Stablecoins accounted for 60% of crypto purchase value processed through Mercuryo’s on-ramp in H1 2026, up from 43% six months earlier. Meanwhile, accepted stablecoin off-ramp transactions grew 446% year on year, based on the company’s on-ramp report and off-ramp data.

These figures come from one provider, not the entire market. Still, they highlight something worth discussing: how money moves between bank accounts and crypto platforms.

If I were managing those flows for a business, I’d start with two questions. Which currencies are we moving, and where are our bank accounts? The answers help determine which payment routes make sense.

So, What Does Each Payment Route Actually Do?

A company with European partners, a Swiss bank account and international USD settlements might use several payment routes, even through the same crypto platform.

SEPA — for EUR transfers across Europe. It connects participating banks across the Single Euro Payments Area and supports euro transfers between eligible accounts.

SWIFT — for international bank transfers. A global financial messaging network used for cross-border payments in USD and other currencies. Costs and timing depend on the banks involved.

SIC — for Swiss franc transfers. Switzerland’s interbank clearing system handles CHF payments between participating financial institutions.

ZEN.COM — for local PLN payments. Unlike SIC, ZEN.COM is a payment provider rather than a clearing system. Its local PLN transfers use ELIXIR, with availability depending on the provider’s integration and customer eligibility.

Other routes, including ACH in the US and PIX in Brazil, become relevant when businesses need to serve customers in different markets.

Let’s Look at Three Different Business Scenarios

1. A Polish Fintech Needs Both EUR and PLN

Imagine a fintech in Warsaw receiving euros from European partners while paying local expenses in Polish zloty. It needs both currencies and a way to move funds into and out of crypto.

WhiteBIT On/Off-Ramp could be worth considering. It lists EUR transfers through SEPA and PLN through ZEN.COM within one crypto ecosystem.The fee for EUR deposits and withdrawals is a flat €5, while limits depend on KYB level and agreed conditions.

The service also lists USD via SWIFT and CHF via SIC, alongside TRY, GEL and AUD among its supported currencies. Routes for those additional currencies require separate confirmation.

For this fintech, having several fiat options in one place could simplify treasury operations. I’d first confirm which PLN transactions are available to its legal entity and whether the limits suit its volumes.

2. What If Your Wallet Serves Customers Across Different Markets?

Now imagine a wallet provider that wants customers to buy and sell crypto directly inside its app. Some users pay in EUR, others prefer cards or local payment systems. The company needs an integrated payment experience across its supported markets.

Kraken Ramp, also marketed as Payward Ramp, takes this approach. Its institutional offering lists 24+ payment methods, including SEPA, ACH, PIX, debit cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay. The service offers API and SDK integration, with payment processing, compliance and crypto conversion handled through Kraken’s infrastructure.

The attraction is the combination of local payment methods and embedded crypto access. However, supported methods differ by market, and the company would need to confirm which currencies, countries and transaction directions are available to its customers.

For this type of wallet, the integration experience matters alongside currency coverage. A payment method listed on a product page is useful, but the full customer journey — from funding to completed conversion — needs to work in the intended markets.

3. And What About Thousands of USD Payouts?

Imagine a US fintech where customers convert digital assets into dollars and withdraw funds to their bank accounts. With thousands of payouts, settlement speed and integration become important.

zerohash On & Off Ramp supports fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat conversions through ACH, RTP, SEPA and payment service providers. It also supports 100+ digital assets, with availability depending on the market and integration.

For this business, I’d check which USD payout methods are available, how returned payments are handled and whether prefunding is required. These details can make a big difference when customer withdrawals are part of everyday operations.

So, What Would I Check Before Choosing?

I wouldn’t rank these payment routes from best to worst. A longer currency list doesn’t necessarily mean a better setup, especially when availability depends on jurisdiction, account type and banking partners.

I’d start by checking three things: which currencies and payment methods are actually available, whether the money belongs to the business or its customers, and how much each completed transfer costs.

Processing times matter too. Domestic real-time payments may suit frequent customer withdrawals, while international transfers can work well for corporate treasury operations. Fees, conversion spreads and reconciliation requirements should all be part of the calculation.

Finance can map currencies and volumes, operations can verify settlement schedules, and compliance can confirm eligibility. Sometimes one provider will cover most needs, while other businesses may benefit from combining several services.

I’d rather check those details upfront than discover halfway through a transfer that the selected route doesn’t work as expected.

Disclaimer: This is not financial or investment advice. Do your own research before making any decisions. Use at your own risk.

Three Companies, Three Fiat Problems, Three Different Ramps was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Receiving money from abroad, paying an international supplier, or getting paid by a foreign client should be straightforward. Yet, for many Africans, cross-border payments can involve high fees, currency conversion costs, delays, and limited payment options.

These challenges have increased interest in alternative ways to move money internationally. One option attracting attention is stablecoins, digital assets designed to maintain a relatively stable value.

Stablecoins like USDT and USDC are becoming part of conversations about remittances, digital payments, and international commerce.

Platforms such as SFx Money App support USDT and USDC transactions through its crypto wallet, alongside other international payment services.

Understanding how stablecoins work, where they may be useful, and what risks they carry can help Africans make more informed financial decisions.

What Are Stablecoins?

Stablecoins are digital assets designed to maintain a relatively stable value, often by being linked to a traditional currency such as the US dollar.

Unlike Bitcoin, whose market price can fluctuate significantly, stablecoins such as USD Coin (USDC) and Tether (USDT) aim to maintain a value close to one US dollar. However, their prices can fluctuate, and neither is entirely risk-free.

Stablecoins can be transferred between compatible digital wallets through blockchain networks. Depending on the network and service provider, this can offer an alternative to certain traditional payment processes.

However, stablecoins are not the same as money held in a bank account. Their reliability depends on factors such as the issuer, the arrangements supporting their value, redemption options, and market conditions.

