ABA Editorial · Feb 16, 2026 · 12 min read
Yellow Card operates in approximately 20 African countries providing businesses with on-ramps and off-ramps between local currencies and USD stablecoins. With Sub-Saharan Africa receiving over USD 205 billion in on-chain crypto value in the 12 months to June 2025 and stablecoins accounting for 43 percent of regional volume, Yellow Card sits at the center of a USD 88 billion opportunity. Inside the B2B stablecoin operational layer and why CEO Chris Maurice's "stablecoins are a proxy for the dollar" framing has become industry shorthand.
An earlier batch of this Market Reports series examined the grassroots and retail side of African crypto adoption, including the Chainalysis 2025 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report finding that Sub-Saharan Africa received over USD 205 billion in on-chain value in the 12 months ending June 2025 (a 52 percent year-on-year increase) and that stablecoins accounted for approximately 43 percent of regional crypto transaction volume. This report looks at the operational layer that turns those adoption statistics into an actual business: the stablecoin on-ramp and off-ramp infrastructure that African companies use to move between local fiat currencies and USD-pegged tokens. The central operator in this category is Yellow Card, and understanding how Yellow Card works explains why African crypto is a B2B story even more than a retail story in 2026.
The starting point is the foreign exchange crisis. According to widely cited industry estimates including those from Yellow Card itself, approximately 70 percent of African countries are experiencing FX shortages that make it difficult for businesses to obtain the US dollars they need for international trade, imports, or cross-border supplier payments. Commercial banks in many African markets simply cannot supply the dollars their customers demand, regardless of how much naira, cedi, or kwacha the customer has in their account. Central banks limit dollar allocation. Parallel markets exist but are legally and practically fragile.
Stablecoins pegged to the US dollar (primarily USDT from Tether and USDC from Circle) have become the practical alternative. For an African business that needs dollars to pay a Chinese supplier, the operational path is: convert local currency to USDT or USDC through an on-ramp provider, send the stablecoins through a blockchain network to a counterparty who can swap them into Chinese yuan or onward dollars, and settle the supplier invoice. The transaction takes minutes to hours rather than days to weeks. The cost is a fraction of traditional correspondent banking. And critically, the transaction completes whether or not the African business could have obtained dollars through its commercial bank.
Yellow Card CEO Chris Maurice's framing, widely quoted in Chainalysis reports and African business press, captures the reality: "The banks do not have dollars, the government does not have dollars, and even if they did, they would not give them to you." And: "Stablecoins are a proxy for the dollar. If you can get into USDT or USDC, you can easily swap that into hard dollars elsewhere."
Yellow Card operates in approximately 20 African countries across West, East, and Southern Africa. The core product is straightforward: Yellow Card maintains banking relationships and local fiat pools in each country where it operates, and it maintains corresponding stablecoin liquidity. A business customer can convert local fiat into USDT or USDC with Yellow Card and can also convert in the opposite direction to receive local fiat from incoming stablecoin transfers. Yellow Card handles the KYC, the compliance, the banking relationships, and the liquidity management. The customer gets an operational USD-equivalent balance without ever needing to go through their commercial bank.
The company has been raising capital consistently through the 2020-2024 period and is one of the very few African crypto-native businesses that has built a genuine pan-African operational footprint. Its customer base includes small and medium importers, multinational corporations with local operations in constrained-FX countries, payment service providers that need stablecoin settlement rails for their own products, and diaspora remittance platforms that want stablecoin corridors as an alternative to traditional correspondent banking.
Most African crypto coverage focuses on retail adoption: individual Nigerians hedging against naira devaluation, Kenyan young people trading on Binance P2P, Ethiopians moving into stablecoins after the July 2024 birr devaluation. That retail story is real and important, but it often obscures how much of the actual dollar volume in African crypto is B2B. Chainalysis data analyzed in its Sub-Saharan Africa regional report showed that a meaningful portion of on-chain flows in Nigeria and South Africa was driven by multi-million dollar stablecoin transfers supporting sectors like energy, merchant payments, and commodity trade. These transfers are not retail speculation. They are operational settlement between corporates.
