Kenya has finally regulated crypto. It took 116 pages, 151 regulations, ten licences, twenty government agencies and enough forms to make opening a wallet feel like applying to run a bank.

I read all of it, then opened MiCA, Europe’s crypto law, and the source became difficult to miss. Kenya copied MiCA’s homework, not merely the idea or the general approach.

MiCA Article 50 says stablecoin issuers cannot pay interest. Kenya’s Regulation 72 repeats it in the same order, including the phrase “any remuneration or other benefit related to the length of time” a person holds the token.

MiCA says issuers must publish a white paper, redeem at par, segregate reserves, disclose conflicts and obtain approval before changing the product. Kenya follows the same sequence. MiCA Article 25 and Kenya’s Regulation 73 even share the instruction that a modified white paper must keep “the order of the information appearing therein” consistent with the original.

That sentence crossed the Mediterranean intact. Kenya changed “crypto-asset” to “virtual asset,” replaced the European regulator with the Central Bank of Kenya and submitted.

The problem with copied homework is that sometimes you also copy an answer to a question nobody asked.

Whose homework is this?

MiCA is the main classmate, but Kenya’s stablecoin reserve rules also resemble the Bahamas’ DARE framework almost line for line: separate reserves from the issuer’s money, separate each coin’s reserves from every other coin, keep them liquid, let the regulator inspect them and protect them from creditors in insolvency.

Then the script suddenly sounds Kenyan because it is. The rules against front-running, churning and cold calling were lifted from Kenya’s own 2011 capital-markets regulations. The old requirement to keep a do-not-call list, phone people only between 8am and 5pm and identify the caller has been dressed in crypto clothes and sent back outside.

The copy trail is specific:

• Kenya 72 from MiCA 40 and 50: interest ban and its definition.

• Kenya 73 from MiCA 25: changes to the business model and modified white paper.

• Kenya 79 from MiCA 32: the same six conflict-of-interest relationships.

• Kenya 80 from MiCA 39: redemption policy, par value and same-currency option.

• Kenya 75 from Bahamas DARE 50: full backing, segregation, inspection, liquidity and creditor protection.

• Kenya 120-122 from Kenya’s 2011 rules 23-24 and 10: front-running, churning and cold calling.

Good regulators borrow. The question is whether the suit fits after import.

The good suit

The strongest rules deal with the oldest trick in crypto: showing a customer a balance, then quietly using the money for something else.

Licensed firms must separate customer assets from company assets. Stablecoins must be fully backed. Reserves must be liquid, protected from creditors and audited. A holder can redeem at par, and the issuer has two working days to pay.

Providers must disclose fees, withdrawal rules, conflicts, licence status and security risks in plain language. Ads cannot hide the dangerous part three clicks deep or place the warning where a small phone screen will miss it. Complaints need a process, progress updates within 21 days and restitution where appropriate.

Front-running, wash trading and churning are offences. Cyber audits and incident plans are mandatory. Transaction records stay available for seven years.

For an ordinary Kenyan, that means something crypto has rarely offered: somebody to complain to.

If an exchange loses your coins, freezes your withdrawal or invents a fee, there is now a legal entity, a record and a regulator. A licence will not make bitcoin stable or recover every stolen key. It does make “our support team is looking into it” less useful as a final answer.

The KSh150 million door

The model begins to strain when we reach the capital table. A wallet provider needs KSh150 million in paid-up capital, an exchange needs KSh100 million and a stablecoin issuer needs KSh300 million. Then come liquid-capital requirements, insurance, auditors, penetration tests, compliance officers and monthly reports. Stablecoin issuers report reconciliations daily.

MiCA, the homework Kenya copied, sets its service-provider minimums at EUR50,000, EUR125,000 and EUR150,000 depending on the risk of the activity. It also uses operating costs and allows qualifying insurance to count as a prudential safeguard.