Transfers may also involve network fees, platform charges, and conversion costs. Users must understand these factors before deciding whether stablecoins suit their needs.

Why Are Stablecoins Becoming Important In Africa?

1. Cross-Border Payments

International payments support families, freelancers, and businesses across Africa. However, traditional transfers can involve intermediary charges, exchange-rate margins, processing delays, or restrictions depending on the countries and institutions involved.

Stablecoins offer another potential way to transfer digital value. Where compatible services are available, users can transfer stablecoins between supported wallets without relying entirely on conventional international banking processes.

This does not mean every stablecoin transfer is cheaper or faster. Network fees, platform charges, conversion rates, and the recipient’s ability to access the funds all affect the overall experience.

SFx Money App supports USDT and USDC transactions through its crypto wallet, alongside other international payment services.

2. Remittances and Family Support

Africans living abroad often send money home to helps families cover education, healthcare, housing, and other daily expenses.

Stablecoins helps with this by providing another option for transferring digital value to friends and loved ones. Recipients need to have access to compatible wallets and services to successfully receive and spend funds.

SFx offers suitable service to receive and convert these assets into local currencies for easy spending.

3. Opportunities for Freelancers and Businesses

African freelancers work with clients around the world, while businesses purchase software, equipment, and other services from international suppliers.

Receiving payments and settling invoices can be challenging when payment options are limited or currency conversion increases costs.

Stablecoins offer an additional way to receive or transfer digital value when both parties have access to compatible services.

SFx supports USDT and USDC transactions through its crypto wallet alongside other international payment services including foreign accounts like USD, GBP, EUR, AED, GHS, and TZS accounts.

How Do Stablecoins Fit Into Africa’s Digital Finance Future?

Stablecoins are part of a wider shift towards digital financial services, alongside mobile payments, digital wallets, and online banking.

For African markets, these developments may create opportunities to improve access to certain financial services. However, reliable internet access, suitable devices, identity verification, and access to conversion services can influence whether people can use these products effectively.

It is important to note that access to an app does not automatically remove every barrier to financial inclusion. Services must be accessible, practical, and appropriate for the people using them.

What Should You Know Before Using Stablecoins?

Stablecoins have potential benefits, but users should understand their risks before making a transaction.

Value Risk

Stablecoins can lose their intended value peg because of market conditions or concerns about the issuer and the arrangements supporting the asset.

Fees and Conversion

Network fees, platform charges, and exchange rates can reduce the amount ultimately received.

Scams and Security

Fraudulent websites, phishing messages, and compromised wallets can cause financial losses. Blockchain transactions are often difficult or impossible to reverse once confirmed.

Regulations

Digital asset rules differ across countries and may change over time. Users should understand the requirements that apply to their location and intended transaction.

Before transferring stablecoins, verify the asset and network, research the service provider, check the fees, and use appropriate security measures.

A Practical Checklist

Before using stablecoins for an international payment, ask yourself:

1. Does the service support the stablecoin and network I intend to use?

2. What are the total transaction and conversion costs?

3. How will the recipient access or convert the funds?

4. How can I protect my wallet and account?

5. What rules apply to this transaction?

These simple checks can help users avoid preventable mistakes and make more informed financial decisions.

What Do Stablecoins Mean For Africa’s Financial Future?

Stablecoins are not a complete solution to Africa’s payment challenges, but they are creating new possibilities for transferring digital value.

They offer families another way to receive money from abroad and give freelancers and businesses additional options for certain international transactions.

SFx Money App illustrates how supported stablecoin transactions can exist alongside other international payment services, giving users different options to explore according to their needs.

As digital finance continues to develop, the focus should not simply be on whether stablecoins will replace traditional money. It should be on where they provide practical value, who can benefit from them, and how their risks can be managed responsibly.

The future of cross-border payments will depend not only on new technology, but also on making financial services more accessible, transparent, and useful for the people who rely on them.

What Are Stablecoins and Why Are They Becoming Important for Africans? was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Monthly volume went from $306M to $1.22B. Everyone wrote the payments story. Almost nobody wrote the balance story.

Nobody writes a headline about a balance.

We write about the swipe. A coffee bought with USDC in Lagos. A ride paid in USDT in Sao Paulo. Those make good copy.

But a card is not a swipe. A card is a balance that occasionally gets smaller.

And over the last twelve months, the balances sitting behind stablecoin cards quietly turned into real money.

Quick answer, for anyone who searched “stablecoin card spending”: monthly stablecoin card spending hit $1.04 billion in July 2026, roughly triple the $306 million recorded a year earlier, and $1.22 billion by September. Cumulative tracked spending has passed $10.9 billion. Dollar-backed stablecoins fund about 70% of it. The whole category is still only around 0.07% of the global card market.

How Fast Did Stablecoin Card Spending Actually Grow?

Faster than the coverage suggested, and from a base so small that almost nobody treated it as a trend.

The tracked monthly numbers for 2026:

• January: $574M
• April: $768M
• July: $1,038M, the first month above a billion
• September: $1,224M, the third straight month above a billion

Three more figures worth holding onto:

• Cumulative tracked card spending crossed $10.9 billion by late August 2026.
• July alone carried more than 10 million individual card transactions.
• Visa reported more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programmes live or in development as of June 2026.

Concentration matters here too. RedotPay alone generated $401.9 million of September volume, roughly 34% of the entire category, and says it now serves more than eight million users.

Ether.fi’s card did $100.3 million in July purchase volume, up from under $10 million two months after launch in 2025.

Why Did Nobody Call Stablecoin Card Spending a Trend?

Two reasons, and both come down to where people were looking.

First, tripling from a small base does not feel like news. It feels like a chart that was always going to go up and to the right.

Second, the growth is not happening where crypto media usually files copy from.

StraitsX, a Visa partner that helps other firms launch cards, reported gross transaction value on its rails grew roughly 600% in lower-income markets between March 2025 and February 2026, against about 150% in wealthier ones. Binance said average volume on its Brazil card climbed 80% in a year.

