• Nigeria now accounts for roughly 60% of all stablecoin inflows into Sub-Saharan Africa, according to IMF-backed data referenced by Bitget Wallet.
• The milestone comes as Bitget Wallet surpasses 100 million global users, with Africa emerging as one of its fastest-growing regions.
• The figures reinforce a broader trend: stablecoins in Nigeria are increasingly being used for payments, remittances, savings, and business settlements, rather than speculative crypto trading.

Between 2019 and 2025, roughly 60% of all stablecoin inflows into Sub-Saharan Africa went to Nigeria. The figure has resurfaced this week alongside news that Bitget Wallet has crossed 100 million global users. According to Bitget, more than half of that growth is driven by the Global South, including Africa. Also remarkable is that daily payment users outnumber traders on the platform for the first time in its history.

Nigeria Now Dominates Africa’s Stablecoin Economy

The resurfaced figure comes from the IMF’s Article IV analysis, which found that Nigerian households and small businesses are increasingly turning to dollar-pegged stablecoins to move money across borders. Nigeria received approximately $59 billion in crypto-asset inflows between July 2023 and June 2024, ranking second globally in Chainalysis’s 2024 Global Crypto Adoption Index. The next year, in 2025, it ranked sixth. More than 65% of that inflow, per the IMF, was denominated in stablecoins.

Bitget Wallet’s announcement adds a second data point to the same trend. The wallet’s Onchain Payments Matrix, its settlement infrastructure, has now processed more than $177 billion in stablecoin transactions across over 80 payment rails and 100 currencies.

In Nigeria specifically, the platform’s user growth rate hit 468% in a single quarter in 2024, surging the app to Number 1 on the App Store as of June 2024. By November 2025, Bitget had launched a direct bank transfer feature in Nigeria. The feature allowed users to convert USDT and USDC into naira.

This Isn’t Really a Bitget Story

Despite the incredible “100 million users” announcement from Bitget, this story isn’t really about Bitget. The numbers from both the IMF and Bitget tell us that Nigeria is the continent’s largest stablecoin economy. This is not a surprise. As the numbers grew, various African fintechs began building towards stablecoins.

Various stablecoin settlement pilots have been launched on the continent, including one by Visa, M-PESA and Onafriq in DRC. Flutterwave, Nigeria’s unicorn, has secured investments from both Circle Ventures and Ripple to scale stablecoin payments in the region. Moves that came after its infrastructure-building partnership with Tempo. Conversation about the naira-backed stablecoin, cNGN, has also increased. HyperFX, a product from Polytope Labs, began utilising it, along with other stablecoins, for instant FX settlement.

Headline after headline, companies have aligned their moves with the rise in stablecoin adoption in Nigeria and on the continent. Bitget’s user surge reflects behaviour that has already transformed the market.

Stablecoins Have Become Nigeria’s Digital Dollar

In June, the IMF issued a warning to Nigeria. It cautioned that the increasing use of dollar-pegged stablecoins could threaten the country’s monetary sovereignty and lead to “digital dollarization.”

This warning is not without merit. Nigerians use stablecoins to address structural issues. It is no longer a simple speculative tool. So why are Nigerians using stablecoins?

Between June 2023 and February 2024, the value of the naira dropped from about 450 naira to the dollar to roughly 1600 to the dollar. It lost an estimated 40% of its value in 2024 alone. In that same period, annual inflation rose to about 35% and food inflation to about 40%. Over what seemed like a short period, people’s savings suddenly lost value, and the currency’s purchasing power dropped.

In addition, periodic FX shortages have made dollar access difficult through official channels. Layered on top of that are cross-border remittance costs. The cost of sending $200 to sub-Saharan Africa is over 8%. The global average is closer to 6%, and the UN’s target is 3%. In a country averaging $600 million in monthly diasporan remittances, 8% is a high cost.

Against that backdrop, a stablecoin is less of an investment, and more of a workaround. For many, it is a way to hold value that doesn’t erode month to month, and a way to receive money from abroad without losing a tenth of it to fees.

Payments Are Replacing Trading

The trend of stablecoins being used for real-life purposes and not trading is further reflected in Bitget’s data. According to the platform, daily payment users now outnumber traders for the first time.

Globally, card spending on the platform reached $31 million in the first half of 2026, up 191% from the second half of 2025. In emerging markets, including Nigeria, that card spend grew 416% over the same period, more than double the global rate.

For years, the industry measured crypto adoption in trading volume and exchange sign-ups. That metric is becoming less relevant. When people stop talking about trading and start talking about paying rent or a supplier in USDT, that’s usually a sign the technology has stopped being a novelty.

