• Busha Business has partnered with Tether to expand regulated stablecoin infrastructure for African businesses.
• The collaboration focuses on enterprise payments, treasury management, and cross-border settlements rather than retail crypto trading.
• The announcement reflects a broader shift across Africa, where fintechs are increasingly positioning stablecoins as financial infrastructure instead of speculative assets.

Busha Business, the B2B infrastructure arm of Nigerian crypto exchange Busha, has announced a partnership with Tether, issuer of USD₮. The focus of the partnership is to expand licensed stablecoin infrastructure for African businesses.

Busha and Tether Deepen Stablecoin Partnership

Busha Business, which operates in Nigeria and Kenya, is built on Busha’s SEC-licensed foundation. It offers cross-border payments, stablecoin treasury management, business savings, merchant payment tools, and API infrastructure for other fintechs and developers. The Tether partnership expands on that by giving Busha Business clients access to globally connected USD₮ liquidity.

Busha co-founder and COO Moyo Sodipo framed the announcement around speed and infrastructure rather than crypto novelty, saying “businesses need financial infrastructure that moves at the speed of modern commerce.”

He also highlighted the opportunities this opens for businesses.

Through our collaboration with Tether, we are giving businesses access to globally connected liquidity on licensed infrastructure designed for faster payments, stronger treasury management, and more efficient international trade.

A move, he claims, is “another step toward building the financial rails that African businesses need to compete globally.”

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino also pointed to the persistent cost and slowness of cross-border transactions in emerging markets as the problem the partnership is meant to close.

“Cross-border transactions are still slow and expensive for the businesses and individuals who depend on them, especially in emerging markets, and closing that gap requires collaboration between companies committed to solving it,” he said.

This announcement comes a few months after the Africa Tech Summit in Nairobi, where Busha’s COO, Moyo Sodipo, called for more African-relevant stablecoin infrastructure to reduce reliance on payment systems built for other markets.

The Africa Tech Summit appearance was shortly followed by an exclusive mixer called “After The Summit” hosted by Busha in partnership with Tether.

Africa’s Stablecoin Race Is Moving Up the Stack

Over the past two years, Africa’s crypto companies have largely stopped competing as exchanges and started competing to become financial infrastructure providers.

Flutterwave integrated USDC settlement through its Circle partnership. Yellow Card has pivoted hard toward institutional infrastructure, adding Visa and Mastercard as platform partners. Opera’s MiniPay has pushed stablecoins into everyday consumer payments. Visa has built out its own stablecoin platform and pilots across the continent.

In May 2026, Busha itself launched a crypto-backed payment card that enables its retail users to spend stablecoins and other digital assets straight from their wallets.

Busha’s move with Tether fits squarely into that pattern.

Why Tether Is Increasingly Focusing on Africa

Stablecoin usage in Africa has grown. Yellow Card reported that stablecoins accounted for 43% of total cryptocurrency transaction volume in sub-Saharan Africa in 2024. Nigeria, one of the markets where Busha Business operates, accounts for 60% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s stablecoin inflow since 2019. It also recorded an estimated $22 billion in transactions between July 2023 and June 2024.

USDT, Tether’s stablecoin, dominates this large stablecoin market. With 59% of its crypto users holding USDT, Nigeria leads the world in USDT ownership. USDT also dominates roughly 60% of P2P trading volume in sub-Saharan Africa. This translates to roughly $3.6 billion in monthly transactions across Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa alone.

This large market share exists because Africa offers Tether a structurally favourable environment for USDT’s business case. Expensive cross-border payment costs, high currency volatility, and chronic dollar-access shortages are all problems on the continent that its stablecoin can address. The continent’s fast-growing base of B2B trade increasingly prefers dollar-denominated settlement that occurs without the hassle of correspondent banking.

USDT has held its lead in international settlement volume largely on liquidity depth and first-mover distribution. It’s the stablecoin most exchanges, OTC desks, and payment corridors already support. USDC and newer entrants like Open USD compete for the same institutional customers on regulatory clarity and banking-grade compliance features.