John Timoney of Rain put it plainly at Consensus Miami: stablecoin cards are under 1% of global card spend today, but some Latin American markets could reach double-digit share soon.

And what people are buying is boring in the best way. Food and retail were the largest spending categories on StraitsX’s rails. Groceries, ride-hailing, food delivery. Not trades.

The adoption is real. It is just happening in markets where a dollar balance is a hedge, not a hobby.

Which Dollars Are Funding the Swipe?

Mostly two of them.

• USDC funded 50.8% of July 2026 card volume, up from roughly 48% a year earlier.
• USDT funded 20.3%, up from about 7%.
• The euro-backed EURe, which was as much as 88% of tracked card spending in early 2024, has fallen below 2%.

That last line is the quiet structural change nobody wrote up. The category started as a European experiment and became a dollar product.

What Is a Stablecoin Balance Actually Doing Between Swipes?

Here is the part the payments coverage skipped.

Every card needs a funded balance behind it. You do not spend $1.22 billion a month without holding considerably more than that across millions of wallets, waiting.

So ask the obvious question. What is that money doing on the other 29 days of the month?

For most stablecoin balances, the honest answer is nothing.

• A plain stablecoin carries a fixed $1.00 face value.
• The reserve behind it usually sits in short-term government paper.
• That return accrues to the issuer, not to the holder.
• You hold the dollar. Somebody else holds the yield.

That was a tolerable trade when stablecoins were trading chips. It is a much stranger trade when stablecoins are your grocery money.

How Much Idle Stablecoin Capital Is Sitting Still Right Now?

Total stablecoin supply sat near $302.8 billion in September 2026. Card spending is running around $1.22 billion a month.

Run the division. Card spending is roughly 0.4% of outstanding stablecoin supply each month.

Analysts tracking stablecoin velocity have been blunt about the rest. Most supply is parked rather than circulating, and only a thin slice is held in yield-generating form.

Yield-generating designs are still a thin slice of that base, under $5 billion by most counts, even though they drove more than half of net new stablecoin supply growth in the first quarter of 2026. Demand is clearly not the constraint. Distribution is.

The spending number is the one that gets written up. The 99.6% sitting behind it is the one that either compounds or does not.

What Is the Sky Savings Rate, and Why Should a Spending Balance Care?

This is where Sky Ecosystem fits into the picture.

Sky Ecosystem is a global savings and capital allocation network, and the mechanics are deliberately unglamorous:

• USDS is the base stablecoin and the unit of account. You convert into it 1:1 through Peg Stability Modules, with no fees and no slippage.
• The Sky Agent Network, a set of independent allocators including Spark, Grove, Obex and Osero, competes for access to USDS liquidity under risk limits published in advance.
• Those allocators pay for that access, and their payments contribute to Sky Protocol revenue.
• A share of that revenue funds the Sky Savings Rate, a variable rate set by Sky Governance rather than by borrowing demand in any one market.
• sUSDS is how you hold it. Supply USDS, receive sUSDS, and the rate accrues programmatically. No lockup, no exit fee, redeemable on demand.

Sky Governance moved the Sky Savings Rate up in early October 2026, from 3.60% to 3.80%. It is variable by design, so check the live figure before quoting it anywhere.

sUSDS is currently the largest yield-generating stablecoin in the market. That matters less as a bragging right than as a liquidity fact.

Size is what lets a spending balance move in and out without slippage, which is the whole requirement for money you might need on a Tuesday.

The dollar you spend from and the dollar that accrues do not have to be two different dollars.

Is Institutional Money Already Treating It This Way?

Yes, and it happened three weeks ago.

On 23 September 2026, Galaxy added $100 million of sUSDS to its corporate treasury and approved sUSDS as eligible collateral across its institutional trading business.

Read that as a signal rather than a press release. A trading desk does not put nine figures into a yield-generating stablecoin as an experiment.

It does it because the position stays liquid, the collateral is verifiable onchain, and the balance does something while it waits.

That is the same logic a card balance needs. Just with fewer zeros.

The numbers behind it are public rather than asserted: $14.15B in Total Protocol Collateral against $11.48B in stablecoin supply, all checkable on the dashboards before you believe a word of this post.

What Could Break This Argument?

I would rather name the friction than pretend it is not there.

• The rate is variable. Sky Governance can vote the Sky Savings Rate down as easily as up.
• Card programmes mostly do not settle in yield-generating tokens yet. Today the plumbing runs on USDC and USDT.
• Regulation is live. A US Senate draft proposed banning yield on idle stablecoin holdings outright, and European regulators have been weighing their own restrictions.
• Smart contract risk and governance risk do not disappear because a balance is convenient.
• Cards are a convenience product. Nobody adds a conversion step to buy coffee, which is why this only works if the yield-generating token is the default balance rather than an extra one.

None of that changes the structural point. It means the structural point is contested, which is the only kind worth writing about.

RedotPay projects the category reaches $50 billion a year by 2028. Whether that number lands or not, the balance question gets louder either way.

Stablecoin card spending tripled and the category barely blinked.

My read is that the spending is the visible half. The balance behind it decides whether any of this is actually better than the card already in your pocket.

Two questions, and I will reply to every answer. Would you hold a spending balance in a yield-generating stablecoin, or does the extra moving part kill it for you? And if you used a stablecoin card this year, what did you actually buy with it?

Stablecoin Card Spending Tripled in a Year and Nobody Called It a Trend was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Stablecoins are winning distribution while Europe concentrates on regulation and settlement. The strategic answer is not one rail, but orchestration across many.

In 2015, before “Blockchain Island” became a recognised part of Malta’s economic positioning, I joined a pressure group advocating for the country to take distributed-ledger technology seriously.

The opportunity appeared larger than crypto. Malta had spent decades building an international financial-services industry. A clear DLT framework could attract new foreign direct investment, widen the fintech sector and give companies the confidence to establish real operations in the country.