Kenya copied Europe’s consumer protections and made market entry more Kenyan: expensive, document-heavy and best attempted by someone who already knows a bank chairman (ama ako na mtu ndani).

The capital does not follow the exact risk. A software wallet and a custodian controlling customer keys are not the same business. A small Kenyan team building merchant settlement in Kisumu is not Binance. The rules know this conceptually, then meet both founders at the door with the same calculator.

VAAK warned that the proposed costs could price smaller Kenyan firms out of the regulated market, loudly enough to move the numbers. The March draft wanted KSh150 million from exchanges, KSh50 million from payment processors, KSh200 million from tokenisation and ICO providers, and KSh500 million from stablecoin issuers. The final rules cut those to KSh100 million, KSh10 million, KSh10-20 million and KSh300 million. Public participation worked, except on wallets, where the KSh150 million answer appears permanent.

Your USDT is about to know your government name

For most Kenyans, the first change will not be safer reserves. It will be onboarding.

Licensed firms must identify customers, inspect source of funds and keep wallet addresses, chain identifiers, transaction histories and interaction logs for seven years. They report volumes, values and geographic distribution every month.

The twenty-member coordination forum includes the Central Bank, CMA, Financial Reporting Centre, police, intelligence agencies, Asset Recovery Agency and Kenya Revenue Authority.

The rules do not create a new crypto tax. They do make pretending the government cannot see your crypto considerably more ambitious.

Foreign firms are included if they target Kenyans or earn income here, even without a Kenyan office. CBK can order local intermediaries to restrict a foreign stablecoin. Enforcement will be easiest where crypto touches M-Pesa or a bank account, because the internet remains stubbornly difficult to arrest.

This creates the central trade-off: the regulated route becomes safer, more expensive and more visible, while the informal route remains cheaper, riskier and available.

If compliance costs raise spreads and withdrawal fees, the person sending KSh2,000 pays for rules designed around institutions. If licensed platforms become too intrusive, users move to private wallets, offshore apps and P2P dealers. Kenya gains supervised firms and loses sight of the market.

Regulation can move the queue, but it cannot close every door.

The stablecoin answer that may not fit

Kenya also copied MiCA’s ban on stablecoin interest. In Europe, that rule stops a payment token from pretending to be a deposit account. In Kenya, stablecoins are also how freelancers get paid, traders hold dollars and households escape shilling risk. Some users seek yield because the coin functions as savings, not only payment.

Ban the yield on licensed platforms and it does not evaporate. It moves offshore or into DeFi, beyond the protections Kenya just spent 116 pages building.

The reserve rules have their own puzzle. At least 30 percent of stablecoin funds must sit in Kenyan bank trust accounts. The remainder must be invested in Kenya. But a dollar stablecoin must hold dollar-denominated reserves.

Kenya wants the dollar token, the reserves in Kenya and no currency mismatch.

That is three chairs and, depending on the available dollar instruments, possibly two guests.

The copied answer still needs Kenyan working

Kenya was right to regulate the activity already happening. Stablecoins move real salaries and trade payments. People hold serious savings on exchanges. The old position, “crypto is risky, please behave,” was not supervision. It was a disclaimer.

But a licence is not deposit insurance. The rules do not create a customer compensation fund. They do not clearly give small customers priority if a provider collapses. And KSh150 million in a company account proves the shareholders have money. It does not prove the company deserves yours.

Kenya copied MiCA because MiCA answers many of the right questions: who holds the reserves, who owns customer assets, who is liable when a white paper lies, and how a holder gets out.

The dangerous copy is the assumption underneath it: that Kenya has Europe’s institutions, enforcement capacity and market depth waiting behind the text.

It does not. Those have to be built one audit, complaint, bank integration and enforcement case at a time.

Europe wrote the homework, the Bahamas lent a page, and Kenya changed the names and added a very expensive cover sheet. What follows is the oral exam: whether the institutions behind the text can make the imported protections work here.