What This Means for African Businesses

For SMEs, the practical upside is improved trade. Faster and cheaper settlement with stablecoins means faster supplier payments, fewer banking delays, and lower remittance costs. It also reduces the barrier to entry and makes it easier to participate in markets that used to require a dollar account they couldn’t easily open.

For banks and fintechs, partnerships like this raise the competitive stakes. With global institutions like Visa integrating and developing stablecoin infrastructure, there’s a chance that institutions that don’t follow suit risk losing corporate payment flows to companies that do.

For regulators, growing enterprise stablecoin usage is likely to shift the conversation further toward licensing frameworks, AML compliance, treasury reporting standards, and institutional custody rules.

Africa’s Financial Infrastructure Is Becoming Blockchain-Native

None of these point toward stablecoins replacing banks. They point toward stablecoin rails being layered underneath the financial services Africa’s businesses already use. It shows how they’re quietly handling the settlement leg that used to take days and cost a meaningful percentage of the transaction.

Busha’s partnership with Tether is one more data point in that shift. Crypto firms are repositioning themselves as payment infrastructure providers rather than exchanges.

The companies that come out ahead over the next few years are unlikely to be the ones with the most trading volume. They’ll be the ones that become quietly indispensable to how African commerce actually moves money.

Originally published at https://cryptoafrica.news on July 21, 2026.

Busha Partners with Tether to Make Cross-Border Business Payments Cheaper and Faster was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A framework for figuring out whose stablecoin revenue actually survives 2026.

In September 2025, some of the best-capitalized companies in crypto stood in a public auction and competed to give their revenue away. Paxos bid 95% of the reserve yield. Ethena bid 95% plus $75 million in ecosystem incentives. Frax and Agora bid 100%. The prize was the right to issue USDH, Hyperliquid’s native stablecoin, and the bidding logic ran in reverse: whoever promised to keep the least deserved to win the most.

That auction was not an anomaly. It was the stablecoin business model meeting honest price discovery for the first time, and it poses the question this piece tries to answer: for each dollar of a stablecoin’s supply, what does the issuer have to pay to stop it from leaving? The answer determines which issuers keep their revenue over the next three years, and it has almost nothing to do with the market-cap league table.

A commodity business that prints $13 billion

A fiat-backed stablecoin is a float business. The issuer holds customer dollars, invests them in short-dated Treasuries at 4 to 5%, and pays holders nothing. Revenue equals float times the spread kept. Tether ran this machine to over $13 billion of profit in 2024.

Which should be impossible. The product is a perfect commodity; every stablecoin is a token worth one dollar, and any rival can offer holders a share of the yield and pull float away. Dozens of yield-bearing alternatives exist. Tether pays nothing and keeps growing anyway.

Profits persisting in a commodity market mean something blocks the competition, and the industry’s shorthand for that something, “the moat,” conceals a category error. The moat is not a property of the coin. It is a property of each individual dollar of float, set by who holds that dollar and why.

Every dollar of float has a deposit beta

Banking solved this classification problem a century ago. Balances spread across millions of small checking accounts are core deposits: sticky, cheap, indifferent to rates. Balances from a few large yield-seeking institutions are hot money, and banks funded by hot money periodically die overnight; Silicon Valley Bank’s depositor base was small, sophisticated, and coordinated through the same group chats, and it moved as one organism in March 2023.

Bank analysts quantify the difference as deposit beta: the fraction of market interest rates an institution must pass through to retain a deposit. Empirical studies put the average US bank’s pass-through at roughly 30 to 46%, but the average hides the point; checking accounts sit near zero, brokered institutional money near one, and a bank’s franchise value is largely the value of its low-beta book.

A stablecoin’s circulating supply is functionally a deposit base, so the transplant is direct. Every dollar of float is either free float, which stays without being paid, or rented float, which stays only for as long as the yield is handed over. An issuer’s defensible revenue is free float times the Treasury rate. Everything else is assets under management wearing a stablecoin costume.