From 2016 to 2018, I became involved more directly as an adviser and consultant, supporting the framework’s development, positioning and communication. The work brought together government, legal advisers and industry participants around a relatively simple proposition: regulatory clarity would allow serious businesses to plan.

I still believe that proposition was right.

But with hindsight, it was incomplete.

Regulation can create permission to build. It cannot create adoption on its own.

Malta did important work in creating a legal vocabulary for a fast-moving industry. Where we could have done more was education: translating legislation into something the public could understand, building trust beyond the professional community and explaining why the technology might matter in everyday life.

That lesson became much more tangible a few years later.

I was recruited by the Calamatta Cuschieri Group to lead its overall marketing and expand its fintech arm, which operated under Moneybase. The mission ultimately included bringing Malta’s first neobank to market.

Inside the business, the technology was central. The product depended on digital onboarding, payments infrastructure, card controls, identity checks, and a regulated operating model working together.

Customers did not describe the value in those terms.

They valued opening an account from home, at a time that suited them, without being constrained by branch hours. They valued controlling their finances from a phone. They could issue, freeze, restrict, or replace a card without waiting for someone else to act.

Trust was the first barrier. Onboarding was the second. Once both were addressed, convenience became the proposition.

The early uptake reinforced that point: new accounts and card creation exceeded their targets during the first six months, and the service reached more than 40,000 monthly active users within its first 90 days.

The technology enabled the experience. It was not the experience.

That distinction now shapes how I view Europe’s position in stablecoins and tokenised finance.

Europe is doing difficult and necessary institutional work. But it risks repeating an old assumption: that credible architecture will naturally translate into customer adoption and market leadership.

Stablecoins have moved beyond the crypto market

The stablecoin story is changing because usage is changing.

Stablecoins remain essential to exchange liquidity and on-chain trading, so raw blockchain volume should never be confused with commercial payments. Transfers between exchanges, minting, decentralised-finance activity and automated transactions can make the headline numbers look more economically significant than they are.

Even after those caveats, however, identifiable payment activity has become substantial.

Visa and Allium estimate annual stablecoin payment volume at between $401 billion and $527 billion. Within that activity, service-fee payments represented $56 billion, payroll $43 billion, and supplier payments $28 billion. Among B2B transactions for which geography could be established, 43% of volume was cross-border.

Visa has also reported that business and commercial programmes represented approximately 17% of stablecoin-linked card volume in its 2026 financial year to date. The company supports more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programmes, whose payment volume grew by almost 200% year on year.

The point is not that stablecoins have already replaced established payment systems. They have not.

The point is that they are solving identifiable operational problems: moving value outside banking cut-off times, reducing some forms of prefunding, reaching markets through digital wallets and simplifying cross-border treasury flows.

As Visa executive Mark Nelsen observed, businesses are not pursuing payment technology for novelty; they want trusted and reliable ways to move money.

Stablecoins are gaining distribution because the value proposition is practical.

Europe is securing the settlement layer

Europe is working on a different part of the problem.

In September 2026, the Eurosystem launched Pontes, an initiative connecting eligible DLT market platforms with TARGET Services so wholesale tokenised transactions can settle in central-bank money.

Pontes uses two settlement routes. Transactions can use cash tokens on the Eurosystem’s DLT platform, or they can settle through T2, Europe’s real-time gross settlement system. Hash-Link technology synchronises the movement of the asset and the cash, enabling delivery-versus-payment and other transactions in which both legs must complete together.

This is easy to reduce to another central-bank technology project. That would miss the significance.

Tokenising a bond does not remove settlement risk if the asset moves on one system while the money moves elsewhere, under different rules and at a different speed. Institutional markets require a credible cash leg, legal finality and confidence that the asset and payment cannot become separated.

Pontes is designed to provide that anchor.

ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone described the initiative as bringing “the stability and trust of central bank money to the European tokenised finance ecosystem.”

That is an institutional advantage. It is not yet a distribution advantage.

Europe’s real vulnerability

Europe has many of the components needed for a credible tokenised-finance market: a large regulated economy, experienced banks and payment institutions, MiCA, instant-payment infrastructure and now an operational bridge between DLT markets and central-bank settlement.

But global digital-money distribution is not organised around regulatory credibility alone.

Dollar stablecoins benefit from deep on-chain liquidity, widespread wallet support, exchange integration, developer adoption and the global demand for dollars. US-led platforms and private networks increasingly influence how customers encounter digital money, even when the users and underlying economic activity sit outside the United States.

This creates a strategic possibility that Europe should take seriously.

Europe could write the rules, supervise the institutions and provide trusted settlement while non-European companies own the wallet, interface, transaction data and customer relationship.

MiCA illustrates both the strength and the constraint of Europe’s position. By 1 September 2026, 39 e-money tokens had been issued under the framework, but no asset-referenced token had been authorised. The European Banking Authority has acknowledged that classification complexity can add cost and delay product development, with consequences for competitiveness.

The answer is not weaker regulation.

Trust is an asset, particularly in financial markets. The challenge is converting that trust into products that are easier to use, liquidity that is easier to access, and distribution capable of competing across borders.

Europe cannot regulate its way into distribution.

It has to make regulated infrastructure commercially useful.

The strategic answer is multi-rail

If I were building a European fintech today or advising a crypto founder entering the European market, I would not begin by choosing between stablecoins and bank money.

I would begin with the transaction.

Where does it start? Where must it end? Who carries the risk? What form of finality is required? Which customer or institution must trust the result?

The answer will not always lead to the same rail.

Stablecoins are compelling when 24/7 portability, global liquidity and onchain access matter. Tokenised commercial-bank deposits are stronger where the banking relationship, regulated balance sheet and treasury structure matter. Central-bank money should anchor wholesale settlement where risk-free finality is essential. Existing bank and instant-payment rails remain effective where local reach, familiarity and acceptance are already strong.

This is not indecision. It is architecture.

