Cryptocurrency adoption across African markets

Africa is vast geographically, demographically, and economically. Roughly 1.4 billion people lived across 54 countries in 2022, and the UN projects the population to approach 2.5 billion by 2050.

Fifty-four countries are not one market. Regulation, currency stability, and infrastructure differ enormously between, say, Nigeria and Mauritius, so what follows are country-level notes, not a continental thesis.

The region's demographics, mobile infrastructure, currency conditions, and cross-border payment needs created different reasons to test blockchain-based products.

By 2022, public and private projects across the continent were testing digital currencies, blockchain payment products, and new regulatory approaches.

Investment was concentrated in a small number of markets. That concentration is not evidence of broad household benefit. Nigeria's National Bureau of Statistics reported in 2022 that 63% of people in the country were multidimensionally poor.

That poverty rate is a warning against treating investment totals as evidence that a technology has improved household finances.

Problems blockchain products might address

Currencies

Inflation and currency volatility vary widely by country.

At the peak of Zimbabwe's hyperinflation in November 2008, researchers Steve Hanke and Nicholas Krus estimated that prices doubled roughly every 24.7 hours. The South African rand depreciated substantially against the US dollar between 2014 and the essay's 2022 publication date.

For individuals and businesses, this makes it difficult to store value or transact reliably.

Some users access dollar-denominated stablecoins such as USDC and USDT through non-custodial wallets.

These tools can provide exposure to a different unit of account, but users take issuer, reserve, wallet, exchange-rate, regulatory, and off-ramp risks. A stablecoin does not repair local infrastructure or make dollar access legal and affordable by itself.

Remittances

Remittances, payments sent by workers abroad back to families at home, are a lifeline for millions across the continent.

But they're also expensive.

The World Bank's Remittance Prices Worldwide report put the simple global average cost of sending $200 at 7.45% in the first quarter of 2017 and 7.32% in the second quarter.

In 2017 alone, remittances to low- and middle-income countries totaled $466 billion. Multiplying the simple average by total flows produces $34.7 billion, but that is an illustration rather than an estimate of actual aggregate fees because transfer corridors and amounts differ.

Those costs reduce the amount recipients receive and are a valid target for competition.

At publication in 2022, Solana documented a base fee of 5,000 lamports (0.000005 SOL) per signature. One million simple transfers with one signature each would therefore consume about 5 SOL in base signature fees, excluding priority fees, account creation, failed transactions, exchange spreads, and off-ramp costs. But the challenge remains: local banks, vendors, and regulators often don't accept crypto, and off-ramps are limited; the last mile back into local cash is where the fees and friction return.

Debt and digital sovereignty

Over the two decades before publication, Chinese lenders financed roads, railways, ports, and other infrastructure across the continent. The terms, benefits, and debt risks differ by project and borrower; they should not be collapsed into one claim about national independence.

Blockchain networks can add another route for payments and capital formation. Businesses still depend on customers, connectivity, custody, law, and conversion between digital assets and local currency.

Adoption problems and later reversals

Progress isn't without missteps. El Salvador made headlines in 2021 by adopting Bitcoin as legal tender. The rollout was rocky.

Adoption remained limited, and the IMF reported no visible improvement in financial inclusion from Bitcoin's official-currency status. In January 2025, El Salvador amended the law. Under its IMF-supported program, private-sector acceptance became voluntary and taxes became payable only in US dollars.

In April 2022, the Central African Republic (CAR) gave Bitcoin legal-tender status. The country amended the law in 2023, removing its legal-tender and guaranteed-convertibility provisions, though cryptocurrency transactions remained permitted. World Bank data put internet use at about 4% of the population in 2019.

The 2019 internet-use estimate meant that most residents could not practically use an internet-dependent payment system. The repeal reinforced the difference between passing a currency law and building accessible payment infrastructure.

Even the optimistic claim that citizens will no longer need to carry CFA francs to convert into dollars misses the reality: they'll need reliable internet, blockchain knowledge, and enough savings to absorb network fees.

What the evidence supports

Blockchain networks address only parts of these problems. They still require infrastructure, education, and workable implementation.

For low-income users, a payment network must be judged by its full delivered cost, reliability, consumer protections, liquidity, and cash conversion, not only its base transaction fee. Low-fee chains improve one variable without settling the others.

The country-level experiments are useful precisely because they expose those constraints. Evidence of success would include lower end-to-end remittance costs, reliable off-ramps, sustained non-speculative use, and access that does not depend on wealth or specialist knowledge.