African central banks debated stablecoin rules at a roundtable last month, but Ghana has already moved, passing a law and creating a new regulator for virtual assets.
Ghanaian technology entrepreneur Ethel Cofie, convener of the Future of Finance Dialogues, moderated the closed session with senior officials from four African central banks: Gallington Mawire of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, Isaac Muhanga of the Bank of Zambia, Jimmy Apaa of the Bank of Uganda and Dr. Yamungu Kayandabila of the Bank of Tanzania. Writing about the discussion afterward, Cofie said it reflected a shift in how African regulators view stablecoins, moving from a fringe technology question to one touching financial stability, monetary policy, payments and cross border settlement.
Cofie argued the debate should move past whether stablecoins are simply good or bad and focus instead on how regulators can capture their benefits, cheaper cross border payments, faster settlement and broader financial inclusion, without exposing local currencies, anti money laundering controls and consumer protections to new risks.
Ghana has already taken concrete steps in that direction. Parliament passed the Virtual Asset Service Providers Act in December 2025, and the Bank of Ghana has since set up a Virtual Assets Regulatory Office (VARO) to bring informal peer to peer crypto activity into supervised channels. Bank of Ghana Governor Dr. Johnson Pandit Asiama has separately called for closer coordination among African regulators on virtual assets, tokenized finance and digital identity, arguing that fragmented national rules are slowing the growth of interoperable cross border payment systems.
Other countries are moving on parallel tracks. Nigeria’s Investments and Securities Act, passed in 2025, brought digital assets under the oversight of its Securities and Exchange Commission and helped clear the way for the African Stablecoin Consortium to launch a naira backed stablecoin, cNGN, built on commercial bank reserves. South Africa has folded crypto asset service providers into its existing regulatory framework under the Financial Sector Conduct Authority and Financial Intelligence Centre, and adopted international anti money laundering travel rule standards.
The market those rules are chasing is already sizeable. One industry estimate put stablecoins at 43 percent of cryptocurrency transaction volume in Sub-Saharan Africa, with Nigeria alone recording close to 22 billion dollars in stablecoin transactions between July 2023 and June 2024, and total stablecoin flows through African markets estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Cofie’s central argument is that regulators need to treat different stablecoin use cases differently rather than applying one regulatory lens to all of them, distinguishing speculative crypto trading from payment focused stablecoins, tokenized deposits and cross border settlement tools. She warned that if African regulators wait for global standards to be set elsewhere, frameworks built for markets in the US or Europe may not reflect African realities such as mobile money penetration, informal trade and currency volatility. As she put it, “trust is the real infrastructure.”
She called for regional coordination, regulatory sandboxes and closer collaboration between central banks, finance ministries and securities regulators, arguing the goal should be building distinctly African regulatory expertise rather than importing rules designed for other markets, a view that lines up with the more coordinated pan-African approach Ghana’s own central bank has pushed for this year.
