International Monetary Fund economists met with senior staff from Yellow Card Financial in Lagos on March 24, bringing together a multilateral institution and a private-sector operator at the centre of Africa's stablecoin infrastructure.

The IMF delegation included Bo Zhao, an economist in the macro-financial unit of the Strategy, Policy and Review Department, and Bonet Laraba, the IMF's Office Manager. Yellow Card's side was led by Lasbery C. Oludimu, the company's Vice President of Operations and Managing Director for Nigeria. The discussions centred on stablecoins as tools for cross-border payments, remittances, and foreign currency access in markets where local currencies remain volatile and dollar liquidity is structurally constrained.

Yellow Card is the first and largest licensed stablecoin on/off-ramp operating in Africa, with a presence across 20 African countries and 34 markets globally. The company connects to 45 regional banks, 45 mobile money providers, and 25,000 cash agents, supporting transactions in USDT, USDC, and PYUSD settled in local currency. Since its founding in 2019, the platform has processed more than $3 billion in total transactions. The company raised $33 million in a Series C round in October 2024. Yellow Card described the meeting as an opportunity to "share on-the-ground insights while also contributing to conversations around responsible regulation and sustainable innovation in the digital asset ecosystem."

The backdrop for the conversation is hard to ignore. Nigeria's naira fell from roughly 460 per dollar in mid-2023 to a low of around 1,740 per dollar by late 2024, a devaluation of approximately 278%, following the Tinubu administration's decision to liberalise foreign exchange controls. The currency recovered partially to about 1,435 per dollar by the end of 2025, its first annual gain since 2012, after the Central Bank of Nigeria pushed through reforms and injected $7.5 billion in FX support. Even so, structural dollar scarcity persists, and approximately 59% of Nigerian crypto holders owned USDT, according to recent data from CoinLaw and Nairametrics.

Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa together account for 12% of global USDC peer-to-peer usage, based on TRM Labs figures.

The IMF's interest in this space is not abstract. A departmental paper published in December 2025, titled "Understanding Stablecoins," acknowledged that dollar-pegged tokens give people in high-inflation, weak-currency markets easier access to foreign exchange, while warning that this same dynamic could accelerate a process sometimes called digital dollarisation: the gradual displacement of local currencies in everyday transactions. South African Reserve Bank Governor Lesetja Kganyago has been among the most prominent African voices on this concern, warning explicitly that USD-pegged stablecoins are being used to undermine African local currencies.

A follow-up working paper published in March 2026 (WP/26/44, "Stablecoin Shocks") extended that analysis. The Fund's December blog noted that traditional remittance costs to Africa can run as high as 20% of the transfer amount, and identified stablecoin infrastructure as having the potential to help reduce that friction. The IMF has also flagged significant financial stability risks associated with rapid stablecoin adoption.

Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America stand out as major stablecoin users relative to their economic size, a pattern the IMF has highlighted as both a sign of demand and a source of potential financial stability risk. African stablecoin holdings as a share of total bank deposits rose from nearly zero in 2020 to 1.5% by 2024.

Yellow Card completed a significant strategic shift at the start of this year, shutting its retail consumer app on December 31, 2025. The company now operates entirely in the business-to-business segment, offering payments APIs, fiat settlement, custody services, and local stablecoin issuance to enterprise clients. The company cited thin margins and unsustainable operating costs as the rationale for exiting the consumer-facing side of the business. In practical terms, the pivot positions Yellow Card as infrastructure rather than a product, functioning more as a payment rails provider than a crypto exchange. In mid-2025, the company announced a partnership with Visa to deploy stablecoin payment capabilities across Africa through Visa Direct, with rollouts beginning in at least one country in 2025 and expanded deployments planned through 2026.

The Lagos meeting may signal a broader shift in how multilateral institutions are approaching crypto policy. Rather than relying solely on sovereign-level data, the IMF appears to be going directly to operators to understand how stablecoin infrastructure functions in practice. According to Yellow Card and Bloomberg Africa Summit data, six African countries now rank in the global top 20 for stablecoin usage, including Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, and the regulatory frameworks governing that activity vary widely across the continent. Nigeria is updating its Virtual Asset Service Provider rules, South Africa is expected to clarify its crypto asset licensing framework during 2026, and Kenya and Ghana have each moved toward structured licensing after earlier blanket restrictions. The IMF's ground-level engagement with Yellow Card may be an early step toward informing policy guidance that reflects how people in these markets are actually using dollar-denominated digital assets, not just how regulators have theorised they might. That picture also carries material risk. Yellow Card CEO Chris Maurice has publicly warned that the stablecoin sector could face significant disruption before the end of 2027, with African users facing the greatest exposure given their reliance on stablecoins for everyday savings. The IMF's own research separately flags run risk as a structural vulnerability in stablecoin ecosystems. For developers and builders working on infrastructure in this space, those warnings carry as much weight as the growth figures.