The customer should not have to choose the rail. The platform should choose the right rail for the transaction.

The most defensible opportunity may therefore sit less in issuing another token than in orchestrating the system around it: identity, compliance, liquidity, foreign exchange, custody, settlement, reconciliation and routing.

Issuance can create visibility. Distribution and orchestration create repeatable utility.

Foundations do not guarantee leadership

My experience with Malta’s DLT framework taught me why clear rules matter before serious institutions can commit.

Helping launch a neobank taught me that customers adopt outcomes, not infrastructure.

Working across global Web3 markets has made the connection between those lessons more visible. Regulation, product, narrative, trust, and distribution are not separate conversations. They are parts of the same strategy.

Europe is building credible foundations. Pontes provides a bridge to central-bank settlement. MiCA creates a common perimeter. Euro stablecoins, tokenised deposits, the digital euro and established payment systems could become complementary parts of a broader digital-money architecture.

But foundations do not guarantee leadership.

Europe’s position will depend on whether it can connect institutional trust with products customers choose, liquidity markets can use, and distribution that travels beyond national boundaries.

If it succeeds, Europe can build a model for tokenised finance that is both regulated and globally relevant.

If it does not, it may provide the safest rails while dollar stablecoins and foreign platforms own the journey.

The strategic question is no longer whether finance will become more tokenised.

It is where, in that multi-rail system, Europe and the companies building within it have the right to win.

About the Author

Joseph Zammit is a CMO and CSO in fintech and crypto, with 25+ years at the intersection of marketing, strategy, and regulation. He helped design Malta’s pioneering DLT framework, launched the country’s first Neobank, and led the global expansion of crypto and Web3 platforms. He works with Europe-based licensed neobanks, EMIs, PSPs, and crypto-native infrastructure teams on strategy, regulation, and go-to-market. He is a member of the Crypto Valley Association.

Europe Is Building the Rails for Tokenised Finance. It Could Still Lose the Customer. was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Prices are down roughly a third from the top. Dollar supply onchain is down 4.5%. That gap is the most important chart in crypto right now.

Bitcoin’s record close was $128,198 on 6 October 2025. In late September 2026 it trades near $84,000.

Ethereum peaked at $4,953 in August 2025. It now sits around $2,670.

More than $810 billion of market value came off the board during the 2026 selloff.

Now look at the dollars.

Total stablecoin supply peaked at $322.4 billion on 17 May 2026. By 13 August it was $308.0 billion. That is a 4.5% drawdown, set against a price drawdown of roughly a third.

For a decade those two lines moved together. This year they did not.

Stablecoin supply vs crypto prices in 2026: what the numbers actually say

The gap is wider than most people realise. Here is the 2026 scoreboard.

• Global crypto market capitalisation sat near $2.98 trillion in late September, with Bitcoin dominance around 56.5%
• Bitcoin is roughly 34% below its October 2025 record
• Ethereum is roughly 46% below its August 2025 record, and touched a 60% drawdown earlier in the year
• Total stablecoin supply is still up 14.3% year over year, from $269.4 billion in August 2025 to $308.0 billion in August 2026
• Stablecoins now account for around 13% of the entire crypto market by capitalisation
• Roughly 269 million onchain addresses held a stablecoin balance as of mid-2026

One more number makes the point properly. June 2026 set a record for adjusted stablecoin transfer volume at $1.79 trillion, in the same quarter that supply was falling.

Balances shrank. Usage grew. Those two things are not supposed to happen at once.

Forbes called it the first sustained contraction the sector had seen in four years.

The framing that stuck with me was simpler: supply falling while velocity climbed means the behaviour underneath the number changed.

Supply fell 4.5%. Prices fell roughly a third. In every previous cycle, those two numbers fell together.

Why stablecoin supply crashed 26% in 2022 but held firm in the 2026 bear market

The last downturn is the control group, and the contrast is brutal.

• Combined stablecoin market cap fell from about $166 billion in March 2022 to $122 billion by September 2023, a contraction of more than 26%
• USDC alone dropped from $55 billion in July 2022 to below $24 billion by November 2023
• The 2026 pullback, by comparison, is the sharpest since 2023 and still only a few percent off the peak

There is also a rehearsal worth noting. Between December 2025 and February 2026, supply contracted by roughly $9 billion, then recovered to a fresh record. Short contractions have become normal. Structural collapse has not.

So what changed? In 2022, most stablecoin balances were trading collateral. They existed to buy the next thing. When the next thing stopped looking attractive, holders redeemed and went home.

In 2026, a large share of those balances have a job that has nothing to do with the next trade.

What broke the link between stablecoin supply and the crypto cycle?

Three structural shifts, all of which landed inside eighteen months.

Regulation split the category in two

The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, prohibits payment stablecoin issuers from paying yield to holders, with the framework taking effect no later than 18 January 2027.

Hold a plain payment stablecoin and you are lending the issuer a dollar for free. That is now the law, not an accident of market structure.

Balances became working capital

Stablecoins are settling payroll, cross-border invoices, card spend and treasury operations. That demand does not care what Bitcoin did last week.

Yield replaced price expectation as the reason to hold

When a dollar onchain can generate a return from a transparent, verifiable source, the holder has a reason to stay through a drawdown.

That third shift is the one most commentary still misses. For scale: yield-generating instruments make up somewhere between 55% and 65% of traditional financial markets.

In crypto, the comparable figure has sat closer to 8% to 11%. The gap is not a quirk. It is a queue of capital waiting for a legitimate route.

If the money did not leave crypto, where did it actually go?

It rotated. The data on this is unusually clean.

• In Q1 2026, tokenized treasuries added $2.12 billion in market cap while stablecoins added $1.19 billion, the first time tokenized treasuries outgrew stablecoins in absolute terms
• The largest absolute supply gains among stablecoins went to yield-generating names, including USDY, sUSDS, USYC and syrupUSDC
• Payment-only supply leaked. Yield-generating supply gained

This is the distinction that makes the headline number misleading. “Stablecoin supply fell” describes an average of two categories moving in opposite directions.