The float segments, from most expensive to keep to cheapest:

B2B reserve float. Another issuer’s treasury, like USDtb sitting in BUIDL. Beta of roughly 1.0. Nobody owns the relationship; the buyer shops.

Platform-captive float. Traders on one venue, like USDC on Hyperliquid. Beta of roughly 1.0 once the venue negotiates. The platform owns the relationship.

DeFi incentive float. Yield farmers. Beta of roughly 1.0, owned by whoever pays most this month.

Exchange-distributed retail. CEX users, like USDC on Coinbase. The beta is contractual: it is the rev-share. The exchange owns the relationship.

Fragmented transactional float. Small wallets and emerging-market commerce, which in practice means USDT. Beta of roughly zero, and the issuer owns the relationship structurally.

The bottom segment deserves a sentence of respect, because it is the only one that cannot be bought. A $200 balance forgoes about fifty cents a month by not chasing yield; nobody rewires their financial life for that. And in the corridors where USDT circulates as the unit of account, from Lagos to Buenos Aires to Istanbul, leaving requires your whole economic neighborhood to leave with you. Coordinating millions of strangers is the hardest problem in economics, which is exactly why this float is defensible.

Exhibit 1: the rent, measured in GAAP

Rented float is not a metaphor. Circle is a public company, and the ransom it pays to keep its float sits on the income statement as “distribution, transaction and other costs,” most of it the Coinbase revenue share (Coinbase collects 100% of reserve income on USDC held on its platform and 50% elsewhere; $908 million of Circle’s $1,011 million in 2024 distribution costs went to Coinbase).

The trajectory is the finding. In 2022, Circle paid out 37 cents of every revenue dollar for distribution. By 2024 it was 60 cents. Across 2025’s reported quarters it held near 61 cents, on much larger revenue. USDC’s supply roughly doubled over that period, which is the point: the supply grew and the share of it Circle gets paid to hold shrank. Growth composed of rented float raises revenue and dilutes revenue quality at the same time, and no supply chart will ever show you that.

Exhibit 2: the deposit base, on-chain

If float quality is real, it should be visible in holder structure. I pulled the holder data for three dollar tokens on Ethereum mainnet from Blockscout on July 5, 2026.

Three tokens, one product, three different animals:

USDtb ($727M supply) is the pure B2B case: 92% of supply sits in ten addresses, and the single largest, an Ethena custody wallet, holds 43% by itself. Behind the labels, this is essentially one treasury desk’s allocation decision. Its stated beta is one by construction; USDtb’s model passes reserve yield through, and BlackRock’s BUIDL, which backs it, keeps that relationship only by remaining the highest bidder among interchangeable tokenized T-bill funds.

USDC ($50.1B on Ethereum) shows an institutional-DeFi profile: 8.1 million holding addresses, with 27% of supply in the top ten, led by Sky’s peg-stability module and a cluster of institutional smart accounts. Fragmented enough to look retail, but the retail is largely intermediated, and the intermediaries, as Exhibit 1 shows, send Circle an invoice.

USDT ($97.1B on Ethereum, more than 16.7 million holding addresses) is the interesting one, because its top-10 concentration (50%) is higher than USDC’s, and the composition explains why that’s a strength rather than a weakness: the big addresses are almost entirely exchange custody wallets (Binance and OKX dominate the list) holding on behalf of millions of end users, plus the issuer’s own treasury and a bridge lockbox. And Ethereum is USDT’s institutional venue; the retail long tail lives on Tron, where USDT’s supply exceeds $86 billion on a network that passed 389 million total accounts in June, built almost entirely on cheap USDT transfers in emerging markets. Tether’s deposit base is the shape a bank would pay a premium for.

One honest complication: exchange custody blurs wallet counts in both directions. A Binance hot wallet is one address and millions of users. The framework handles this cleanly, though, because custody is precisely the case where the platform owns the relationship, and platform-owned float is where the next section’s repricing happens.

