Stablecoins are a treasury tool before they are a payment rail

Most writing about stablecoins in Africa starts from the wrong end. It starts with the transfer: seconds instead of days, cents instead of dollars, no correspondent bank in New York. All of that is true, and none of it is the reason the importers I talk to actually started using USDT.

They started because they could not get dollars. Not because the dollars were expensive, or because the wire was slow, but because the bank told them to wait, and could not say for how long.

What a queue looks like from the inside

Picture an importer in Blantyre who needs $40,000 to pay a supplier in Guangzhou for packaging material. She has the kwacha. She has the invoice. She has the bank account. What she does not have is a date on which her bank will sell her the dollars.

This is not a hypothetical. Malawi's reserves fell to $239 million by the end of 2023, roughly one month of import cover, and even after recovering to about $609 million by December 2025 they were still short of the three-month international benchmark. The question the local press keeps asking is not whether dollars exist at all, but who gets them, with manufacturers and hospitals reporting that banks cannot fund letters of credit for raw materials, fuel and medicines. On 2 September 2026 the reporting was the same: reserves have improved, yet traders say banks remain reluctant to release dollars for legitimate transactions, pushing them to the parallel market at inflated rates.

Nigeria ran the same experiment at a bigger scale. When Olayemi Cardoso took over the central bank in September 2023 he inherited a $7 billion backlog of unmet foreign exchange obligations. That backlog was, concretely, thousands of businesses who had done everything right and were still standing in line. The lesson from the Nigerian fintech operators who lived through it is simple: when the banking system has a $7 billion backlog, businesses do not stop trading, they look for the path of least resistance.

The path of least resistance turned out to be a dollar that did not require permission.

Why "treasury" is the right word

A payment rail is something you use at the moment of payment. A treasury tool is something you use between payments, to hold, protect and position the money you will need later.

When you watch how importers actually use stablecoins, the behaviour is the second kind. They buy USDT when local currency is available and the rate is acceptable, not when an invoice is due. They hold it for days or weeks. They release it to a supplier when the goods are ready. The on-chain transfer is the last and least interesting step.

This is why the "faster and cheaper" framing misses the point. A bank wire that takes three days is fine if you know it will leave on day one. What breaks a business is not the three days. It is the indefinite wait before the three days start, and the risk that your kwacha or naira loses a fifth of its value while you wait. In 2023 the naira lost more than 40% of its value against the dollar and the Kenyan shilling dropped about 24%; for anyone paying suppliers in dollars, that erodes margins and makes planning close to impossible.

So the importer is solving two treasury problems at once. First, access: getting dollars at all, on a date she controls. Second, timing: locking in the exchange rate when she chooses rather than when the bank finally gets to her. The stablecoin does both. The IMF's own read of Nigeria says the same thing in more careful language: currency depreciation, high inflation and constrained access to foreign exchange increased demand for dollar-linked assets, and stablecoins served as both a hedge against currency risk and a way to pay overseas suppliers. Hedge first, payment second.

The banks are not the enemy. The allocation is.

It is tempting to read this as businesses routing around the banking system out of distrust. That is not what I see. The importers I know still bank. They pay staff, taxes and local suppliers through the same accounts they always did. Many of them would happily buy dollars from their bank tomorrow if the bank would sell.

The problem is upstream of the bank. When a central bank is rationing scarce reserves, it decides, formally or informally, which imports matter. Fuel and medicine go first. Packaging material, spare parts and the small manufacturer's raw inputs go last. In Malawi, commercial banks are effectively rationing dollars, making it nearly impossible for local manufacturers to import essential raw materials. The bank is not refusing the customer; it is passing down a shortage it did not create.

Stablecoins let a business opt out of the allocation without opting out of the formal economy. That distinction is why I think this survives regulation rather than being killed by it. Nigeria's central bank, which ordered banks to close crypto-linked accounts in 2021, now mentions stablecoins dozens of times in its Payments System Vision 2028 and has set up a working group to study adoption. Kenya went further. The Virtual Asset Service Providers Regulations took effect on gazettement on 22 July 2026, covering exchanges, wallet providers, payment processors and stablecoin issuers, and existing providers have until 4 November 2026 to comply. Stablecoin issuers must hold full reserves with a Central Bank-approved custodian, keep at least thirty percent in Kenyan trust accounts, and redeem within two working days. That is a regulator writing rules for a treasury asset, not banning a payment gimmick.

The scale, honestly

The numbers are large enough to matter and small enough that nobody should pretend the game is over. Sub-Saharan Africa received about $205 billion in on-chain value between mid-2024 and mid-2025, and stablecoins now account for 43% of crypto volume in the region. Set that against African imports exceeding $1 trillion a year and a trade finance gap the African Development Bank puts somewhere between $74 billion and $92 billion. Stablecoins are filling a real gap, and the gap is still mostly unfilled.

There is also a reason the thesis should worry policymakers, and I think it is fair to say so. A stablecoin that is safer and more liquid than the local currency turns an informal hedge into a formal alternative to it, with real implications for capital flight, deposit creation and monetary sovereignty in countries like Nigeria and Kenya. If every importer with working capital holds it in USDT rather than in a local bank, the local banking system has less to lend and the central bank has less to steer. A treasury tool that works for the individual business can be a slow leak for the system. I do not think that argues for banning it. It argues for the allocation problem being fixed, because businesses will keep choosing the dollar they can actually get.

What this means if you are building

If you are building payments infrastructure in these markets, the thesis has a practical consequence: the product is not the transfer. The product is the balance.

The importer's real questions are: how quickly can I get from local currency into dollars, what rate do I get, can I hold it safely for three weeks, and can I get out on the other side into whatever my supplier accepts. Speed of settlement is table stakes. The value sits in the on-ramp, the off-ramp, the custody and the accounting. Getting fiat into stablecoins still requires an exchange account and KYC, and not every African exchange has deep USDT or USDC liquidity, which makes the on-ramp the biggest bottleneck. Whoever solves the boring treasury problems, reconciliation, audit trails, rate locking and clean books for the tax authority, wins the payment volume as a side effect.

The importers I know did not fall in love with blockchains. They fell out of love with waiting. Any technology that removes the queue would have won. Stablecoins happened to be the one that existed.