_{This is regulatory analysis, not legal or investment advice.}

Fourteen days after I wrote that Open USD had a member list and no machine to measure it, Visa built the machine.

I found out from a Fortune exclusive on Thursday morning and read it twice, because the announcement was, almost line for line, the missing infrastructure I’d been going on about. On July 4 I argued that the consortium’s problem wasn’t the padded list or the Samsung denial. It was that nothing in the system could measure what a partner is, and the law makes that measurement mandatory before anyone gets paid. Two weeks later the biggest name on the list shipped exactly that measuring machine, and kept the keys.

Here’s what launched. The Visa Stablecoin Platform, VSP, is an enterprise system that lets banks, fintechs and crypto firms mint, store, transfer and redeem stablecoins inside Visa’s existing payment and treasury rails. CoinDesk’s read lists the parts: wallet infrastructure as a service, blockchain connectivity, dual-approval workflows, audit logs, transfer allow-lists. It launches with Open USD as its anchor asset, alongside Visa’s existing support for Circle‘s USDC and Paxos‘ USDG. The reach Visa claims: roughly 15,000 financial institutions, more than 200 million merchants, about $15 trillion in annual settlement, and, in its own telling, several billion dollars of stablecoin settlement already flowing.

If you’re new to this story, the analogy that carries it: a farm co-op that promises to pay members by the grain they deliver needs a weighbridge, the truck scale at the gate, before it needs more members. Open USD launched with 140 members and no scale. eToro posted “proud to join” while Samsung learned from Korean media that it had apparently joined too. A confirmation and a denial were the same kind of evidence, because nothing measured anybody.

And the measurement isn’t cosmetic. The GENIUS Act bars issuers from paying holders yield in the US, and MiCA bans it outright in Europe. So the only legal shape for Open USD’s core promise, near-zero fees with reserve income flowing to distributors, is documented compensation for measured distribution work. No meter, no money.

The quote that concedes the thesis

Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, Jack Forestell, in the launch statement:

That’s the weighbridge argument, spoken by the company that just built one. The concept was never in short supply. The operational reality, the mint and redeem plumbing, the approval workflows, the audit trail that proves who distributed what, is the entire game. Visa looked at a consortium drowning in logos and correctly identified the scarce asset: the scale, not the membership.

The turn, because there always is one

My first reaction on Thursday was something like vindication. My second reaction was more useful: read the ownership line again.

The weighbridge I asked for was consortium infrastructure, a neutral scale at the co-op gate that makes every member’s contribution legible, including to the public. What shipped is a member-owned scale. VSP is an internal Visa platform. Its audit logs satisfy the lawyers. Its allow-lists define, operationally, who is real. But none of that is visible from outside the barn. The market still can’t tell a Samsung from an eToro; the only party who now can is Visa.

That is not a detail. That is the whole power map. Whoever holds the meter holds the ledger the yield gets paid against, and the meter-holder here is also the largest truck in the co-op, with its own crop to weigh. Visa is a backer of Open Standard alongside BlackRock, Alphabet and Coinbase, per CoinDesk. Mastercard and American Express have partnered with the consortium too, per Fortune. Every one of them can now watch their distribution measured on a rival member’s machine, or build their own barn. Mastercard already settles card transactions in 6 regulated stablecoins. The co-op doesn’t have one weighbridge. It’s about to have several, each owned by the trucks.

There’s a second sharpening. Two weeks ago my open question was the issuer of record: no named US issuer, no EU e-money entity. Still none named. But now the minting itself runs through Visa’s platform. If the token is minted, stored, moved and redeemed inside VSP while the legal issuer stays a blank, then in every way that matters operationally, Visa is the issuer, holding none of the paper and none of the liability. The most valuable seat in stablecoins used to be the issuer’s. Visa just built the seat above it.

