Opera's MiniPay wallet introduced the MiniPay Card on June 23, a virtual Visa debit card that lets users spend stablecoin balances at more than 175 million merchant locations worldwide. The product targets the wallet's existing base of 16 million activated accounts across 65 countries. The card runs on the Celo blockchain, uses infrastructure from crypto card platform Gnosis Pay, and is issued by Monavate, an FCA-regulated UK electronic money institution operating under a Visa Europe license.

Users can spend directly from self-custodial balances in USDT, USDC, or USDm, a dollar-pegged stablecoin. Self-custodial means users hold their own funds rather than depositing them with a company, which removes a layer of counterparty risk. The card carries no monthly or annual fee and charges only a transaction-level foreign exchange fee. It also works with Apple Pay and Google Pay. Cashback rewards in select markets are paid in USDT, USDC, or Tether Gold (XAUt0), a token backed by physical gold.

The Problem the Card Is Solving

MiniPay has logged more than 420 million total stablecoin transactions since its 2023 launch inside the Opera Mini browser. It expanded to a standalone iOS and Android app in May 2025 and now spans Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, and dozens of other markets. Growth has been fast, but a wallet that holds funds is only useful if those funds can move into the economy. According to MiniPay, users had been asking for a card consistently since the product launched. Jørgen Arnesen, EVP Mobile at Opera, said MiniPay "was built to make stablecoins useful in everyday life," with the goal of enabling users not just to hold or send funds, but to spend them. "Local rails are important, but they are fragmented by country and provider," a MiniPay spokesperson told TechCabal. "Cards are different. They travel better."

That fragmentation is the core friction. A user in Lagos or Nairobi might have stablecoin savings accumulated over months but no straightforward way to pay a foreign vendor, book travel, or shop on a platform that does not accept local payment methods. Traditional debit or credit cards tied to dollar accounts are difficult to obtain across many African markets. The MiniPay Card routes around that problem by enabling spending from stablecoin balances without requiring merchants to accept or process crypto.

Friederike Ernst, co-founder of Gnosis, described the gap this way. The missing piece, she said, is not the wallet but "the last meter": the ability to spend those balances at a checkout in another country without the merchant needing to know or care about crypto.

The Regional Numbers Behind the Launch

Africa is the world's highest-adoption region for stablecoins by ownership rate. BVNK's 2026 Stablecoin Utility Report, which surveyed 4,658 adults across 15 countries, found that 79 percent of African crypto users hold stablecoins, a higher rate than any other region. The same report found that 71 percent of crypto users in Nigeria and South Africa expressed interest in a stablecoin-linked debit card specifically. The report also noted that African women are nearly as likely as men to hold stablecoins, a gender parity that stands in contrast to the global average, where ownership skews roughly 60 percent male.

Nigeria alone accounts for 40 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa's stablecoin inflows. Traditional cross-border remittances into the region cost an average of 8.78 percent per transaction in Q1 2025, according to World Bank data. Stablecoin transfers typically cost between 0.5 and 1 percent. That cost gap may partly explain why on-chain stablecoin volume for Sub-Saharan Africa exceeded $200 billion between mid-2024 and mid-2025, with stablecoins representing 43 percent of total regional on-chain activity.

The Celo network underpinning MiniPay has supported stablecoin gas payments since its launch, allowing users to pay transaction fees in stablecoins rather than ETH. The network completed a migration to an Ethereum Layer 2 in March 2025, which brought cheaper, faster settlement and broader EVM compatibility with Ethereum's ecosystem. Celo now processes roughly $6.2 billion in monthly stablecoin volume and has surpassed $65 billion in cumulative stablecoin volume since the L2 migration. The network has approximately 840,000 daily active users and 4.27 million weekly active stablecoin users.

A Crowded but Nascent Market

MiniPay is not alone. Binance and Mastercard launched a stablecoin virtual card in South Africa. Yellow Card and Mastercard announced a partnership covering 34 countries, including 20 across Africa, targeting remittances and business payments. Visa itself operates more than 130 stablecoin card programs in 40 countries and has stated a goal of reaching 100 or more countries by the end of 2026.

Kenya, where MiniPay has a significant user base, formalized its regulatory framework for virtual asset service providers under the Virtual Asset Service Providers Act in November 2025, establishing a dual-regulator model that provides clearer operating conditions for products like the MiniPay Card.

MiniPay's clearest advantage is its installed base. No competitor in the region enters this space with 16 million pre-existing wallets already holding stablecoin balances. Cuy Sheffield, Visa's head of crypto, noted that connecting MiniPay's stablecoin ecosystem to Visa's global merchant footprint gives users in high-growth markets "a practical way to participate in global commerce."

The broader question is whether card spending becomes the behavioral shift that moves stablecoins from savings instruments into daily transaction currency. The XAUt0 cashback option adds a distinctive dimension to that question. For users in markets like Nigeria, where the naira has faced sustained depreciation and foreign exchange pressure, receiving rewards in a gold-backed token offers a concrete inflation hedge rather than a simple return to local currency exposure. With regulatory frameworks maturing in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, and on-ramp options expanding through integrations like Stripe's Bridge adding Celo support in May 2026, the infrastructure conditions are in place. Whether users actually spend rather than hold will be the metric worth watching.