USDS is a useful illustration of the entry point, and sUSDS of the destination. USDS is the fully backed unit of account. sUSDS is the yield-generating version of it, redeemable at any time, with no lockups.

Why a governance-set savings rate behaves differently in a drawdown

Here is the part that actually explains the durability.

The Sky Savings Rate is a variable rate set by SKY-token-holder governance.

It is funded by Net Protocol Revenue generated when the Sky Agent Network, a set of independent capital allocators, draws USDS liquidity from Sky Protocol and deploys it into diversified strategies under public risk limits.

Read that again with a market crash in mind. The rate does not depend on funding rates staying positive.

It does not depend on token prices. It depends on whether a diversified allocation network keeps generating revenue.

In 2026, it did. Per Sky Frontier Foundation:

• Protocol Collateral grew 18.2% year over year to $11.10 billion at the August close
• Sky Agent Network vaults expanded from $5.63 billion to $6.06 billion during August alone
• Sky Protocol stablecoin supply closed August at $9.53 billion, up from $9.41 billion in July
• Q2 2026 delivered $107.35 million in Gross Protocol Revenue and $33.29 million in Net Protocol Surplus, the fifth consecutive positive quarter
• sUSDS supply grew 149% year over year to $5.52 billion at the Q2 close

A market shrinking 4.5% at the top line. A savings layer inside it growing at triple digits. That is the decoupling, in one comparison.

The question stopped being “where is the price going” and became “who is paying me to wait”.

Who is backing the structural demand argument with real money?

Institutions, and recently.

Token Terminal data as of 21 August placed Sky Protocol at $4.6 billion in tokenized funds, the largest single share of a $34.4 billion category, ahead of several far better-known issuers.

Then on 23 September, Galaxy added $100 million of sUSDS to its corporate balance sheet and approved it as eligible collateral across its institutional trading business.

Sky Agent Network exposure to Galaxy moved from $27 million at the Q2 close to roughly $304 million by 1 September.

Sky.money reported $7.1 billion across its full product suite on 19 August, of which $4.92 billion sat in the Sky Savings Rate.

None of that is speculative positioning. It is a treasury decision made during a drawdown.

Is falling stablecoin supply still a bearish signal for crypto prices?

Less than it used to be, and that is the honest answer.

Stablecoin supply was once a single-purpose gauge. It measured dry powder waiting on the sidelines. Today it measures at least three different behaviours at once:

• Dry powder waiting to buy
• Working capital moving through payment and settlement rails
• Yield-generating balances that have no intention of leaving

When one number tracks three behaviours, the number stops being a signal and starts being noise.

A 4.5% drawdown tells you almost nothing about whether the next leg is up or down.

Better things to watch:

• Net issuance split by category, payment versus yield-generating
• Adjusted transfer volume rather than parked balances, and the underlying supply data behind both
• Collateral composition and backing ratios, which you can verify onchain rather than infer
• Whether protocol revenue holds up when prices do not

What this actually means for the next cycle

The stablecoin market has stopped being a mirror of crypto prices. It has started behaving like a savings layer that happens to live onchain.

That changes what the metric is good for. Supply used to tell you about sentiment. Now it tells you about allocation.

And allocation, unlike sentiment, tends to be sticky.

If you want to check any figure in this piece rather than take my word for it, Sky Ecosystem publishes protocol collateral, revenue and supply data continuously.

So here is the question worth arguing about in the comments. If stablecoin supply no longer tracks the crypto cycle, what is the honest replacement metric for onchain liquidity? Net issuance by category? Transfer volume? Something else entirely? I do not think the market has settled on an answer yet, and I would rather hear a good disagreement than a consensus.

Crypto Fell Hard in 2026. Stablecoin Supply Barely Moved. What Broke the Link? was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fees are not revenue. Revenue is not surplus. The onchain revenue rankings look very different once you check the second number.

Over a trailing year, Uniswap collected roughly $892 million in fees. It kept about $12 million.

Hyperliquid collected $1.05 billion. It kept $943 million.

Same industry. Same twelve months. Two completely different businesses.

That gap is the whole story of onchain revenue in 2026. It is also the reason most “highest revenue DeFi protocols” lists fall apart the moment you look past the headline number.

So let’s rank them properly. Then let’s look at the one protocol that publishes a quarterly income statement like a real company, and argue about whether it is paying out too little.

Which Are the Highest Revenue DeFi Protocols Right Now?

Short answer first, because you came here for a ranking.

By protocol revenue actually retained over a trailing year, per DefiLlama:

• Hyperliquid — around $943M
• Sky Protocol — around $209M
• Jupiter — around $134M
• Aave — around $127M
• Uniswap — around $12M

Two caveats before anyone starts typing in the comments.

• Third-party methodology is not the same as a protocol’s own accounting. Sky Protocol’s own monthly settlement cycles put its annualised gross run rate at $429.4M entering the second half of 2026.
• Several very large protocols read as near-zero revenue because their fees flow to suppliers rather than the treasury. Morpho and EigenCloud both look like that. Huge, but structurally different animals.

For scale, DefiLlama tracked $93.9 billion locked across all of DeFi on 21 September 2026.

The entire industry’s retained revenue still fits inside what a single mid-sized bank books in a quarter. Worth remembering before anyone declares victory.

Fees or Protocol Revenue: Which Number Actually Tells You Who Makes Money?

Three words get used interchangeably and they mean three different things.

• Fees are what users pay. That is throughput, not income.
• Protocol revenue is what is left after liquidity providers, validators and incentives are paid.
• Surplus is what survives after the protocol covers its own operating costs.

Most rankings stop at the first one. That is how a protocol gets called a cash machine while it hands 98% of its take straight back out the door.

The number worth tracking is the revenue capture ratio: revenue divided by fees.