The market read the same map. Circle, whose USDC makes almost all its revenue from reserve yield, fell about 5% on Thursday and Coinbase traded down with it. When the rails can meter distribution themselves, the reserve-yield business becomes a commodity input, and the pricing power moves to whoever owns the meter and the merchants. I wrote two weeks ago, about a different deal, that the issuers are bidding and the rail keeps the book. Flutterwave rented rooms to Ripple and Circle. Visa just did the same thing at 1,000 times the scale, and added a toll booth.

What I’m watching

Grading the July 4 shots first, in public, as promised. Shot 1, the unit: half repaired. An operational unit of membership now exists (you’re real if VSP meters you), but it’s private, so the public logo problem stands. Shot 2, the license: sharpened, not answered; see above. Shots 3 through 5 stay open. New shots, written so I can’t wriggle out:

1. The public ticket. If Open Standard or Visa publishes member-level distribution data, even quarterly and aggregated, within 6 months, the weighbridge becomes real infrastructure. If the numbers stay inside VSP, the consortium’s transparency story is marketing and my July 4 warning stands upgraded.

2. The issuer blank. If a named, licensed issuer of record for OUSD isn’t public by the token’s general availability, regulators will eventually ask my question with subpoena power: who exactly is minting this, and on whose balance sheet?

3. The rival barns. If Mastercard or American Express ships an equivalent mint-and-meter platform within 2 quarters, the consortium fragments into competing weighbridges and the “open standard” brand becomes the punchline. One weighbridge is infrastructure. Four is a standards war.

4. USDC on VSP. Visa says the platform complements USDC and USDG. If Circle lets its coin be metered on Visa’s machine, that’s the moment the issuer business formally accepts commodity status. Watch what Circle announces instead; a 5% drawdown usually produces a press release.

5. The corridor test, unchanged. First non-seed volume through a real payout corridor with a local off-ramp member, or month 6 supply still parked in anchor treasuries. USDG did $1 billion in 13 months with a licensed issuer standing first. That pace is still the bar.

The consortium spent two weeks being laughed at for a padded list, and the laughing missed the plot. Lists are cheap and everyone knew it, including the members. The real race was always to own the machine that makes the list legible, because the machine holds the ledger and the ledger directs the yield. That race just ended its first lap, and a member won it, not the co-op.

The weighbridge finally exists. It’s parked in the biggest member’s barn.

I write about money and technology from the emerging-market edge, after a decade building market entry and payments across Africa, including one of the continent’s first fiat-to-crypto gateways and ecosystem growth for a major Layer 2. I hold no position in CRCL, COIN, V or any token named here. One operator reading a machine against a rulebook. Not investment advice.

Circle just invested in Flutterwave, three weeks after Ripple did.

I have to start with a correction, because my last piece on this company aged in twenty-one days. When Ripple bought its stake on June 16, I wrote that Flutterwave’s licenses and integrations across 34 markets were the one thing in African payments you can’t buy twice, and that “Ripple just bought it once.”

On July 7, Circle Ventures bought it too.

The licenses still can’t be rebuilt twice. Access to them, it turns out, can be sold as many times as the seller wants. The miss is mine, and it is the most useful one I have made this year, because what I got wrong is exactly what makes Flutterwave dangerous.

I thought Ripple had bought the house.

Ripple had bought the public title.

If you have watched The Polygamist, you know the shape of the story. The drama is not just one man with too many relationships. It is hierarchy. One person has the public marriage. Another has proximity. Another has the quiet upper hand. Flutterwave’s version is much cleaner than scandal, but structurally it is the same game: every dollar gets a room, nobody gets the house, and whoever controls the rooms controls the drama.

And Flutterwave is smiling, because everyone paid attention to the spouses and not enough attention to the house.

What Circle actually bought

The deal, per Flutterwave’s announcement and the press release: a strategic investment from Circle Ventures, terms undisclosed, alongside native USDC settlement built directly into Flutterwave’s platform. Businesses collect locally, in naira or cedis or shillings, and settle in USDC “when it makes sense for their operations,” in Flutterwave’s words: past banking hours, across borders, into treasury.

