What happens when the largest crypto exchange in Africa plugs into the largest mobile payments network on the continent?
You get a single integration that potentially hands over 1 billion mobile wallet holders a direct door into digital asset markets, without a bank account, without a wire transfer, and without converting to dollars first. That is exactly what VALR and Onafriq announced on April 9, 2026. Before getting into the specifics of this deal, it is worth grounding the scale of what mobile money represents in Africa, because the numbers reframe the entire premise of crypto adoption in the region.
According to GSMA's State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2025, the industry hit two significant milestones in 2024: over 2 billion registered accounts and more than 500 million monthly active users globally. Roughly 108 billion transactions moved through these systems in 2024, totalling over $1.68 trillion in value, with 20% year-on-year growth in volume and 16% in value. The most recent GSMA 2026 report puts 2025 transaction values above $2 trillion, a doubling of the milestone that itself took two decades to reach.
Think of mobile money as a bank account that lives inside a basic mobile phone. Services like M-Pesa in Kenya or MTN MoMo across West and Central Africa let people send money, pay bills, save, and receive wages, all without a physical bank branch. In most Sub-Saharan markets, it is the primary payment rail, not a secondary option. For any financial product that wants to reach people who actually need it, ignoring mobile money is not a strategy. It is a disqualification.
In Sub-Saharan Africa specifically, mobile money contributed roughly $190 billion to GDP in 2023 alone. Cross-border remittances via traditional systems average 7-8% in fees and often take several days. Mobile money cuts through both problems. The VALR-Onafriq integration is built on precisely this infrastructure.
What the Integration Actually Does
The structure of this deal is worth understanding clearly. Onafriq runs what it describes as a "network of networks," connecting over 1 billion mobile money wallets and 500 million bank accounts across 43 African markets through a single API integration. Platforms like M-Pesa and MTN MoMo are both part of that network. Onafriq is not building new rails. It is connecting the rails that already exist and that hundreds of millions of people already use every day.
Farzam Ehsani, Co-Founder and CEO of VALR, explains,
VALR's partnership with Onafriq deepens our reach across Africa and the world, connecting many more countries and people to VALR's wide array of crypto asset services and infrastructure. Mobile money has already reshaped financial access across the African continent.
By enabling direct connections in local currencies, we offer millions a practical pathway to Bitcoin, stablecoins, tokenised gold, and more, as well as innovative financial tools, supporting greater economic participation for everyone.
Through this integration, VALR users in supported markets can now deposit funds directly from their mobile money wallets in local currencies, whether Kenyan Shillings, Nigerian Naira, Ghanaian Cedi, or Ugandan Shillings. Settlements are processed using stablecoins, and the deposited value can then be deployed across VALR's full product suite: spot and margin trading for Bitcoin and over 100 crypto assets, tokenized real-world assets including gold and equities, lending, staking, and VALR Pay.
To put this concretely: a Kenyan smallholder farmer who uses M-Pesa to receive payment for produce could, in theory, convert a portion of that income into a tokenized gold position or a stablecoin yield product, directly from the same wallet app. No bank account required. No dollar conversion at a bureau de change. No wire transfer.
VALR's Position and Why That Matters
VALR is not a startup experiment in Africa's crypto space. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Johannesburg, the exchange is backed by Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and Fidelity's F-Prime Capital. It is licensed by South Africa's Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) and holds regulatory approval in Europe. As of early 2026, VALR serves over 1.7 million registered users and 2,000 corporate and institutional clients globally.
The regulatory backdrop matters more than it might seem. Africa's 54-country patchwork of financial regulators has historically been one of the biggest obstacles to pan-continental crypto adoption. A licensed exchange with cross-jurisdictional approval is a different kind of counterparty than an offshore platform operating in regulatory gray areas. For Onafriq, which operates under tight compliance frameworks across 43 markets, partnering with a licensed entity is not optional. It is the baseline.
Sub-Saharan Africa recorded 52% year-over-year growth in crypto activity through mid-2025, according to Chainalysis. Nigeria alone saw over $92 billion in crypto transaction value in the 12 months to mid-2025. Stablecoins account for a large share of those volumes, driven not by speculative trading but by practical hedging against currencies like the Naira, which depreciated over 100% in 2024 alone. That is the user base this integration is built to serve.
Dare Okoudjou, Founder and CEO of Onafriq, frames the strategic significance from the network side:
We are truly excited to welcome VALR onto the Onafriq Network, enabling their clients across Africa to transact freely with the 1bn mobile wallet users and hundreds of thousands of businesses already on Onafriq's network. VALR is a recognised pioneer and leader of Blockchain and Stablecoin technologies on the continent and we look forward to working with them to bring the many benefits of these technologies to people and businesses across Africa.
The Stablecoin Layer: Why This Is Not Just an On-Ramp Deal
The structure of settlements through stablecoins is the part of this deal that carries the most long-term significance. A stablecoin is a digital currency pegged to a stable asset, usually the US dollar. Because it does not fluctuate with the dollar's exchange rate against local currencies, it acts as a hedge for people whose national currencies are losing value. In Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, where inflation and currency volatility are daily realities, holding USDC or USDT effectively means holding dollar value without needing a US bank account.
Onafriq had already begun building this direction. In April 2025, the network partnered with Circle to integrate USDC across 40 African markets, a move explicitly aimed at reducing the 80% of intra-African payments that are still routed through banks outside the continent, generating roughly $5 billion in annual fees. The VALR partnership deepens that stablecoin layer and attaches it to a trading and yield infrastructure that most mobile-only users currently have no access to.
This is different from a standard fiat on-ramp. It is a path from mobile money to stablecoin savings, to tokenized gold, to lending yield, all within a single exchange's infrastructure. For someone previously priced out of dollar savings, that is a material change in economic access.
What This Tells Us About the Crypto Inclusion Narrative
For years, the financial inclusion argument for crypto in Africa has been made loudly but executed poorly. The gap between "Bitcoin can bank the unbanked" as a talking point and an interface that a rural M-Pesa user can actually navigate was enormous. Most crypto exchanges required bank accounts for funding, demanded identity documentation that many informal workers do not have in usable digital form, and operated in dollars by default.
This integration addresses the first problem directly: funding without a bank account. It does not solve everything. KYC requirements remain, and Onafriq's network, while broad, does not cover every corner of 43 markets evenly. The GSMA's own data shows a persistent gender gap in mobile money ownership, with women in low-and-middle-income countries being 36% less likely to own a mobile money account than men, a gap that has widened since 2021. A crypto on-ramp built on mobile money inherits those structural exclusions if nothing else changes.
Still, the architecture of this deal, a licensed exchange, a compliant payment network, stablecoin settlement, and local currency entry, is the most technically coherent version of the crypto inclusion model that has been proposed for Africa at scale. Prior experiments either lacked the network depth or the regulatory standing to operate broadly. This one has both.
Final Thoughts
The VALR-Onafriq deal is significant not because it is perfect but because it is specific. It does not promise to bank the unbanked through ideology. It builds on infrastructure that hundreds of millions of people already use, adds a licensed and regulated exchange on top of it, and settles in an asset class that has demonstrated real utility for currency hedging in volatile markets.
The stablecoin layer is the unlock. Mobile money is the entry point. And crypto, in this framing, is less about speculation and more about access to financial instruments that richer, bank-connected populations have taken for granted. Whether the full chain, from local currency deposit to yield product to tokenized asset, gets adopted at scale depends on execution, user experience, and whether the regulatory environments in each of those 43 markets remain permissive. But the infrastructure to try it, finally, is in place.
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