Stablecoins are becoming part of the bigger conversation about how money moves across borders.
Unlike cryptocurrencies, which are often used for trading and speculation, stablecoins are designed to maintain a stable value. They are usually pegged to a fiat currency such as the US dollar.
This makes them useful for moving dollar-denominated money between institutions, businesses, and payment platforms without relying entirely on traditional banking systems, which can make international transfers slow and expensive.
For Kenya, the bigger shift could come from stablecoins becoming part of the infrastructure behind services people already use.
Movement CEO Torab Torabi sees blockchains eventually becoming as invisible as the networks that carry phone calls, a view that shapes how the company positions itself.
“When you say blockchain and crypto, I think those are two very different things. We are not in the crypto business. We’re in the blockchain business.”
Movement is a blockchain infrastructure company focused on stablecoin settlement that wants to provide the infrastructure that other financial products plug into, letting stablecoins handle settlement while customers continue using familiar wallets, banks, and payment apps.
Where Stablecoins Are Already Being Used
A stablecoin is a digital token designed to hold a stable value against another asset, most commonly a fiat currency. USDC, for example, aims to always equal one US dollar, giving parties the speed of blockchain infrastructure without the price swings of an asset like Bitcoin.
Chainanalysis estimates Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, with Kenya among the region’s five largest markets.
That doesn’t mean stablecoins are replacing banks or mobile money. Rather, they’re filling a gap where moving money across borders remains difficult.
Yellow Card, a digital asset and stablecoin infrastructure company operating across African markets, has noted that usage on the company’s Kenyan platform skews toward cross-border payments, treasury management, and hedging against shilling volatility, rather than retail speculation.
Its Senior Customer Success Manager, Florence Githinji, pointed to a concrete example:
“A Kenyan manufacturer or importer paying a Chinese supplier normally waits days for correspondent banks to clear the payment and can run into dollar shortages in the local market at the worst possible moment. Settling that invoice in stablecoins collapses the wait to near-instant.”
The business, in other words, doesn’t care about the blockchain itself, only about getting dollars to its supplier without delay or cost. Liquidity, compliance checks, and local payment channels still have to exist around that transaction; stablecoins only replace one slow piece of it.
The Goal Is for Users Not to Notice Blockchain
Torabi sees blockchain infrastructure developing much like telecommunications did. Users don’t need to know which network carries a phone call; they just expect the call to work.
“Most users don’t care which blockchain they use. All they care about is, can I receive the money? Can I send the money reliably?”
Essentially, it’s someone sending money from an M-Pesa wallet to a relative in Australia, for instance. They see shillings deducted from their wallet while the recipient gets Australian dollars, with a stablecoin moving the money between the two.
Neither person would need to own cryptocurrency or understand blockchain technology. That is the five-year vision Torabi anticipates with blockchain as the invisible infrastructure rather than a destination in itself.
Kenya is a reasonable place to test that idea. M-Pesa already provides the consumer interface, banks provide regulated currency access, and Yellow Card connects digital assets to local currency and international liquidity.
It cites Kenya’s numbers at roughly $19 billion in crypto inflows, $3.3 billion in stablecoin transactions, and about $500 million in monthly volume, activity well beyond retail speculation.
Kenya’s Rules Give the Market More Clarity
Kenya’s Virtual Asset Service Providers Act, 2025, issued regulations in 2026 adding licensing and capital and reserve requirements for stablecoin issuers, including that reserves be held in cash, bank deposits, or short-term government securities.
Yellow Card’s Senior Legal Counsel for East Africa, Edline Murungi, said the industry actually prefers that kind of clarity to the alternative. The genuinely difficult years, she said, were before any framework existed:
“That ambiguity was worse for a serious operator than either a hard no or a defined yes, because you couldn’t build durable infrastructure or bank relationships against it.”
Government Bonds Could Be the Bigger Opportunity
Torabi also sees stablecoins as a foundation for tokenized government bonds, folding Treasury securities into everyday financial apps rather than keeping them inside conventional investment infrastructure.
For Kenya, which already has an established Treasury bills and bonds market, that could matter more than faster transfers alone, though it raises real questions around custody, taxation, and monetary policy that remain unresolved.
The idea is simply that stablecoins provide the digital cash layer, and tokenized securities give that cash something to buy.
A Real-World Test of the Movement Model
Movement’s clearest working example is Hesab, which selected Movement as the exclusive stablecoin settlement layer for its Global Self-Custody Bank.
Hesab built its services in Afghanistan, a market where conventional banking access has long been difficult. Kenya’s problems aren’t the same; its banking system is deeper and mobile money far more mature, but the lesson holds.
Stablecoin infrastructure can adapt to markets where traditional rails aren’t the most efficient route for moving money internationally.
Movement’s path into Kenya would likely run through partnerships with banks, fintechs, and mobile-money platforms rather than asking consumers to change how they pay.
Success Could Mean Nobody Notices
If Torabi’s vision works, people won’t talk about using Movement or even stablecoins. They’ll simply notice a payment arriving faster or an overseas invoice settling with less friction.
That future still depends on finance’s less glamorous parts, including liquidity, compliance, banking relationships, and local payouts, which don’t disappear just because settlement moves onto a blockchain.
READ: Kenya’s Virtual Assets Act Spurs Rapid Growth in Crypto Market
Stablecoins do not have to replace M-Pesa or Kenya’s banks to become important. They could instead become the infrastructure that supports them.
If Movement gets its way, success will not be measured by how many Kenyans understand stablecoins, but by whether they can use financial services built on them without ever knowing they are there.