Now read the sentence two paragraphs away in the same post: “RLUSD will serve as the default stablecoin across Flutterwave’s stablecoin products.”

Ripple’s June deal got the default slot. Circle looked at a household where its rival had the named position and moved in anyway. The sizes explain the confidence: USDC circulates $73.3 billion against RLUSD’s $1.57 billion, 47 times larger, and USDC is the dollar a treasurer in Nairobi or a merchant acquirer in Accra has actually heard of.

The default is Ripple’s. The demand is Circle’s to lose.

The deeper point is colder. Flutterwave wrote an exclusive marriage contract with neither of them. It gave Ripple status and Circle access, and only one of those is proof that the table belongs to Flutterwave.

Flutterwave never promised monogamy

The Circle deal reads differently once you lay out the record, because this is not Flutterwave’s second crypto move. It is the sixth.

It started in October 2023, with USDC settlement piloted on Hedera. In April 2025 it became a design partner in Circle’s payments network alongside Yellow Card and Onafriq. In October 2025 it added Polygon as a settlement layer for USDT and USDC transfers. In January 2026 it launched stablecoin wallets with Turnkey and Nuvion. Then came Ripple in June and Circle in July, three weeks apart.

Look at what that sequence never contains: an exclusive.

Three chains, three dollars, two rival issuers, zero marriages.

That is not indecision. That is design.

Flutterwave has been building optionality one partner at a time, never handing anyone the keys. For two and a half years it used crypto infrastructure without becoming anyone’s crypto subsidiary. Then, in the space of twenty-one days, the money flow reversed. Flutterwave stopped paying to access crypto infrastructure. The infrastructure companies started paying to access Flutterwave.

That reversal is the story.

Flutterwave calls itself multi-rail, which is the polite corporate phrase. The honest phrase is plural household. One rail, many claimants. One landlord, many tenants, each with a story about why they matter.

But the house is Flutterwave’s.

The rail is scarce. The dollars are not.

Why Circle had to move in

Circle’s summer was already the roughest stretch of its public life. Open USD launched on June 30 with 140 partners and a model built to give away the reserve yield that makes up nearly all of Circle’s revenue, and the stock fell double digits the same day. A commoditized product leaves you two moats a rival cannot copy overnight: licenses and distribution.

Licenses are how Circle won Europe, where MiCA handed USDC the regulated market. Distribution is the fight it has barely started in Africa, where USDT’s $184 billion owns the street and, as of three weeks ago, RLUSD owned the default on the continent’s biggest rail.

Circle had been in Flutterwave’s orbit for years through the settlement pilots and the payments network. Then Ripple arrived and took the ceremony. Three weeks later, Circle got the call after the ceremony, and still chose to formalize its claim.

I cannot source a mood, so I will not pretend to know whether anyone inside Circle was annoyed. The public record only lets me say this: a company already partnered with Flutterwave decided it needed equity after its rival got the default language. That is not indifference. That is a distribution fight.

Read the two announcements together and the hierarchy is visible. June gives Ripple myth language: Series E, validation, financial operating system. July gives Circle utility language: settlement, treasury flexibility, businesses already using USDC. Strategic spouse, commercial spouse. Then Flutterwave pulls rank over both: the future is multi-rail, and Flutterwave orchestrates the choice.

But the issuer war is not won in announcement language. It is won in settlement flow, and the last-mile truth lives with the rail.

What I am watching

First, attributed volume. My June watch item asked whether RLUSD settlement would show up on-chain in Flutterwave’s corridors. That question now has a control group: two dollars, same rail, same quarter. Whichever stablecoin first shows attributable Flutterwave settlement volume at scale wins the only scoreboard that matters. If neither shows by year-end, both deals were press releases with cap-table attachments.