2026 keeps running the experiment

Hyperliquid separated the two moats. Native Markets won the USDH ticker in September 2025. Eight months later USDH had stalled near $100 million while USDC on Hyperliquid doubled to roughly $5 billion; the challenger has since faded toward $20 million on its way to sunset.

Liquidity gravity won; every order book and habit was denominated in USDC, and no governance vote could repeal that. But look at the terms of victory. In May 2026, Coinbase became USDC’s official treasury deployer on Hyperliquid under AQAv2, committing to share the vast majority of the reserve yield with the protocol, and bought the USDH brand to retire it. The incumbent kept 100% of the float and surrendered nearly 100% of the income on it.

The lesson generalizes: the moat that defends supply and the moat that defends margin are different moats. Network effects answer whether the dollars stay. Deposit beta answers who keeps the yield on them. A platform doesn’t need to replace your stablecoin; it needs a credible threat of replacing it, and the yield reprices on its own.

Open USD is a beta-of-one stablecoin by design. The 140-plus-partner consortium announced June 30 (Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, Google among them) routes reserve earnings to distribution partners from day one. Circle’s stock fell 16% on the announcement. Wherever distribution owns the customer, issuer margin is being declared zero in advance.

Regulation is running the same experiment from the other side. The GENIUS Act bans issuers from paying yield to holders, legislating retail float’s beta to zero inside the compliant perimeter; the yield now leaks through distribution deals instead of holder payments. Same leak, different plumbing. Meanwhile MiCA enforcement pushed USDT off regulated EU venues and Tether still lacks a GENIUS reciprocity determination, so the market is splitting into a regulated zone where a dozen interchangeable compliant issuers fight over rented float, and an offshore zone containing nearly all the free float in existence.

Re-rank the table

Total stablecoin supply sits near $312 billion; USDT holds roughly $184 billion of it. Adjust each issuer’s supply for float quality and the standings deform. USDT’s number is disproportionately free float, earning the full spread. USDC’s skews toward exchanges, platforms, and institutions: float Circle demonstrably rents, some of it repriced in public this year. Reserve-backing stablecoins and consortium coins carry betas near one by construction; their supply is real and their defensible revenue rounds to a management fee.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that the industry is celebrating the wrong number. Every consortium launch, yield-share deal, and platform extraction grows the supply charts and shrinks the share of that supply anyone is paid to hold. Distribution always captures the margin in commodity markets; crypto spent five years believing it had built an exception.

The only exception that exists is the float that can’t be bought: fragmented, transactional, unit-of-account money, accumulated over a decade of ground-level adoption, priced in USDT because everything around it is. That is most of the defensible revenue in a $300 billion industry, and one issuer owns it, from outside the regulated perimeter.

Watch one variable from here: whether wallets begin abstracting yield away from retail holders, auto-converting idle balances into yield-bearing equivalents in the background. That would raise the deposit beta of the last low-beta segment without any holder ever “deciding” to switch, and it is the single biggest threat to the franchise this piece describes.

Free Float, Rented Float: Measuring Revenue Defensibility in Stablecoins was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is no single winner. Here are the six criteria that decide it, and how USDC, USDT, USDS, and DAI actually score against them.

One of the most-read rankings of the largest stablecoins, updated by The Motley Fool in April 2026, lists DAI as the fourth-biggest coin and never mentions USDS. Two months later, that table describes a market that no longer exists: between April and May 2026, Binance, Coinbase, and Crypto.com converted customer DAI into USDS, its upgraded successor, and USDS now sits third by market cap at roughly $10 billion.

So what are the best stablecoins to hold this year? There is no single best. The right coin depends on six things you can check yourself: backing quality, transparency, peg stability, liquidity, track record, and redemption. More than $300 billion now sits in stablecoins, and close to nine dollars in ten of it is in just two coins, USDT and USDC.

One more fact shapes the whole decision in 2026: most stablecoins pay their holders nothing, and only some have a yield-bearing form. A ranking sorted by size went stale in two months. The criteria below will still work next year, so this guide leads with them, then holds the four major dollar coins up against each one.

What makes a stablecoin worth holding?