Yellow Card sits at the center of this B2B layer. An importer paying a foreign supplier through stablecoin corridors is a Yellow Card customer. A payment service provider that needs stablecoin liquidity to offer cross-border settlement to its own merchant customers is a Yellow Card customer. A multinational with a local African subsidiary that needs to repatriate earnings from blocked-currency environments is a Yellow Card customer. The retail-facing African crypto exchanges (Busha, Binance P2P, Luno) serve individual speculators and savers. Yellow Card serves the businesses whose dollar settlement needs are otherwise unmet.
Yellow Card operates across a regulatory environment that ranges from supportive to hostile depending on the country. South Africa has licensed hundreds of Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) through the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA), including Yellow Card, and provides a genuinely favorable operating environment. Kenya passed a VASP bill in 2025 creating the first Kenyan crypto licensing framework. Nigeria has had a turbulent regulatory history with the Central Bank of Nigeria alternating between crypto restrictions and more permissive positions, but by 2025 the overall direction was toward formalization, with licensed crypto exchanges operating under newly issued guidelines. Ghana, Tanzania, and several other markets are in various stages of developing frameworks.
Yellow Card's operational challenge is to maintain compliance across all of these different regulatory regimes simultaneously, which is why the company has built its business around licensed operations and institutional-grade AML and KYC rather than around P2P marketplace economics. This discipline is expensive but it is what allows Yellow Card to serve corporate customers who cannot tolerate the regulatory ambiguity of less formal crypto operators.
Yellow Card is not alone in the B2B stablecoin infrastructure category, though it is the most recognized. AZA Finance (formerly BitPesa) has operated since 2013 and offers cross-border payment and treasury services including stablecoin on-ramps for corporates. AZA was one of the original African crypto companies and has evolved from a pure Bitcoin remittance service into a broader treasury infrastructure provider. Onafriq (formerly MFS Africa, covered in earlier batches) offers cross-border mobile money rails that compete with stablecoin corridors for certain use cases. Various smaller regional operators provide similar services in specific corridors.
The broader competitive pressure comes from two directions. On one side, regulated cross-border payment infrastructure like PAPSS is trying to solve the same problem (cross-border African payments in local currencies) without requiring crypto at all. If PAPSS scales as projected, some use cases currently served by stablecoin corridors will migrate back to fiat rails. On the other side, global stablecoin issuers like Circle and payment companies like Stripe are increasingly offering direct stablecoin services that compete with regional African operators. Yellow Card's competitive advantage is its on-the-ground banking relationships and regulatory licensing across multiple African countries, which is difficult for global players to replicate quickly.
Three things. First, whether PAPSS and the African Currency Marketplace gain enough commercial traction to absorb B2B cross-border flows that currently clear through stablecoin corridors, or whether stablecoins continue to dominate the high-friction currency pairs. Second, whether major African central banks move to formally regulate stablecoin use by corporates, either creating formal licensed paths or restricting the category. South Africa's intergovernmental fintech working group plans to formally classify stablecoins as a distinct subset of crypto assets, which would be a precedent other markets might follow. Third, whether Yellow Card continues to scale across the continent or whether the business concentrates in a few high-volume corridors (Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana) where unit economics are strongest.
The broader observation is that African B2B stablecoin infrastructure is not a crypto speculation story. It is an operational banking alternative for businesses that cannot access dollars through their commercial banks. That framing is what separates Yellow Card's business from the retail crypto exchanges covered in the general Africa crypto narrative. For as long as African FX shortages persist, Yellow Card has a job to do. And for as long as Yellow Card has a job to do, it is genuinely critical infrastructure rather than a speculative trading venue.
This report draws on Chainalysis 2025 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report and its Sub-Saharan Africa regional analysis; Chainalysis interviews with Yellow Card CEO Chris Maurice; ChainCatcher's "Stablecoins in Africa" research report (May 2025); CryptoSlate coverage of Chainalysis Africa data; Mariblock reporting on Sub-Saharan Africa crypto adoption; and public communications from the South African Financial Sector Conduct Authority and Kenya's Capital Markets Authority on VASP frameworks.