A freelancer in Lagos gets offered payment in stablecoins. She looks around her usual apps, finds no option to accept them, and tells the sender no. That single moment, repeated across the continent, is what Demilade Olugbenga of Nigerian crypto payments platform Breet calls the adoption gap. He laid it out plainly at "The Adoption Gap," a panel at Moonshot by TechCabal on Thursday, October 29, alongside Shalom Osiadi, founder and CEO of foreign exchange company Esca Finance, and moderator Nnanna Ijezie.
The numbers make the gap look stranger. Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain crypto value between July 2024 and June 2025, with Nigeria alone pulling in $92.1 billion, according to Chainalysis. Stablecoins made up about 43 percent of that volume. Meanwhile, Olugbenga noted that sending anything from $5 to $500,000 on Breet costs 10 cents, while a bank transfer can take days and swallow up to 8 percent of the amount. Osiadi explained why banks charge so much: African currencies can shift before a transfer even lands, so banks build wide margins into their exchange rates to protect themselves.
Regulators are the other wall. Central banks need to know where money comes from, where it goes, and how it is used. Privately issued stablecoins give them none of that visibility. Nigeria has tried two answers. The Central Bank of Nigeria launched the eNaira, Africa's first central bank digital currency, in October 2021. By 2023, the IMF found that 98.5 percent of eNaira wallets went unused in any given week. Then in February 2025, cNGN, a naira-pegged stablecoin from private company WrappedCBDC, went live under the Securities and Exchange Commission's regulatory incubation programme. Osiadi said the CBN should either issue its own stablecoin or partner directly with issuers like cNGN.
What Osiadi keeps hearing from his own clients is simpler than any of that. Esca processes between $75 million and $120 million a month for businesses including NALA and MoneyGram, routing payments through stablecoins that most corporate clients never see or think about. "Truth be told, what we're starting to learn now is nobody really cares," he said. "They just care about value: how value arrives and how value is created for their business." The infrastructure question, it turns out, is mostly invisible to the people it serves. The question is whether regulators and app developers can catch up before users stop waiting.
Originally published by TechCabal.