The best stablecoin for you depends on backing quality, transparency, peg stability, liquidity, track record, and redemption. Each of these is checkable before you buy, either in the issuer’s attestations or directly onchain. A coin can be enormous and still score poorly on the criterion that matters most for your use, which is why size alone is a weak filter.

Here is what each criterion means in practice:

• Backing quality. What actually stands behind each token: cash and short-term Treasuries, a diversified pool of crypto and real-world assets, or something thinner. Overcollateralized designs hold more than a dollar of backing per token.
• Transparency. Whether you verify the reserves yourself onchain or rely on periodic attestations from an accounting firm. The gap between those two matters most in a crisis, when attestations are weeks old.
• Peg stability. How closely the coin has held to $1 through stress, and what mechanism pulls it back when it drifts. The mint-and-redeem loop that holds the peg is worth understanding before you hold any of them.
• Liquidity. How easily you can buy, sell, and use the coin across exchanges and onchain venues, and how thin that liquidity gets in a selloff.
• Track record. How long the system has operated without a core failure, through at least one full market cycle.
• Redemption. Whether you can reliably convert the token back into its underlying value, and who can block that path.

The collateral model behind a stablecoin determines most of these scores at once, so identifying the model is the fastest first check.

The major stablecoins at a glance

The four major dollar stablecoins in 2026 are USDT and USDC, both fiat-backed and company-issued, USDS, which is crypto and real-world-asset collateralized and governed onchain, and DAI, the predecessor of USDS. They hold their pegs in different ways, and they treat their holders differently, especially on transparency and yield.

• USDT (Tether). The largest at roughly $187 billion, with the deepest liquidity and the most trading pairs. Reserves are reported in quarterly attestations, without full audits, and the interest those reserves earn stays with the issuer.
• USDC (Circle). Around $76 billion, with monthly reserve attestations and the strongest regulatory posture of the large coins, including a MiCA license in Europe. Holders receive none of the reserve interest from the issuer itself.
• USDS (Sky). Roughly $10 billion and the third-largest stablecoin. USDS is fully backed and overcollateralized by a diversified pool of crypto and real-world assets, governed onchain, with collateral you can verify live instead of waiting for an attestation. It is the one coin of the four with a yield-bearing form, sUSDS.
• DAI. The coin USDS upgraded from, created by MakerDAO in 2017. It still circulates onchain, but the major exchanges completed forced conversions to USDS in spring 2026, and new activity has moved to its successor.

A deeper head-to-head of the three live coins deserves its own piece; a practical USDC vs USDT vs USDS comparison is coming in this series. For a fuller risk treatment of the category, see Are Stablecoins Safe? Understanding the Real Risks.

What is the safest stablecoin?

There is no single safest stablecoin. Lower-risk coins share traits you can verify: transparent backing, more value behind the token than in circulation, a redemption path that works under stress, and years of operation without a core failure. None are risk-free, and each model fails in its own way.

The record shows this concretely. In March 2023, USDC fell to $0.87 after Circle disclosed $3.3 billion of reserves stuck at the failing Silicon Valley Bank, recovering only when regulators guaranteed the deposits. In May 2022, the algorithmic coin TerraUSD erased tens of billions of dollars in days because its backing was mostly a subsidy and belief.

Every major depeg began as a fact about the backing that most holders learned too late.

Fiat-backed coins concentrate banking and issuer risk. Crypto-collateralized coins like USDS trade that for smart-contract risk and collateral volatility, contained by overcollateralization. USDS also carries a disclosed, speculative-grade B- credit rating from S&P Global, the first ever issued to a DeFi protocol, which flagged a thin capital buffer and depositor concentration.

That a holder can read the rating and check the collateral the same afternoon is the transparency the category has mostly lacked. Why depegs happen and how to stay protected covers the failure modes in detail.

Which stablecoins are yield-bearing?

Most stablecoins pay holders nothing. Of the four major coins, only USDS has a yield-bearing form, sUSDS, which accrues the Sky Savings Rate. USDC and USDT do not pass yield to people who simply hold them, and under the GENIUS Act, enacted in July 2025, compliant US issuers are barred from paying holders interest at all.