What This Means for African Fintech

The practical implication is that stablecoins are becoming competitive infrastructure rather than a niche product line. Companies operating in cross-border payments, treasury management, payroll, or merchant settlement that ignore stablecoins risk losing ground to competitors who don’t.

Crypto wallets themselves are shifting shape in the process. Bitget’s own services, which now include card issuance, direct bank integrations, and QR payment rails, make it look less like a trading app and more like a dollar-denominated bank account with a crypto backend.

The Bigger Question: Can Regulation Keep Up?

Beyond the potential impact on monetary policy and naira demand, the IMF also flagged financial integrity risks. Because transactions that once moved through regulated institutions are increasingly routed through wallets and exchanges, there’s an increased chance that certain transactions will slip through the cracks.

Nigeria has moved past prohibition towards supervision. The Investments and Securities Act of 2025 gave the Securities and Exchange Commission jurisdiction to license and oversee virtual asset service providers, and a separate crypto regulation bill has continued advancing through the Senate.

Similar frameworks are taking shape elsewhere on the continent. Kenya’s Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, South Africa’s FSCA licensing regime, and early-stage consultations in Tanzania. However, none of them are positioned to resolve the underlying tension the IMF describes. A licensing framework can regulate who is allowed to issue or facilitate stablecoin transactions. It cannot change the fact that millions of Nigerians are choosing dollar tokens over the naira because the naira has given them reasons to.

Why This Matters

Nigeria’s stablecoin economy didn’t emerge because a global wallet provider crossed 100 million users. It emerged because millions of households and small businesses needed a workaround for a currency that kept losing value and a banking system that made cross-border payments expensive and slow. What started as an alternative payment method has become parallel financial infrastructure, used daily by freelancers, SMEs, and diaspora families sending money home.

Bitget’s numbers, the IMF’s data, and the wave of fintech partnerships building around stablecoins in Nigeria all indicate that infrastructure follows, not creates, user behavior.

If that pattern holds, Nigeria is likely to keep shaping how stablecoins get used, and eventually regulated, across the rest of the continent.

Originally published at https://cryptoafrica.news on July 27, 2026.

Nigeria Dominates 60% of Africa’s Stablecoin Inflows Reshaping the Digital Economy was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• ForgeLayer has replaced its fixed monthly subscription with a pay-as-you-go pricing model after receiving customer feedback.
• The company says businesses were hesitant to commit to recurring fees before proving the product’s value.
• The change reflects a broader trend in B2B fintech, where reducing adoption friction can be more important than maximising short-term revenue.
• The move raises an interesting question: should more African crypto infrastructure startups adopt usage-based pricing?

ForgeLayer announced that it’s taking customer feedback and offering a pay-as-you-go alternative to its previous subscription model. One must consider the cost implications for the industry and not just its customers, and the potential ripple effects.

ForgeLayer provides non-custodial crypto payment infrastructure for businesses looking to integrate crypto products without spending time and resources building blockchain infrastructure from scratch.

ForgeLayer Is Rethinking How Crypto Infrastructure Is Sold

The new model charges a flat 0.3% per successful transaction, rather than the flat recurring monthly charge businesses would incur regardless of the volume processed. Companies that process sufficient volume and aren’t as concerned about cost can still opt to pay for the subscription plan, which removes per-transaction fees.

ForgeLayer’s infrastructure provides plugins for WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart, PHP, React, and Node JS to accelerate dev adoption.

For smaller businesses, this new pricing system reduces the barrier to entry and allows them to try out this new product without committing a large amount. According to the community manager for ForgeLayer, Lilian Jessica,

Customers were saying they wanted to implement our platform, but having to pay without any guarantee that they’d make that amount back in a month was difficult. We went back to the drawing board and looked at our mission, which is making it easier for businesses that want to go global.

Pricing is Part of Product-Market Fit

Infrastructure product providers, especially in Africa, must consider this: if you want your business to scale, you must understand your customers’ pain points. If this customer base consists of African businesses and startups, you should ideally be aware of and ready to accommodate their cost-related challenges.

Infrastructure products compete on more than technical features. They compete on API pricing, onboarding friction, implementation time, and developer experience. Your API could be great, but adoption will still stall if businesses have to pay high fees to see any value.

In that sense, pricing is not separate from the product because it shapes who is willing to try it and determines how quickly they can.

Why Pay-as-You-Go Makes Sense for African Businesses

In the first quarter of 2026, companies in the USA and Canada secured over $250 billion in funding. In comparison, African startups raised $705 million in the same time period. The general idea most people have about tech companies, regardless of industry, is that if the idea and your plan are good, the funding will come. African entrepreneurs know this is not always true.

