Stablepay

Stablepay is a stablecoin-powered peer-to-peer payments network built for Africa, enabling users to transact directly from their crypto wallets while merchants and recipients receive local currency through familiar channels such as mobile money, telcos, fintechs, and financial institutions. The platform is founded by executives with backgrounds at Visa, Absa, and Citi, and positions itself as a compliant on-chain alternative to legacy cross-border payment rails across five initial markets: Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda.

The Problem Stablepay Addresses

Cross-border and domestic payments across Africa remain expensive, slow, and fragmented. Traditional rails — SWIFT, card networks, and correspondent banking — impose high fees, multi-day settlement windows, and operational complexity that disadvantages both consumers and businesses. Stablecoins offer a programmable, near-instant alternative, but the last-mile problem — converting digital dollars into usable local currency at point-of-sale or mobile money wallets — has historically required deep integration work that most African fintechs cannot absorb.

Stablepay targets this gap by abstracting the on-chain complexity into a clean payments API and consumer-facing wallet, so that everyday transactions can run on blockchain rails without requiring end users to understand or manage crypto directly.

Core Mechanism

The network operates around two primary flows.

Spend with Stablecoin allows holders of USDC to pay merchants directly from their stablecoin wallets. When a user initiates a payment, Stablepay converts the stablecoin amount into local currency in real time and settles to the merchant through their preferred receiving channel — mobile money operators such as M-Pesa, bank accounts, or fintech platforms. The merchant experience mirrors existing mobile money or card acceptance without requiring any crypto knowledge.

Send to Stablecoin is a credential-based transfer layer. Each user holds a Stablepay Credential, a human-readable on-chain identity that links a Stablepay ID to a stablecoin wallet address. This functions like a username for money: senders enter a Stablepay ID rather than a wallet address, and the underlying USDC transfer settles entirely on-chain. The interface is designed to feel like modern remittance apps while operating entirely on blockchain infrastructure.

Blockchain and Stablecoin Infrastructure

Stablepay is built on Solana and Base. Solana provides the throughput and low transaction fees that make small-value, high-frequency payments economically viable — a critical requirement in African markets where average transaction sizes can be modest. Base extends the reach to Ethereum-aligned liquidity and users.

The platform's stablecoin of choice is USDC, issued by Circle. Stablepay is a Circle Alliance partner and uses both USDC and Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP), which enables native USDC movement between Solana and Base without bridging through wrapped token equivalents. This reduces settlement risk and eliminates the trust assumptions associated with third-party bridges.

Ecosystem Partners and Integrations

Stablepay's partner ecosystem spans exchanges and wallets — Binance, Bybit, Valr, Chipper Wallet, Quidax, and Busha — alongside African-native payment processors Paystack and Flutterwave. This combination gives the platform both the crypto on-ramp liquidity needed to acquire USDC and the local payment disbursement infrastructure needed to convert stablecoins into local currency.

The platform is available on Android, iOS, and web, and exposes a Payment API for fintech developers and financial institutions to integrate stablecoin-to-local-currency rails into their own products without building the blockchain layer themselves.

Target Users

Stablepay addresses three distinct segments. For consumers, it provides a stablecoin wallet with a familiar payments interface for everyday spending. For fintechs and developers, the Payment API enables rapid integration of stablecoin settlement into existing apps and platforms. For telcos and financial institutions, it offers a wholesale on-chain payment rail that can be layered beneath their existing mobile money and remittance products.

Status and Access

As of mid-2025, Stablepay is in early access. Developers and institutions can request API credentials through the team at [email protected] or via the website's Request Access form. The documentation at docs.stablepay.ai covers the API integration path for production deployment.

Why Solana

Solana's transaction throughput and sub-cent fee structure align with the economics of African payments, where high volume and low average transaction values require infrastructure that traditional blockchains cannot serve cost-effectively. Stablepay's use of Solana alongside Base — combined with Circle's CCTP for cross-chain USDC movement — gives the network flexibility as liquidity flows and partner requirements evolve across different markets.