Second, the life expectancy of the default. RLUSD holds the default slot in the same announcement that welcomes USDC onto the platform. Defaults are sticky for passive flow and weak against explicit demand, and merchant settlement is explicit demand. If Flutterwave’s product pages quietly stop saying “default” within a year, the auction has entered its second round.

Third, the next bidder. Tether has $184 billion and no seat. Paxos runs the consortium dollar Robinhood settles on. Open USD needs exactly this kind of corridor to convert its launch page into volume. If any of them takes a stake in an African rail within six months, Flutterwave or a rival, the cap-table-as-consortium reading stops being my theory and becomes the market structure.

Fourth, who publishes the numbers. Flutterwave can attribute settlement volume per dollar per corridor. The issuers cannot, not at the last mile. The moment Flutterwave starts publishing, packaging, or charging for that attribution, it stops being a rail with investors and becomes the referee of the dollar war on the continent.

Fifth, the empty local seat. Every dollar settling into Nigeria still needs a naira leg, and today that leg is fiat bank rails. cNGN, the regulated naira stablecoin, holds two cards neither dollar can play: naira reserves yield around 20 percent against the 4 or 5 the dollars share with distributors, and a regulated naira leg is the version of this table Nigeria’s central bank can bless. Its bid is not equity but the reserve attestation it still has not published, then the richest yield share at the auction. If a regulated naira token lands on Flutterwave’s shelf within a year, the local-stablecoin category gets its first real product moment. If the corridors ossify as dollars in, fiat out, the naira never gets a seat, and one day Flutterwave will mint its own.

The rail keeps the book

The dollar war was supposed to be decided in Washington and Brussels, in reserve disclosures and license queues. Instead, the two biggest regulated dollars on earth spent three weeks bidding their way onto one Lagos company’s cap table, and neither got exclusivity.

That is what I missed in June, writing as if the rail could only be bought once. Flutterwave understood its own scarcity better than I did. The asset was not a thing to be sold. It was a position to be rented, ranked, repriced, and sold again.

Ripple got the public title. Circle bought in anyway. Tether is still outside with the biggest wallet. cNGN is the local seat that could change the shape of the table.

Flutterwave did not choose a spouse. It built the house, assigned the rooms, and kept the register.

The issuers are bidding. The rail keeps the book.

_{I hold no position in CRCL, XRP, USDC, RLUSD, or Flutterwave. Deal facts are from Flutterwave’s July 7 announcement and the reporting linked above; Circle’s investment amount is undisclosed, and the read of Circle’s public posture is labeled as inference, not fact. Supply figures are from DeFiLlama, July 8. Flutterwave’s per-dollar settlement volumes are not public; that gap is the fourth watch item, not an estimate. One operator reading a cap table like a market map. Not investment advice.}

I left one thread hanging in last week’s piece: Camila Russo asked what being a partner commits anyone to, and nobody on the launch page answered. I called governance the question I’d press first. I didn’t expect reality to press it inside a week. Chosun Biz reported that Samsung, Shinhan, Dunamu, and K Bank had signed nothing; Samsung said there had been no official consultations and it didn’t know what role it was supposed to play. Then Gabor Gurbacs checked with his own clients on the list and reported they “never signed or agreed to anything.”

The same list was confirming from the other side. eToro posted that it was “proud to join” as a launch partner within hours of the announcement. Crypto.com called it “a pivotal step change” the same afternoon, and MoonPay’s entire statement was a handshake emoji. Bitso put itself “at the table” for Latin America the next day, and Ledger was still posting “proud to be a launch partner” on the day the Korean denials spread. So the list holds companies loudly in and companies that never knew they were on it, wearing the same logo at the same size.

The easy read is a lying scandal, Protos ran exactly that headline, and it’s the read I’d caution against. What made me stop was the thought underneath both piles of statements: right now, the genuine members can’t prove they’re any different from Samsung. A confirmation tweet and a denial are the same kind of evidence. There is no unit for what a partner is.