• Hyperliquid: around 90%
• Aerodrome: around 77%
• Sky Protocol: around 53%
• Jupiter: around 30%
• Aave: around 13%
• Uniswap: around 1.4%

A low capture ratio can be a deliberate growth choice. It can also be a business that never learned how to keep anything.

Where Does Sky Protocol’s Revenue Actually Come From?

This is where the model gets genuinely unusual, because it does not look like a trading venue at all.

Sky Protocol issues USDS and makes it available as wholesale liquidity. Independent capital allocators, together called the Sky Agent Network, borrow that liquidity at a governance-set Base Rate and put it to work.

• Spark runs lending markets and is the largest by activity
• Grove handles institutional tokenized credit
• Osero operates a neobank
• Obex incubates new allocators

Each agent keeps the spread it earns above the Base Rate. That spread is their business.

Their Base Rate payments then settle back to the protocol every month, alongside vault stability fees, real-world asset yield and Peg Stability Module fees.

So the revenue line is not one product with one demand curve. It is a portfolio of independent allocators competing for the same liquidity.

For scale: Total Protocol Collateral stood at $14.15B, against $11.48B in stablecoin supply, when I checked the dashboard on skyeco.com this week.

How Much Has Sky Protocol Made in 2026 So Far?

Published quarter by quarter by Sky Frontier Foundation, which is unusual in itself.

• Q1 2026 — $123.79M Gross Protocol Revenue and $46.04M Net Protocol Surplus. The strongest quarter on record. DL News covered it here.
• Q2 2026 — $107.35M Gross Protocol Revenue, up 10.5% year on year. Net Protocol Revenue of $40.09M, up 25.1%. Net revenue margin widened from 33.0% to 37.3%.
• Five consecutive quarters in Net Protocol Surplus.
• Full-year 2025 landed at $338M. The published 2026 outlook is $611.5M.

One line deserves a pause. Operating expenses in June 2026 came in at $161K, against $9.89M in June 2025. That is not a rounding difference.

It is an organisational consolidation that turned a modest revenue increase into a much larger surplus increase.

Revenue growth gets the headline. Cost discipline did the heavy lifting.

Who Actually Gets Paid When a DeFi Protocol Makes Money?

Revenue is a vanity metric if you cannot trace where it lands. Here you can.

The Sky Savings Rate gets funded first. sUSDS holders are paid before anyone else in the stack.

What remains runs through the Stage 2 framework:

• 50% to the Surplus Buffer
• 22.5% to SKY buybacks
• 22.5% to USDS staking rewards
• 5% to SKY buy and burn

Sky Reserves closed Q2 at $82.4M against a $150M Solvency Reserve target. Roughly 55% of the way there. Until that floor is met, reserve building outranks distributions.

Sky Governance made that call in March 2026, after S&P Global assigned Sky Protocol a B- issuer credit rating in August 2025, the first credit rating a major agency has given a DeFi protocol.

Why Is the Sky Savings Rate Only 3.6% When Revenue Is at a Record?

This is the question I see most often, and it is a fair one.

The Sky Savings Rate is a dial, not an output. Sky Governance sets it by onchain vote. It moved to 3.6% on 3 September 2026.

• Turn the dial up and current sUSDS holders get paid more today
• Turn it down and more surplus is retained, reserves fill faster, the protocol gets harder to break

Right now the dial is pointed at resilience rather than payout. You can argue that is too conservative, and plenty of people do.

What you cannot argue is that the tradeoff is hidden. Every change is proposed and voted onchain before it takes effect.

There is one wrinkle most coverage skipped. In July 2026, Sky Governance cut the Sky Spread from 0.1% to zero through the weekly Atlas Edit cycle, ratified onchain on 23 July.

Tiny number, real signal. More of the Base Rate now reaches savers instead of being retained as protocol margin.

Demand has not exactly collapsed in response. sUSDS supply reached $5.52B at the end of Q2 2026, up 149% year on year.

A published, governance-set rate is quietly one of the most useful things in onchain finance. It gives a treasury an actual discount rate for operating cash.

What Does Galaxy’s $100M sUSDS Position Tell Us About Onchain Revenue?

On 23 September 2026, Galaxy Digital (Nasdaq: GLXY) added $100 million of sUSDS to its corporate treasury and approved sUSDS as eligible collateral across its institutional trading business. Full announcement here.

The detail underneath the headline is the interesting part:

• Galaxy’s institutional loan book averages $1.4 billion
• It serves more than 1,600 trading counterparties
• Clients who post sUSDS against a loan keep accruing the Sky Savings Rate on the full position for as long as the loan runs
• Grove already provides Galaxy a $500 million warehouse lending facility

That is collateral doing two jobs at once, which is the thing traditional cash management cannot do.

Zoom out and the trend line is the same everywhere. Onchain real-world assets, excluding stablecoins, passed $33 billion in July 2026, roughly four times their level in early 2025, per rwa.xyz. Revenue rankings follow that kind of capital flow, with a lag.

How Do You Verify Any of These Revenue Numbers Yourself?

Please do not take a ranking on trust. Mine included.

• info.skyeco.com — live TVL, collateral composition, and the current state of USDS and sUSDS
• financial.skyeco.com — the balance sheet, Gross and Net Protocol Revenue, Protocol Surplus and Sky Reserves
• insights.skyeco.com — the quarterly reports and monthly financial updates published by Sky Frontier Foundation
• DefiLlama’s Sky page — an independent cross-check with a different methodology

If two sources disagree, that is usually a methodology difference rather than a scandal. Read both.

So Who Actually Makes Money Onchain?

If “makes money” means fee throughput, Hyperliquid wins and it is not close.

If it means retained protocol revenue with a published income statement, audited security reviews and a credit rating behind it, the field narrows very fast.

And here is the thing I would actually like to argue about in the comments.

Should a protocol build reserves to a hard floor before paying holders in full? Or pay holders now and raise reserves later?

