Beyond the hype, Nigerians are using stablecoins for payments

For years, Nigeria has sat at the centre of global crypto conversations. Volumes are high. Peer-to-peer markets are active. Stablecoins like USDT move daily across borders.

The harder question is what those numbers actually represent. Are Nigerians using USDT to send money, pay bills, and buy things, or is most of the activity still trading, speculation, and arbitrage dressed up as adoption?

Nathaniel Luz, founder of stablecoin payments platform YDPay, argues that the answer is less dramatic and more practical than the hype suggests.

“Cryptocurrency has always been a lifeline for Africans where it was a luxury for the West,” Luz says. “It has been more of a solution to our payment problems than a tool to get rich.”

Asked to give brutally honest percentages on how much USDT volume in Nigeria is real peer-to-peer payments versus trading and speculation, Luz avoids exact figures but is clear on direction. “I believe a greater percentage of Stablecoin volume in Nigeria is actual P2P payments and not trading, speculations, or arbitrage. The ratio has pretty much remained the same over the years.”

That claim counters the popular idea that crypto adoption in Nigeria is either exploding or collapsing. In Luz’s telling, usage has been steady, driven less by cycles of enthusiasm and more by persistent structural needs.

Nathaniel Luz, President of the Africa Blockchain Network

One of the biggest challenges in assessing real adoption is the reliability of reported peer-to-peer volume. Crypto platforms regularly publish large P2P figures, but critics argue that a significant share of this activity is driven by bots, market makers, and algorithmic traders cycling liquidity.

Luz draws a line between exchange trading and stablecoin usage. “I cannot speak to how much of the crypto exchange order-book trading volume is bots and the others; we will let the regulators take care of that,” he says. “However, I can say with confidence that in terms of stablecoins, what we have is real organic trading for person to person.”

He rejects the idea that Africa’s stablecoin usage is inflated by fake activity. “I do not think we are systematically overstating the adoption rate in Africa. My work at Paxful, Flincap, and currently, YDPay shows that real people are using these crypto platforms to send money to other people.”

The motivation, he insists, is not speculation. “Nobody is buying a stablecoin to get rich overnight, so you can trust that the P2P volume in that market is as organic and accurate as it can get.”

So who are these people, and what are they actually using Stablecoins for?

Luz points first to Nigeria’s growing remote workforce. “I believe that primarily it will be freelancers accepting payments from abroad,” he says. “We have a lot of Nigerians who are working remotely for companies outside the country.”

He paints a familiar picture. “You will find a young undergraduate at the University of Ibadan who works remotely for an organisation in Sweden. The easiest way for this person to get paid is to use Stablecoins which are closer to the company’s legal tender.”

Beyond receiving income, Stablecoins also shape how that money is spent. “It also has the additional incentive of spending in the currency you earn,” Luz says. “I will say following closely after that are the people who use it to make purchases, from paying for courses to funding dollar cards to pay for Spotify, Zoom, Apple and other platforms.”

This framing strips away much of crypto’s ideological baggage. According to Luz, most users are not interested in decentralisation, censorship resistance, or monetary philosophy. They want payments that work.

“Stablecoins by nature are not truly decentralised; they are controlled by big companies all over the world,” he says. “Tether controls USDT, RLUSD by Ripple, USDC by Circle, and so on. These companies can freeze your account and stop your transactions anytime.”

That reality has not slowed adoption. “So, I don’t think it is currently about ideology,” Luz adds. “People are using stablecoins because they work, solving an important problem, especially for emerging markets in Africa and Latin America.”

For someone who has long championed crypto as peer-to-peer electronic cash, this shift could be read as a failure of the original vision. Luz disagrees.

“We have not failed!” he says. “Cryptocurrency is an active digital asset that has become integral to banking and finance.”

In his view, stablecoins are not a deviation but a fulfilment. “I believe the fulfilment of the bitcoin crypto movement is stablecoins and the vision remains intact in that realm,” he says. “The vision is actually happening before our very eyes.”

Daily usage matters more than narratives. “People are making use of stablecoins to make actual P2P payments daily,” Luz says. “I think that the coming generations would not make use of currency as we know it today. So, digital is still the cash, and stablecoins is the way to go.”

Still, a gap remains between this quiet utility and true mainstream adoption. If Stablecoins were fully solving cross-border payments for everyday Africans, their use would be more visible.

Luz argues that adoption is already happening, just not where most people are looking. “We are seeing adoption,” he says. “Adoption is at different levels and layers, and one of the emerging layers is those who are making use of stablecoins without knowing that it is the infrastructure powering their transactions.”

The future, he believes, is less consumer-facing and more infrastructural. “I believe we will see stablecoins being used primarily on the B2B layer, where the end user would not even know that it is being used for the transaction.”

In that sense, USDT’s real story in Nigeria is not about hype or ideology. It is about freelancers getting paid, subscriptions staying active, and money moving across borders with fewer obstacles. Not revolutionary. Just useful.

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