ABA Editorial Board · Jan 7, 2026 · 10 min read
African crypto regulation across 2024 and 2025 has moved toward formal licensing frameworks that treat crypto as a consumer speculation product. Our view, shared by practitioners who actually serve African crypto users, is that this framing gets the problem backwards. The majority of African crypto activity is not consumer speculation. It is operational dollar settlement. Regulating it as the first thing produces rules that fail to address what is actually happening.
Across 2024 and 2025, African crypto regulation has taken a distinct direction. South Africa has licensed hundreds of Virtual Asset Service Providers through the Financial Sector Conduct Authority, creating one of the most formalized crypto regulatory environments on the continent. Kenya passed a Virtual Asset Service Provider bill in 2025 establishing its first crypto licensing framework. Nigeria, after years of restrictive posture from the Central Bank, moved through 2025 toward formal licensing with the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Investment and Securities Act 2025. Morocco, Ghana, Tanzania, and several others are at various stages of developing their own frameworks. The direction of travel is clear: African crypto is being formalized, licensed, and brought under consumer protection and anti-money-laundering rules that treat it as a retail investment product analogous to equities, mutual funds, or consumer lending. We think this direction is wrong, and we think the operators who actually serve African crypto users have been saying so for at least two years without regulators listening carefully enough to what they were describing.
According to the Chainalysis 2025 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report, Sub-Saharan Africa received over USD 205 billion in on-chain cryptocurrency value in the 12 months ending June 2025, a 52 percent year-on-year increase. Stablecoins accounted for approximately 43 percent of the regional transaction volume. Nigeria alone received USD 92.1 billion and ranked second globally for peer-to-peer trading. These numbers look like evidence of a retail speculation boom. They are not. Practitioners who actually operate crypto businesses in these corridors have been consistent for years about what the volume is actually moving. A significant share, almost certainly the majority in the larger corridors, is operational dollar settlement by businesses that cannot access US dollars through their commercial banks.
This is not theoretical. Yellow Card CEO Chris Maurice has said publicly, and practitioners in the B2B stablecoin infrastructure sector have echoed privately, that approximately 70 percent of African countries are experiencing foreign exchange shortages severe enough that commercial banks cannot supply the dollars their customers need for legitimate trade. An importer paying a Chinese supplier, a multinational repatriating earnings from a constrained-currency country, a payment service provider settling cross-border merchant flows, all of these use cases are handled through stablecoin corridors precisely because the formal banking system cannot handle them. The African crypto user base looks different from the American one. It is less "twentysomething speculating on meme coins" and more "finance director trying to pay a supplier before the quarter closes."
The licensing frameworks now being built across the continent treat crypto service providers as consumer investment platforms. They impose disclosure requirements modeled on securities regulations. They require consumer suitability testing. They treat crypto holdings as speculative assets that need the same investor protections as equities. None of this is inherently wrong for actual retail crypto speculation, which does exist in African markets and does need some form of consumer protection. But it is addressing the smaller portion of the problem with the wrong tools, and in doing so it is making life harder for the legitimate B2B operators who are actually solving the dollar shortage problem that African businesses face every day.
Operators we have heard from in the B2B stablecoin space have made a consistent point. The licensing cost structures of the new frameworks are calibrated for high-margin retail exchanges, not for low-margin corporate treasury infrastructure. A licensed consumer crypto exchange can absorb compliance costs by charging retail fees on speculative trades. A B2B stablecoin corridor operator, earning a few basis points on corporate settlement flows, cannot absorb the same compliance cost structure at the same scale. The result, which is already starting to be visible in some markets, is that the regulatory frameworks push B2B crypto activity either offshore or underground, while formalizing the retail speculation layer that regulators were probably less worried about to begin with.
The framework that would actually address what African crypto is being used for would have three features. First, it would explicitly recognize stablecoin corridors as B2B payment infrastructure rather than as retail investment products, and apply proportionate payment institution regulation rather than securities regulation. Second, it would create a licensing path for legitimate corporate treasury use cases that acknowledges the foreign exchange shortage reality rather than pretending African businesses could simply use their commercial banks. Third, it would coordinate across African markets to prevent regulatory arbitrage, because a Nigerian importer facing high compliance costs in Lagos will simply route the same transaction through a licensed operator in a different country.
South Africa's inter-governmental fintech working group has been discussing some of these ideas, and the Financial Sector Conduct Authority has shown more willingness than many peer regulators to engage with the B2B framing. But the direction of travel across the continent, as of early 2026, is still toward consumer-product licensing frameworks that miss what is actually happening. Regulators should spend less time reviewing retail exchange marketing materials and more time talking to the finance directors who are moving USDT between Lagos and Shenzhen every week because their banks cannot help them. The reality of African crypto will not be understood from Brussels, Washington, or international consultancy reports. It will be understood from the operational rooms where the actual work gets done, and it is past time for African regulators to spend more time in those rooms.