Many small and medium enterprises across Africa operate with limited cash flow. What some might consider too cautious or frugal is standard practice. When you secure funding, you need to use it diligently. When you spend, the spending must be justified.

A Usage-Based Model Aligns Costs with Business Growth

African businesses need the option of experimenting with the product before making any long-term commitments. Offering usage-based billing ties what a business pays to what it earns, making the cost easier to justify.

If a merchant processes zero crypto transactions, then they do not have to pay. This is especially ideal for African fintechs, online businesses, and SaaS platforms that are testing crypto for the first time.

Stablecoin adoption across the continent is on the rise, with Sub-Saharan Africa leading the world and the region at a 9.3% adoption rate. Stablecoins accounted for 43% of total cryptocurrency transaction volume in the region in 2024, with strong use for retail and cross-border payments. Businesses will want to tap into this. Of course, this doesn’t guarantee that crypto payments will take off for any business. However, this model lowers the cost of finding out.

Could Other African Crypto Infrastructure Companies Follow?

Reducing adoption friction has become a major competitive advantage in fintech. Other crypto infrastructure firms in Africa could increase their adoption rate by offering usage-based models. Whether you’re offering stablecoin payment APIs, wallet infrastructure, or compliance tools, this is worth considering.

Yellow Card recently discontinued their retail arm and has spent time repositioning itself around B2B and institutional clients. Its widespread regulatory credibility is its competitive advantage. Opera’s Mini Pay has embedded a stablecoin wallet directly into a browser that millions of Africans already use, stripping out friction.

Across the continent, Fintechs are exploring ways to reduce the hurdles to adoption for their clients. Flutterwave has spent its year improving and deepening its stablecoin integration. Paga, via partnerships with SUI and TBook, has also explored stablecoin accounts and tokenized assets this year.

While the mechanisms for reducing adoption across these businesses have differed from ForgeLayer’s pricing change, the instinct is similar. The point is not for other crypto infrastructure providers to unthinkingly copy ForgeLayer. The goal, however, is to recognize the various pain points and barriers that could delay integration and to work with that in mind.

Reducing friction is a competitive axis for African crypto infrastructure.

African Infrastructure Companies are Selling Trust, Not Just Technology

In the African market, earning trust is just as important as building the right product. It doesn’t matter if the product is B2B or B2C; you need to build trust. How do you get businesses to trust you in a market typically considered “low trust?”

For most businesses, choosing an infrastructure provider is a big deal. That infrastructure will be part of your business’s foundation. You need to ask yourself certain questions about reliability and about cost. Will this provider be here in two or three years? Is the service they are offering me worth the money? Will the eventual transaction volume justify the cost?

All these questions can be condensed into one question. Is it worth it?

Companies like Lazerpay, a Nigerian crypto payments startup once pitched as the “Stripe for crypto,” shut down in 2023 after failing to raise much-needed funding. Lazerpay is an example that crypto infrastructure on the continent has a genuine mortality rate.

Usage-based billing reduces perceived risk for cautious executives. If the provider’s earnings are tied to the merchant’s earnings, it increases trust. Businesses are more inclined to believe you will do right by them, as your success is intertwined with theirs. In a market with so many uncertainties, commercial empathy and lower financial friction could ultimately create higher long-term adoption.

Lessons Crypto Infrastructure Could Learn From Saas And Cloud Computing

Traditional technology giants popularised consumption-based billing long ago. Amazon Web Services, Twilio, and Stripe built empires using this framework. OpenAI also prices its AI models based on direct usage.

​These companies rarely demanded massive upfront financial commitments from early adopters. Instead, customers paid per API call or per transaction. They paid per compute hour or per message sent. Crypto infrastructure is moving in this same direction globally. ForgeLayer is adapting a proven software model to African digital finance.

As blockchain tools become commoditized, technical features look identical. Providers must find new ways to stand out in a crowded market. Business model innovation is becoming the new frontier for enterprise software.

​Why This Matters

​The pricing change might look like a minor product update. However, it reflects a major shift in how crypto platforms acquire users. Technical innovation alone is no longer enough to win the market.

​As competition intensifies, providers will differentiate through their commercial models. Onboarding experiences and customer success will dictate who wins the continent. Financial tools must adapt to the economic realities of local businesses.

​Companies that make experimenting with stablecoins cheap will drive mainstream adoption. They allow traditional Web2 firms to test Web3 tools safely. By removing fixed overheads, ForgeLayer changes the risk equation for African commerce. The future of regional crypto infrastructure depends heavily on lowering the cost of discovery.

Originally published at https://cryptoafrica.news on July 9, 2026.

Why ForgeLayer’s Pay-as-You-Go Model Could Accelerate Crypto Infrastructure Adoption in Africa was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.