The reserves behind the big fiat-backed coins earn Treasury interest every day. The law now fixes where that interest goes, and it is not to you.

The interest on the reserves backing your stablecoin is real. Under US law, it belongs to the issuer.

Platforms have built workarounds: Coinbase, for example, pays rewards on USDC balances from its own revenue, and the higher advertised number is real, with platform custody as the trade you make for it.

The structural alternative is a coin designed to route protocol revenue to holders. You supply USDS through Sky.money, a non-custodial interface to Sky Protocol, receive sUSDS, and it accrues the Sky Savings Rate, a variable, governance-set rate funded by Sky Protocol revenue generated through the Sky Agent Network.

You can redeem for USDS plus accrued yield at any time, and the rate sat in the mid-single digits as of mid-2026; check the live figure at financial.skyeco.com because governance can change it.

That yield is variable, uninsured, and carries smart-contract risk, so it belongs in the decision as an option, and never as the whole reason. What stablecoin yield is and how much you can earn covers the mechanics and the realistic ranges.

How to choose the best stablecoin for you

Match the coin to the job you need done. Traders and anyone who values raw liquidity gravitate to USDT. Businesses and users who want a regulated, frequently attested fiat-backed coin pick USDC. Holders who want onchain transparency, overcollateralized backing, and the option to earn yield choose USDS. DAI’s job has passed to its successor.

A short process keeps the decision honest:

1. Define the job: moving money, holding through volatility, or earning on idle dollars.
2. Read what backs the coin, in the attestation or directly onchain.
3. Check its peg history through at least one stress event.
4. Confirm how you would redeem or convert it, and who could block that.
5. Decide whether you want the yield option, and read the risks attached to it.
6. Split your balance across at least two coins with different backing models.

That last step is the cheapest protection available. Diversifying across issuers and collateral models means a single bank failure, issuer decision, or contract bug cannot touch your whole balance.

Two coins with different failure modes protect you better than one coin with a bigger market cap.

The bottom line

The best stablecoins to hold this year are the ones you have actually checked, and for most holders in 2026 that shortlist is USDT, USDC, and USDS, split by job.

My own approach is a split: a fiat-backed coin for moving money, and USDS for the balance that sits, because I can verify the collateral onchain and the idle part earns the Sky Savings Rate instead of earning the issuer’s shareholders a return.

Whatever you pick, read the backing before the ranking.

Frequently asked questions

What are the best stablecoins to hold this year?
There is no single best stablecoin. The strongest candidates in 2026 are USDT for liquidity, USDC for regulated fiat backing, and USDS for onchain transparency, overcollateralization, and its yield-bearing form, judged against backing, peg history, and redemption.

What is the safest stablecoin?
No stablecoin is safest in the absolute. Lower-risk coins are transparent about their backing, hold more value than they issue, redeem reliably under stress, and have operated for years without a core failure. None are risk-free.

Which stablecoins are yield-bearing?
Only some stablecoins have a yield-bearing form. USDS has sUSDS, which accrues the variable, governance-set Sky Savings Rate. USDC and USDT do not pass yield to holders, and US law bars compliant issuers from paying interest.

Is USDS the same as DAI?
USDS is the upgrade of DAI, sharing the same MakerDAO lineage. Major exchanges converted customer DAI to USDS in April and May 2026. DAI still exists onchain, and new development and yield features live on USDS.

Should I hold more than one stablecoin?
Yes, if the balance matters to you. Holding two coins with different backing models, one fiat-backed and one overcollateralized onchain, means no single issuer, bank, or contract failure affects everything you hold.

How do I judge whether a stablecoin is trustworthy?
Check five things: what backs it, whether you can verify that backing, how the peg behaved in past stress, how redemption works, and how long the system has run without a core failure. Anything you cannot verify, treat as risk.

What Are the Best Stablecoins to Hold This Year? (2026) was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.