this‚ creating stablecoin infrastructure that captures the benefits of the technology while keeping value and monetary control within the continent.
The Bolder Vision: Anchored to Wealth, Not Debt
Here is where I want to push the conversation further, because I think we are still thinking too small.
Local currency stablecoins are better than dollar-backed ones. But local currencies themselves can be volatile, vulnerable to external shocks, and subject to the same pressures that drove people toward dollar stablecoins in the first place. We may be solving the symptom rather than the condition.
What if Africa's stablecoins were not anchored to currency at all, but to commodities?
The continent holds a disproportionate share of the world's most valuable resources. Gold. Oil. Cobalt. Lithium. Agricultural commodities that feed the globe. These are not abstract assets, they are the real, tangible wealth of African nations, and for generations that wealth has been extracted, priced in dollars, and shipped elsewhere.
A resource-backed stablecoin changes that equation. Instead of pegging value to a foreign currency and inheriting its debt dynamics, you anchor it to something Africa actually has, and in doing so, create a monetary instrument that reflects African economic reality rather than replicating Western monetary dependency in digital form.
This is not without complexity. Commodity prices fluctuate. Governance frameworks would need to be robust. The infrastructure for reserve verification and transparency would have to be built from scratch. None of this is simple.
But the global monetary system was not built in a day either, and it was built by those who showed up to design it.
Africa has spent too long operating within a financial architecture designed by others, for others. The stablecoin moment is one of the rare occasions when the rules are genuinely still being written. A resource-backed digital currency, whether issued by a central bank, a pan-African institution, or a consortium of resource-rich nations, would not just protect Africa from dollarization. It would give Africa something it has rarely had: monetary leverage.
That is the conversation I want to be having in the years ahead.
Africa Gets to Choose
Here is what I find genuinely hopeful: Africa is not playing catch-up on this. The continent's regulators are thoughtful, its fintech ecosystem is dynamic, and its central banks are increasingly willing to engage the private sector as partners rather than subjects.
The sandbox approaches being adopted in Ghana and Rwanda are exactly right‚ test, learn, and regulate progressively rather than reactively. The private sector, for its part, needs to meet that openness with genuine governance and responsibility.
Owureku Asare of the Bank of Ghana put the stakes plainly: "The underlying base of all these conversations is trust. Which of these instruments will be able to facilitate the trust of citizens and players in the ecosystem? That is where we are heading."
Trust, in the end, is what determines whether a currency‚ digital or otherwise‚ takes hold. And trust is something that can be built deliberately or surrendered by default.
The stablecoin era is here. Africa has the knowledge, the institutions, and the momentum to shape it. The only question is whether it acts with the urgency the moment demands.