Stablepay

Stablepay is an on-chain payments network built specifically for Africa, designed to bridge the gap between stablecoin wallets and the mobile money systems that hundreds of millions of Africans use for everyday transactions. Founded in 2025 by executives with backgrounds at Visa, Absa, and Citi, the platform enables users to spend USDC directly from their crypto wallets while merchants and recipients automatically receive settlement in local currency through existing mobile money rails like M-Pesa.

The core problem Stablepay addresses is practical. Stablecoins — primarily USDC — have become a meaningful store of value and remittance tool across Sub-Saharan Africa, driven by currency instability and limited access to USD-denominated accounts. But spending those digital dollars at a local merchant or sending them to a family member still requires an off-ramp that most crypto platforms handle slowly or expensively. Stablepay positions itself as that settlement layer: accepting inbound USDC from any connected wallet and converting it to local currency for instant delivery through mobile network operators and neobanks.

How the Payment Flow Works

A Stablepay payment begins with a user holding USDC in a connected wallet — supported wallet providers include Binance, Bybit, VALR, Chipper Wallet, Quidax, and Busha. When a payment is initiated, it is verified by the payer, typically with biometric confirmation through their wallet app. Stablepay's settlement engine then handles the conversion from USDC to local currency and routes the funds to the recipient through mobile money infrastructure. Merchants receive local currency in real time; they do not need to hold or manage digital assets at any point.

The platform supports two primary use cases. The first is merchant payment: a customer initiates a stablecoin payment from their wallet and the merchant receives local currency directly into their mobile money account. The second is peer-to-peer transfer: a sender uses the Stablepay Credential system to transfer USDC to another user via a human-readable identifier, with the recipient receiving local currency on their end.

Two Core Infrastructure Products

Stablepay offers two products for integration by fintechs, telcos, and financial institutions.

The Stablepay Payment API is a RESTful API that allows developers and institutions to embed stablecoin-to-local-currency payment rails into their own products. The API exposes endpoints for creating payments, retrieving payment status, validating mobile money accounts (including M-Pesa Till and Paybill numbers), validating bank accounts in Kenya and Nigeria, and fetching live foreign exchange rates. This makes it straightforward for a fintech building a payments app to accept USDC from their users while settling in local currency on the back end.

The Stablepay Credential is an on-chain identity layer that links a human-readable identifier — a Stablepay ID — to a stablecoin wallet address. This allows users and businesses to send and receive USDC using a familiar, contact-style interface rather than managing raw wallet addresses. The design deliberately mirrors remittance apps in look and feel, lowering the barrier for users migrating from traditional mobile money to on-chain settlement.

Geographic Coverage and Supported Assets

Stablepay is currently active in five countries: Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda. These markets were chosen for their established mobile money ecosystems and significant stablecoin adoption driven by local currency volatility. The platform supports transaction limits that vary by country and mobile network operator.

USDC is the primary stablecoin supported. Stablepay is a member of Circle's Alliance partner program and uses both USDC and Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) for cross-chain movement of dollar-denominated liquidity. The platform operates on Solana and Base, making use of both networks' low transaction costs and high throughput for settlement operations.

Solana's Role

Solana provides Stablepay with a settlement layer that combines finality speed with negligible transaction fees — practical requirements for a payments network where individual transaction values may be small. The combination of Solana's throughput and USDC's programmability allows Stablepay to process consumer-scale payments that would be uneconomical on higher-fee chains. Circle's deployment of USDC natively on Solana, along with CCTP support, means Stablepay can receive USDC from any major exchange or wallet that supports Solana-based transfers.

Partner Ecosystem

On the wallet and exchange side, Stablepay connects to Binance, Bybit, VALR, Chipper Wallet, Quidax, and Busha — covering both global centralized exchanges with African user bases and Africa-native crypto platforms. On the payments infrastructure side, the platform works with Paystack and Flutterwave, two of the dominant payment processors operating across West and East Africa. This combination of crypto wallet access and traditional payment processor integration gives Stablepay a path to scale without requiring users to adopt entirely new financial infrastructure.

Team Background and Stage

The founding team brings direct experience from the traditional financial institutions operating in Africa: Visa, pan-African bank Absa, and Citi. This background is relevant given that the regulatory and banking relationships required to offer local currency settlement across multiple African markets are non-trivial to establish. The platform was in early access as of late 2025, with the Payment API available to fintech developers and financial institutions. No third-party security audits have been publicly disclosed.

Stablepay operates at a moment when stablecoin payment infrastructure is receiving serious institutional attention globally. Its focus on mobile money settlement — rather than crypto-native wallets — is deliberate: the platform is designed to work within the financial habits already established across its target markets, using stablecoins as the settlement rail rather than the end-user interface.