Sky Governance chose the first, and capped distributions until reserves hit $150M. Ethena, Hyperliquid and Aave have each answered it differently.

Which side are you on? And which protocol do you think will top the onchain revenue rankings twelve months from now?

Drop it below. I read every response.

Highest Revenue DeFi Protocols in 2026: Who Actually Makes Money Onchain? was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• The Central Bank of Ghana asked the IMF to conduct a technical assistance mission regarding its digital asset regulatory framework.
• In its report, the IMF identified several structural gaps in market abuse protections, stablecoin redemption rights, and offsite reporting, and proposed solutions for Ghanaian regulators to implement.
• The IMF also noted that Ghana’s cryptocurrency volume was driven mostly by stablecoin use, for trading, cross-border commerce, and inflation hedging.
• The Bank of Ghana and SEC Ghana have till December 2026 to implement the IMF’s proposed regulations.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a technical assistance report on September 25. In the report, the IMF informed the Bank of Ghana (BoG) and Ghana’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC Ghana) that its current guidelines and regulations “fall short of comprehensive oversight.”

The IMF noted that while current regulation was “directionally aligned with global standards,” Ghana’s central bank and the SEC must close key gaps before the digital asset licensing regime goes live later in December 2026.

Ghana’s Current Crypto Framework

In December 2025, Ghana passed the Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Act (Act 1154). The Act gives the Bank of Ghana and SEC Ghana regulatory and supervisory authority over virtual assets.

In line with the VASP Act, the Bank of Ghana regulates and supervises:

• stablecoin issuance,
• payment processing,
• Custodial and noncustodial wallet services
• Crypto lending and borrowing
• Bitcoin ATMs.

The Securities and Exchange Commission Ghana regulates and supervises:

• Crypto Trading Platforms
• Brokers and Advisory
• Asset Tokenisation and ICOs
• Fund Management and ETFs

The current framework also requires stablecoin issuers (cedi-backed or backed by foreign currency) to obtain a licence to continue marketing to the Ghanaian market. Stablecoin issuers may keep reserves abroad, provided they are held in banks in “non-high-risk” jurisdictions.

The Bank of Ghana and the SEC each have their own sandbox. On August 19, 2026, SEC Ghana added 9 new firms to its crypto sandbox, growing the number from 11 to 20 participants. The sandbox, which initially launched in March 2026, is expected to run for a 12-month pilot period.

Later that month, on August 25, the BoG inaugurated a five-agency Virtual Assets Coordinating Committee (VACC). The committee includes representatives from the BoG, SEC Ghana, the Ministry of Finance, the Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC), and the Cyber Security Authority (CSA).

The BoG governor described the committee as necessary for coordinating regulatory and supervisory activity.

Less than a week later, UMB Bank gained approval from both the SEC and the Bank of Ghana to provide virtual accounts to eligible VASPs.

The Gaps the IMF Flagged and its Recommendations

Despite all this and the IMF’s acknowledgement that “legislation is in place” and that Ghanaian “authorities are ready to regulate,” the IMF still found gaps in the current framework. The IMF outlined those gaps and its recommendations, urging the BoG and SEC Ghana to implement them before December 2026. They include, but aren’t limited to:

1. Broad Regulatory Scope: The IMF noted that there were no tailored, activity-specific guidelines for trading platforms, brokers and lending services in Ghana’s VASP Act. It also noted that the Act extends unnecessary financial oversight to network mining, validation and self-hosted wallets.

To combat this, the IMF urged the SEC and the BoG to provide regulations that allow for “comprehensive regulation and supervision of the crypto market’s activities.”

2. Market Conduct, Abuse, Custody and Trading: The existing market abuse provisions apply almost exclusively to proprietary trading. The IMF called for expanding these rules to cover order books, front-running, wash trading, spoofing, and other order misuse by brokers.

The IMF also noted that the current rules do not explicitly prohibit asset rehypothecation. It called for clear rules prohibiting the rehypothecation of clients’ assets without consent. The IMF asked the SEC to develop dedicated trading guidelines covering pre- and post-trade transparency, disclosure, whitepaper requirements, and listing/delisting criteria.

3. Stablecoin Arrangements: The current stablecoin framework does not clearly state end-user redemption rights or minimum rules for liquid reserves. The IMF also noted that the current framework does not clearly distinguish between cedi-backed stablecoins and foreign stablecoins.

The IMF asked regulators to prioritise binding rules for par-value redemption rights. It also asked regulators to enforce liquid reserve allocations and establish clear currency-matching requirements.

4. Reporting, Disclosures and Data Collection: The IMF warned that supervisory offsite reporting requirements are sparse, static, and non-standardised. It relies on annual financial statements rather than dynamic market data.

It asked regulators to consider implementing standardised, activity-specific, periodic reporting templates that cover risk metrics, volume, and reserve details.

Why This Matters

The IMF report estimates that somewhere between 8% and 17% of Ghana’s population participate in the crypto market. With an estimated $21 billion in annual virtual asset transactions, Ghana is the fifth-largest cryptocurrency market in sub-Saharan Africa.

The scale of the market means that Ghana’s regulators need to be careful and thorough as they draft regulations.

The IMF also noted that most of Ghana’s crypto transaction volume is dominated by USDT stablecoin. It also highlighted that current volumes show Ghanaians use USDT for crypto trading and to protect their funds against inflation. Unlike remittance-dependent economies, Ghana showed balanced gross inflows and outflows, driven by increased stablecoin use in B2B cross-border commerce.

With just two months before December, the Bank of Ghana and SEC Ghana face a narrow window to review and refine their regulations.

However, considering that the IMF conducted the technical assessment mission at the request of the Ghanaian central bank, the regulators seem intent on providing clear digital asset governance and regulations for its market.

Originally published at https://cryptoafrica.news on September 28, 2026.

IMF Flags Gaps in Ghana’s Crypto Framework Ahead of December 2026 Licensing Go-Live — Crypto Africa was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.