{"id":6808,"date":"2026-11-02T17:32:01","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T17:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/2026\/11\/02\/spending-and-regulation-hold-back-stablecoins-in-africa-moonshot-panel-says\/"},"modified":"2026-11-02T17:32:01","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T17:32:01","slug":"spending-and-regulation-hold-back-stablecoins-in-africa-moonshot-panel-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/2026\/11\/02\/spending-and-regulation-hold-back-stablecoins-in-africa-moonshot-panel-says\/","title":{"rendered":"Spending and regulation hold back stablecoins in Africa, Moonshot panel says"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Stablecoins already move money in and out of Africa faster and more cheaply than banks. What keeps them from the mainstream is that people still can\u2019t spend them easily, and regulators still can\u2019t see where they go.<\/p>\n

That was the view from \u201cThe Adoption Gap\u201d, a panel at Moonshot <\/a>by TechCabal on Thursday, October 29. Shalom Osiadi, founder and CEO of Esca Finance, a foreign exchange company serving businesses in emerging markets, and Demilade Olugbenga, B2B business development manager at Breet, a Nigerian crypto payments platform, discussed with moderator Nnanna Ijezie why adoption still lags.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people use stablecoins, but they\u2019re not able to spend them in the applications they use daily,\u201d Olugbenga said. \u201cSay I\u2019m a freelancer and someone wants to pay me in stablecoins. If I look around and there\u2019s no stablecoin option, I will tell whoever is paying me, \u2018Sorry, I can\u2019t accept this now.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain crypto value between July 2024 and June 2025, with Nigeria taking in $92.1 billion, according to Chainalysis<\/a>. Stablecoins made up about 43% of the region\u2019s crypto volume over that period.<\/p>\n

Olugbenga said sending anything from $5 to $500,000 on Breet costs 10 cents, while a bank transfer can take days and eat up to 8% of the amount. Banks charge that much, Osiadi said, because African currencies can move before a transfer lands, so they build wide margins into their exchange rates.<\/p>\n

Central banks need to know where money comes from, where it goes and how it is used, Osiadi said, and privately issued stablecoins give them no such view. Nigeria has tried two routes. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) launched the eNaira, Africa\u2019s first central bank digital currency, in October 2021, but in 2023 the International Monetary Fund found<\/a> that 98.5% of eNaira wallets went unused in any given week. <\/p>\n

cNGN, a naira-pegged stablecoin issued by private company WrappedCBDC, went live in February 2025 under the Securities and Exchange Commission\u2019s (SEC) regulatory incubation programme. Osiadi said the CBN should either issue a stablecoin or partner with issuers such as cNGN.<\/p>\n

Most of Osiadi\u2019s business customers, he said, do not care what moves their money. Esca, which says it processes between $75 million and $120 million a month for clients including NALA and MoneyGram, routes payments through stablecoins its corporate clients rarely see. \u201cTruth be told, what we\u2019re starting to learn now is nobody really cares,\u201d he said. \u201cThey just care about value: how value arrives and how value is created for their business.\u201d<\/p>\n

Breet\u2019s next step is making stablecoins spendable where people already pay. If TechCabal wanted Moonshot attendees to pay in stablecoins, Olugbenga said, Breet would take the payment, convert it and settle TechCabal in dollars or naira. \u201cI can sit here and tell you with confidence that stablecoins are solving major business problems that currently exist,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Both panellists expect adoption to grow as more banks enter the market. \u201cThis thing isn\u2019t going anywhere,\u201d Osiadi said, urging regulators to work with operators. The SEC has proposed rules<\/a> that would require foreign-pegged stablecoins to win its approval before they can be listed or held on regulated Nigerian platforms. However, once those rules land, they will shape the next phase of adoption as much as anything product builders do.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Source: <\/p>\n

TechCabal<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stablecoins already move money in and out of Africa faster and more cheaply than banks. What keeps them from the mainstream is that people still can\u2019t spend them easily, and… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6808\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}