Nigeria Stablecoin Flows Skew to Businesses, AfriFlux Finds

In Short

• Nigeria stablecoin flows are being driven more by businesses than by individual users.
• AfriFlux says business-class accounts made up 81% of observed stablecoin movement across 22 venues.
• A small number of accounts moved billions, pointing to concentrated liquidity in the market.

What Happened

Nigeria stablecoin flows are being driven by businesses, according to data from AfriFlux. Stablecoins are crypto tokens that track a currency like the US dollar, similar to holding digital dollars such as USDT.

AfriFlux says it maps wallets across Nigerian crypto venues, including exchanges, offramps, neobanks, and payment companies, wallet by wallet. Across 22 venues it tracks, AfriFlux observed 967 business-class accounts moving $2.26 billion in stablecoins between July and September.

Over the same three months, 209,495 retail deposit addresses moved $493 million. That means less than 0.5% of tracked accounts moved 81% of the stablecoin value observed in the period.

The report challenges the popular narrative that stablecoin activity in Nigeria is mainly retail-led. While freelancers, traders, and savers still use stablecoins, AfriFlux argues the larger share of flows comes from business usage, including moving funds between fintech apps.

Why It Matters

For fintech operators and regulators, concentrated stablecoin flows can signal both efficiency and risk. When a small group of accounts carries most of the volume, outages, compliance actions, or account freezes can have outsized impact on liquidity.

For businesses, the figures reinforce stablecoins as working infrastructure for payments and treasury. Treasury here means how a company stores cash and moves it between suppliers, platforms, and currencies.

For policymakers, the data adds urgency to clearer rules for stablecoin onramps and offramps, meaning how users enter and exit stablecoins using bank transfers or card payments. It also raises questions about monitoring large flows across multiple venues without pushing activity further into informal channels.