By Alvin Kan, Chief Operating Officer, Bitget Wallet
In February, Ghana’s central bank and its securities regulator gave companies 48 hours to take down billboards advertising dollar stablecoins. Not a ban on trading them, which Ghana had already legalised, or new capital rules. Just an order about advertising, and it landed while, by the state’s own count, 3 million Ghanaians, 17 percent of adults, were already moving their savings into USDT and USDC.
The cedi had appreciated 40.7 percent, while inflation had fallen to 5.4 percent. None of it moved the 3 million. They had already made a decision the order couldn’t undo.
This is the real test of whether Arc’s improvements to stablecoin settlement solve Africa’s stablecoin problem. Arc is real progress: a settlement layer built for institutional volume rather than retail speculation. None of that touches what happened in Accra. The problem there was never the flow; it was trust, and a regulator answering the symptom because the real alternative wasn’t ready yet.
Stablecoins don’t have an adoption problem in Africa’s largest markets. This becomes a policy problem, and the two keep getting confused.
Nigeria moved 59 billion dollars in crypto inflows between July 2023 and June 2024, and the IMF’s own reporting this year puts Nigeria’s share of all Sub Saharan African stablecoin inflows since 2019 at roughly 60 percent. Kenya recorded 3.3 billion dollars in stablecoin volume over the same stretch, fourth largest globally behind Nigeria, South Africa and Ghana. Ghana’s 3 billion dollars moved on infrastructure that predates Arc entirely.
If settlement speed or compliance tooling were the real constraint, none of that volume would exist yet. It does. Four of Africa’s largest economies built stablecoin markets worth tens of billions of dollars on rails the industry still considers unfinished. What it won’t explain is why Ghana reached for a billboard order instead of a competing product, why Kenya just priced formalisation into its stablecoin market, or why South Africa’s own central bank is fighting its own draft rule three weeks before comments close. None of that is a settlement problem.
Start with Nigeria, the largest volume and the clearest warning. The IMF’s own June assessment doesn’t dispute that stablecoins solve something real here.
A bank charges close to 9 percent to send 200 dollars into Sub-Saharan Africa, against a 6 percent global average, and that gap explains most of why nearly 4 in 10 Nigerians now say they use crypto for international transfers. The Fund’s concern sits one level up: at this volume, adoption could weaken demand for the naira and blunt the Central Bank’s ability to manage the economy. Not a wallet problem. A question of currency sovereignty, and no settlement upgrade answers it.
Kenya’s wall is law now, not a draft. The Virtual Asset Service Providers Regulations, gazetted in July, gave the Central Bank and the Capital Markets Authority formal oversight for the first time, which the market had actually been asking for. They also require stablecoin issuers to hold 30 percent of customer float inside Kenyan bank accounts. Formalising the sector was the right call. Setting a float requirement without weighing what it costs issuers to serve the market already using their product is the detail that decides whether formalisation grows that market or quietly prices part of it out.
South Africa’s wall is the most contested of the four right now. Treasury’s draft manual would bar regulated platforms from handling cross-border transfers, the exact use case driving adoption everywhere else on this list. It would also let money leave a platform for a personal wallet with no way back in. VALR, Luno, AltCoinTrader and EasyEquities formed a coalition against it this month, naming it CATASTROPHE, a backronym blunt enough to make the point on its own. Even the Reserve Bank admits its approach to stablecoins specifically is still unsettled, and comment closes at the end of September. Neither banned nor settled. Three weeks from a decision either way.
Ghana’s wall is the billboard order, and it’s the strangest of the four because it’s barely about currency risk at all. The state’s preferred alternative, a gold-backed settlement instrument built on 65 tonnes accumulated through its Domestic Gold Purchase Programme, is still years from working at the scale 3 million Ghanaians already transact at. Cracking down on advertising while the reserve system remains incomplete is how regulators react when the real solution isn’t operational yet. Targeting the warning signs becomes the sole remaining option.
It’s worth being precise about “last mile,” a phrase that gets used loosely. In telecoms, it means the final stretch of cable into a home, the hardest and most expensive part of a network to build. Applied to stablecoins, it has quietly drifted to mean something narrower: the wallet-to-wallet hop, the interface. That’s not where Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Ghana are stuck.
Their last mile is the policy accommodation on the receiving end, decided by a central bank, a securities regulator, or a finance ministry, not a settlement layer. No infrastructure upgrade, however well engineered, routes around a decision made in Abuja, Nairobi, Pretoria or Accra.
The rails are arriving faster than the policy is, and that gap is now the whole story. Builders who treat it as a technology problem will keep shipping improvements nobody asked for. Regulators who treat it as an advertising problem will keep losing ground to a market their own citizens already chose. The market that closes the gap first, not the one running the fastest chain, sets the terms for how the rest of the continent transcends into a new era of digital inclusion.
