MiniPay, the stablecoin wallet launched by Opera in Nigeria in September 2023, has recorded 123% year-over-year wallet growth as of May 2026, reaching 15 million activated wallets. For broader trajectory context, the wallet had approximately 7 million wallets at the end of 2024. The wallet operates on Celo, an Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain (since its 2024 migration), and supports USDT, USDC, and cUSD. The milestone arrives as Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 43% of the region's total crypto transaction volume in stablecoins, the highest stablecoin adoption rate of any region globally at 9.3%, according to Transak's 2026 Africa fintech report.

The wallet was built inside Opera Mini, a data-compression browser with over 100 million users across Africa and a presence on the continent spanning more than 17 years. That existing distribution base solved a problem that has hobbled many Web3 consumer products: how to acquire users who do not already hold crypto. Within five months of its September 2023 launch, MiniPay had reached 1 million users across Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana. Activation requires only a phone number and a Google or iCloud account, with deposits averaging 55 seconds. Transaction fees run approximately $0.001 per transfer, settling on Celo in roughly one second.

MiniPay launched on a Nigeria-first basis before expanding to Kenya, Ghana, and other African markets. "MiniPay expanded first across Kenya and other key African markets before going global in 2025," said Murray Spark, Senior Director of Business Development at MiniPay, in comments reported by TechCabal this week.

The structural case for stablecoin adoption in these markets is straightforward. Nigeria's naira has lost roughly 75% of its value over the past five years, making dollar-denominated stablecoins a practical savings tool for ordinary users rather than a speculative instrument. Remittances add another layer: Sub-Saharan Africa received $54 billion in remittances in 2023 while paying an average fee of 7.9% on a $200 transfer through traditional channels. Stablecoin transfers can reduce that cost by up to 85%, according to the same Transak report. Nigeria alone accounts for 40% of regional stablecoin inflows and recorded $59 billion in crypto transactions between July 2023 and June 2024. Ethiopia offers a further signal of the trend's reach: retail stablecoin transfers in the country grew 180% year-over-year, pointing to deepening demand well beyond the region's largest crypto markets.

A key inflection point for MiniPay came with the integration of Tether's USDT as the wallet's primary savings currency. By December 2025, the platform held 7 million phone-verified USDT wallets and recorded approximately 300,000 unique USDT buyers in a single month, a 33% month-over-month increase. The wallet's overall user base had reached 12.6 million activated wallets by that point, a figure that would climb to 15 million by Q1 2026. Tether Gold (XAU₮0), a gold-backed stablecoin, is also available through the wallet; over 91% of Tether Gold holders globally now operate on Celo, with virtually all of them using MiniPay. "Integrating USDT directly into MiniPay turns smartphone reach into real financial access," said Jørgen Arnesen, Executive Vice President of Mobile at Opera. "Millions of users are now holding, sending, and saving in digital dollars seamlessly."

The network effect extends to Celo itself. After completing its migration from an independent blockchain to an Ethereum Layer 2 in 2024, Celo briefly ranked first among all L2 networks by daily active users, placing ahead of Base, World, Arbitrum, and Optimism. That ranking is largely attributable to MiniPay's African user base, according to Celo ecosystem reporting. Celo's on-chain usage grew 50% in Q4 2025 alone, and the network now processes over 500,000 daily stablecoin operations.

In May 2025, MiniPay launched as a standalone iOS and Android app, a product milestone that preceded the acceleration from roughly 7 million to 12.6 million wallets over the months that followed.

MiniPay's developer layer is also expanding. The wallet supports over 50 Mini Apps, lightweight decentralized applications embedded directly in the wallet interface. One of them, BitGifty, launched from a hackathon with no marketing budget, reached 1 million users across 10 countries, and recorded more than 800,000 in-wallet transactions along the way. In April 2026, MiniPay announced a $1 million developer incentive program structured around transaction volume rather than pitch competitions or committee review, an explicit attempt to reward tools that generate real usage.

Beyond Africa, MiniPay has moved into Latin America with a feature called "Pay Like a Local," which allows users to spend USDT through Brazil's PIX payment rail and Argentina's Mercado Pago. The wallet also integrated with GCash in the Philippines, and Celo's Asia user base grew threefold year-over-year according to MiniPay's own reporting, signaling that the model may translate to South Asia, where currency instability in markets like Pakistan and Sri Lanka and large diaspora remittance flows into India (the world's largest remittance recipient) create comparable structural demand.

The 15 million figure represents activated wallets rather than monthly or daily active users, a distinction MiniPay has not publicly resolved with disclosed MAU or DAU figures. Even so, the roughly 2.4 million net new activations between December 2025 and Q1 2026 marks the fastest growth period in the product's history, and the platform's geographic expansion, developer grants, and Latin American integrations represent a significant broadening of its addressable market heading into the rest of 2026.