USDC Expands Across Africa as Onafriq Adds Stablecoin Settlement Rails

TL;DR:

• Onafriq adopted USDC as a settlement rail to execute cross-border transactions across more than 40 African markets.
• The pan-African network connects nearly 1 billion mobile wallets and aims to reclaim $5 billion in annual fees.
• The integration with Circle reduced deployment time from six months to between four and six actual weeks.

Onafriq is the largest pan-African payments operator on the continent and connects approximately 1 billion mobile wallets and 500 million bank accounts across more than 40 markets. The company announced that it will scale its use of USDC as a settlement rail for cross-border payments, as part of a strategic partnership with Circle, the stablecoin’s issuer, formalized recently in Dubai.

The problem this initiative seeks to solve is structural. More than 80% of cross-border transactions in Africa are routed through offshore correspondent banks, meaning a payment from Lagos to Nairobi may pass through London or New York before reaching its destination. The cost of that inefficiency amounts to roughly $5 billion in annual fees, a significant burden on trade between African nations.

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