The Democratic Republic of Congo is quietly becoming one of Africa’s most important testing grounds for the future of cross-border payments. And Visa is at the centre of it.In partnership with Onafriq, the pan-African payments network whose APIs connect M-Pesa, Airtel Money, and Orange Money wallets across the DRC, Visa has launched VisaPay, a platform that lets Congolese consumers fund Visa wallets directly from their mobile money accounts.
What makes the initiative significant is what happens in the background. The transactions are settled in stablecoins.
“There is a use case that we have in DR Congo where we are settling M-Pesa mobile money top-ups with stablecoins through a partnership with Onafriq,” said Patrick Sullivan, Visa’s Head of Innovation for Sub-Saharan Africa. “As you top up your M-Pesa wallet, the transaction is settled in stablecoins in the background.”
The customer sees nothing different. The infrastructure underneath has changed entirely.
Why the DRC Makes Sense as a Testing Ground
The DRC is not an obvious choice for a fintech pilot. However, that is precisely what makes it valuable.Only 30% of Congolese adults have access to formal financial services, according to Financial Sector Deepening Africa, compared to 84% in Kenya and 76% in Tanzania. The country’s economy is heavily cash-based and highly dollarised. Furthermore, its fragmented mobile money landscape represents exactly the kind of complexity that stablecoin settlement infrastructure is designed to handle.If stablecoins can work here, they can work anywhere on the continent.
A Broader Stablecoin Strategy Taking Shape
The DRC pilot is not a standalone experiment. It sits within a much larger strategic shift at Visa. By April 2026, Visa’s global stablecoin settlement pilot had reached a $7 billion annualised run rate which is a 50% increase in a single quarter.
Through Visa Direct, the company is also testing stablecoin prefunding for cross-border payouts, allowing eligible clients to settle transactions using USDC or PayPal USD instead of traditional fiat rails. In June 2025, Visa signed a separate stablecoin exploration deal with Yellow Card.
Together, these moves reflect a company that is not dabbling in stablecoins. It is building infrastructure around them.Sullivan was direct about where he sees the continent heading.
“We will see banks, fintechs and mobile network operators adopting stablecoins to solve challenges associated with cross-border payments, remittances and business-to-business payments because existing solutions have not really cracked these problems yet,” he said.
The Numbers Behind the Opportunity
The scale of the opportunity in Africa is significant. Sub-Saharan Africa processed $1.4 trillion in mobile money transactions in 2025 which is a 26% increase from 2024 according to the GSMA. Transaction volumes reached 96 billion, up 16% year on year. Stablecoins accounted for 43% of all crypto transaction volume in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2024, according to Chainalysis.
However, cross-border payments remain a weak link in that infrastructure. Mobile money works well within borders. Moving money across them, from the DRC to Kenya, or from Nigeria to Ghana, still involves high fees, slow settlement, and multiple intermediaries. Stablecoin settlement addresses all three problems simultaneously.
The Regulatory Question
The DRC experiment is not without its complications. The country’s central bank, the Banque Centrale du Congo, is actively trying to reduce the economy’s dependence on the dollar while stablecoin adoption is simultaneously pushing it further in that direction. Regulators across the continent are watching closely. The DRC will show whether African authorities can shape these payment rails before user habits harden around them.
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Editorial Takeaway
Visa’s stablecoin pilot in the DRC is significant not because of what users will notice but because of what it proves. Dollar-settled stablecoin infrastructure can sit invisibly beneath familiar mobile money experiences and work at scale. For a continent where $1.4 trillion moves through mobile money annually but cross-border payments remain expensive and slow, that invisible layer could be transformative. The DRC is the test. Africa is the market.
