Africa's inability to trade with itself has quietly emerged as one of the most significant opportunities in global finance. Fragmented currencies, prohibitive transfer fees, and banking systems that treat cross-border payments as an afterthought have left the continent in urgent need of alternatives. Increasingly, that alternative is stablecoins.

Few people are better positioned to make that argument than Gillian Darko, Group Vice President of Strategy at Yellow Card (LinkedIn), the pan-African cryptocurrency infrastructure firm that launched as a retail trading application in 2019 and has since repositioned itself as a business-to-business payments layer serving banks, telecom operators, and corporate clients.

In an exclusive interview with Technext, Darko explained why she believes Africa is not merely adopting stablecoins in step with the rest of the world but is, in fact, quietly setting the pace.

Grounding Adoption in Real-World Problems

Darko is careful not to present stablecoins as a solution searching for a problem. "You also have to think about what the problem is that you wish to solve on the continent," she said, citing fragmented ecosystems, thin liquidity, and the sheer expense of moving money across African borders as the genuine drivers of adoption.

"There are a lot of problems across several different regions on how to move money efficiently," she added, characterizing the current surge of interest as the moment when longstanding structural issues finally converged with the technology designed to address them.

Darko placed the global cross-border payments market at approximately $194.6 trillion today, projected to rise to $320 trillion by 2030. Sub-Saharan Africa, she noted, remains the world's most expensive corridor, where "banks are averaging 14.5% in fees." On-chain cryptocurrency transactions in the region have grown from roughly $205 billion last year to approximately $300 billion this year, with stablecoins accounting for that growth.

That matters because payment infrastructure shapes how quickly businesses can settle invoices, move treasury funds, and pay partners across borders. In a region where trade is still constrained by fragmented financial systems, the appeal of a faster settlement rail is not abstract; it is tied to ordinary operating costs.

The Corporate Treasurer's Calculus

For a corporate treasurer, the appeal of stablecoins is less ideological than arithmetic. As Darko explained, when a business wants to execute a cross-border payment, "you need to hold in one account currencies, then you have the local currency, then you have to also hold the foreign currency, then you have a nostro account as well, and then you have all the underlying compliance costs."

Stablecoins, she argued, do not eliminate these costs entirely — "it is not completely free" — but they collapse several steps that businesses currently pay for separately.

Standard Chartered has projected that the global stablecoin market could reach $2 trillion by 2028. Citigroup has gone further, forecasting $4 trillion by 2030. When asked whether those figures are realistic, Darko responded without hesitation: "When I saw that figure, I actually smiled," she said, recalling Citigroup's projection arriving a year earlier than expected, "because we are heading in the right direction."

Three Pillars for Growth

Achieving those projections, in Darko's view, depends on three foundational pillars.

1. Regulatory Coordination. Not merely individual countries drafting rules, but jurisdictions actively engaging with one another. "Institutions need certainty regarding who can issue stablecoins, the quality and custody of reserves, redemption rights, financial crime controls, bankruptcy treatment and the responsibility of intermediaries," she said. She pointed to early passporting arrangements in Ghana and Rwanda as a potential template, alongside sandbox initiatives from Ghana's central bank and regulatory developments in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.

2. The Orchestration Layer. What Darko calls the unglamorous plumbing behind any settlement rail: custody, transaction monitoring, local currency liquidity, and API reporting. "Often when people talk about stablecoins, they talk about the settlement layer; they ignore the plumbing, the orchestration layer," she said. "Without that, what is your liquidity? Do you have any local currency? What are your reconciliation tools?"

3. Product Integration. Embedding stablecoins into products people already use — from merchant settlement and treasury management to remittances (a flow she estimated at approximately $96 billion for the continent) and tokenized capital markets. "The market must reach this," she said. "It cannot reach this through just consuming stablecoins and wallets. It needs to do so through the full plethora of the offering."

Africa's Mobile Money Precedent

Darko's case for African leadership draws on precedent as much as projection. Mobile money, she noted, served as a proof of concept: "Africa, with its uniqueness, brought Momo. It looked at the difficulties around fragmented ecosystems. It created a system that was unique and solved the problems for Africans." Stablecoins, in her framing, represent the next iteration of that same instinct.

The demographic argument she advanced aligns with projections from the United Nations and the African Development Bank. "By 2050, one in every four people on earth will be African, with the continent's population expected to reach approximately 2.5 billion people. Africa already is home to 1.5 billion people today, making it the world's second-largest population and fastest-growing major region."

Addressing Monetary Policy Concerns

Darko also addressed concerns — including those raised by the World Bank — that stablecoin adoption in Nigeria could weaken central banks' control over monetary policy. "Regulators right now are really focused on ensuring that there are regulatory sandboxes and structured pilots," she said. "This allows them to actually observe how the product works and understand the flow of funds."

Her preferred approach is cooperation over confrontation, with dollar-backed and locally issued stablecoins "working together, not against each other," so that "someone in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and other parts of the continent should have accessibility to all forms in which to make payments."

To illustrate how regulation builds trust rather than obstructing innovation, Darko drew on a personal anecdote: a taxi that broke down while she was traveling to a panel discussion in Kigali. "The traditional form of cross-border payment is you pick that taxi, you've paid them, and you hope that they will get you there," she said. Regulation, in her metaphor, ensures "the driver that is operating that vehicle has a licence, understands traffic rules, and understands and requires anti-money laundering so that every time a customer chooses that vehicle, they are comfortable that the regulation has reviewed them."

Practical Guidance for Businesses

For businesses considering involvement in stablecoins, Darko's advice was deliberately pragmatic. "It's very important what the problem is and what the solution you wish to solve is," she said, urging companies to first determine whether they want to issue a stablecoin or simply use existing rails to improve payment efficiency. "Those are very distinct."

From there, she said, "the institution needs to establish a measurable baseline. What does the process currently cost you? How long does settlement take? How many intermediaries are involved?"

On the subject of locally backed stablecoins pegged to African currencies rather than the U.S. dollar, Darko was candid about the current limitations, suggesting that "the central banks should work together as a whole ecosystem." Regulatory fragmentation and inconsistent consumer demand across markets, she said, mean the concept remains more aspirational than operational at present. "There's a lot of moving parts to it," requiring deeper collaboration between central banks and market participants before meaningful progress can be made.

Yellow Card's Strategic Pivot

Yellow Card's own transformation — from a consumer trading application to an infrastructure provider serving banks and fintechs — mirrors the broader industry shift Darko describes. "As the market matured, the larger need became infrastructure," she said of the company's decision to discontinue its retail app and concentrate on B2B services.

Whether the wider market actually reaches Standard Chartered's $2 trillion benchmark by 2028 (related coverage) remains to be seen. But based on the evidence Darko presented — from regulatory sandboxes to a demographic trajectory few other regions can match — Africa's stablecoin trajectory appears less like a speculative wager and more like a continuation of a pattern the continent has already demonstrated.

As she concluded: "Stablecoins are a settlement layer. AI is also going to be the intelligence layer; it's actually going to continue to move us in a direction to speed our growth even further."