Sending money across borders for business has always been slow and expensive. Banks charge high fees, exchange rates are reduced and transfers can take days.
The costs are highest in Africa. By comparison, sending money to Sub-Saharan Africa costs an average of 7.9% in fees for a $200 transfer, the highest of any region, according to the World Bank.
A new partnership between Aptos Foundation, HashKey MENA and African payments platform Daya aims to reduce this using stablecoins, digital tokens pegged to traditional currencies. The three are building a regulated payment corridor connecting the Middle East and Africa, with transactions settled on the Aptos blockchain.
How the new payment route works
The partners signed what they call a ‘Corridor Pilot Agreement’, a test run of a new payment route between the two regions. A typical transaction goes like this:
- A company in the UAE converts local currencies into stablecoins via HashKey MENA.
- These stablecoins move on the Aptos blockchain.
- Daya converts them into local African currency and delivers them to the recipient.
The aim is to make cross-border payments faster, cheaper and easier to track while complying with local rules. Each partner has a role: HashKey MENA, a Dubai-based virtual asset service provider regulated by the UAE’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), handles the conversion between stablecoins and fiat. Daya, a pan-African payments platform, moves money across the continent and charges in local currency. Aptos Foundation supports the blockchain on which the corridor is located.
Aptos in the middle
The stablecoin activity on Aptos has grown rapidly. The value of stablecoins circulating on the network has surpassed $1.9 billion, an all-time high. Aptos said its stablecoin market capitalization grew from about $649 million to over $1.2 billion in the first half of 2025, before rising above $1.9 billion in 2026.
The corridor expands HashKey’s Asia Connect network, which runs on Aptos. Since launching the first corridor between Hong Kong and the Philippines in June 2025, the network has added Vietnam through partnerships with CAEX and VPBank, and the UAE through HashKey MENA. Africa is the newest and furthest addition yet.
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Africa’s stablecoin moment
Africa is one of the fastest growing markets for stablecoins. Businesses and consumers are increasingly using them to move money across borders, hedge against currency fluctuations and reduce transaction costs.
The figures show how far that has gone. Stablecoins now represent roughly 43% of all crypto transaction volume in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to Chainalysis, and the region generated more than $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, up about 52% year-over-year, the third fastest growth of any region.
The savings can be dramatic: a Mercy Corps Ventures pilot that paid Kenyan freelancers found that using stablecoins reduced fees from 29% to 2%.
What has been missing so far is the regulated infrastructure to connect that demand with the rest of the world.
Paul Joe from Daya summed it up immediately:
“Africa is already a leader in stablecoin adoption. What is still lacking is the regulated infrastructure and scalable liquidity to connect that demand to the rest of the world. By joining HashKey’s Asia Connect network as the African hub, based on Aptos, we join a network that already runs from Hong Kong to the Philippines, via Vietnam to the UAE.”
Where this fits in the stablecoin tree
The partnership comes as stablecoins become mainstream. The market has surpassed $300 billion, attracting banks, payments companies and regulators who increasingly see it as a faster, cheaper way to move money across borders.
A March 2026 IMF paper found that markets increasingly expect stablecoins to play a greater role in payments, especially cross-border, where existing systems remain slow and expensive.
The rollout will take place in two phases. The first allows companies to finance local payments across borders, sending money on one side of the corridor and receiving local currency on the other. If that works, the second phase aims to build a broader trading network, allowing companies to use stablecoins to settle international transactions through supported corridors. Both phases will take place within the VARA regulatory framework.