What does joining weigh?

Recall the model. Open USD charges nothing to mint or redeem, and pays nearly all reserve interest to its partners based on the balances and volume they bring, and reserve interest is the entire prize; it was 99% of Circle’s 2024 revenue.

Think of a farm co-op that pays dividends by the grain each member delivers. Before that co-op needs more members, it needs a weighbridge. Open Standard published the member list before the weighbridge.

The law makes the weighbridge mandatory anyway, on both sides of the Atlantic. The GENIUS Act bars issuers from paying holders yield, and MiCA goes further, banning interest from issuers and even service providers across the EU. So in every market that matters, partner payments have to survive as documented compensation for measurable distribution work. The system that measures each partner’s contribution is the same system that makes the economics legal. One machine, two jobs, zero public evidence it exists yet.

Once you see it that way, “partner” stops being a status and becomes a rung. Six of them, and every rung above the first has an artifact nobody can fake:

L0, logo. A supportive conversation. Obligations: zero. Where Samsung was, involuntarily.
L1, paper. A signed membership agreement.
L2, sandbox. Mint and redeem keys live in testing.
L3, pilot. First attributed live volume. The dashboard line leaves zero.
L4, default. Open USD becomes a default option in one product line.
L5, treasury. Float policy changes; balances sit in the token.

The launch page flattened all six into one word. The denials were what that flattening looks like from Seoul.

Join is a different verb in every seat

Run the 140 through the ladder and a second structure appears. An acquirer settles in the token. A remitter routes through it. An exchange lists it. A platform pays out in it. A treasury holds it. A bank distributes it. A chain hosts it. Infrastructure enables it.

Only two of those verbs mint supply: holding balances and routing volume. Chains and infrastructure create capacity. Banks create legitimacy. Most of the list can’t convert in any way that shows up in supply, whatever they sign.

And the ladder climbs on lopsided economics. At a 4% reserve yield (substitute your own rate, the shape survives), $100 million of attributed average balance pays $4 million a year. That’s rounding error to a card network that already earns float on its own rails, and transformational to an African off-ramp or a LatAm remitter. So the mid-tail climbs fastest and the anchors sit low for structural reasons. Some are capped outright: Coinbase earns roughly half of USDC’s reserve income, and every Open USD balance on its platform would cannibalize a better deal. Its rational ceiling is a listing.

Where my first read breaks

Last week I told readers to watch where Open USD “shows up,” as if partners convert one at a time. That framing was wrong, and the miss is mine.

Work through any single member and you hit someone else. DoorDash’s launch statement points at exactly this, stablecoins as “a real path to bring that level of financial flexibility to other geographies we operate in”; a payout pilot in Nairobi or Mexico City needs a local off-ramp member live first. An off-ramp pilot dies on slippage unless someone seeds liquidity in the local pair. BBVA, the most enthusiastic bank on the page, legally can’t distribute the token in Europe until an issuer of record holds an e-money license, and none has been named. Nobody converts alone. The convertible unit is a corridor: one demand platform, one off-ramp, seeded liquidity, one license, switched on together.

That also softens a warning I made last week. I said that if the big members simply parked their own money in the token to make the supply chart look alive, Open USD would be a standard with no seller. Half right, and the half I missed is what parked money is for. A new corridor can’t carry its first real transfer until dollars already sit on both ends of it, because no remitter will route a customer’s money through an asset it can’t instantly buy and sell at size. Someone has to fund that pool before the first customer shows up, and in month one that someone is always a big member. It’s the cash in the till on opening day, not fake demand. The test is what the parked money is doing six months later. If it has become the float underneath real transfers, it did its job. If it’s still the only supply on the chart, it was a press release.

There’s a benchmark for what the honest version looks like. The one consortium dollar that grew, Paxos’s Global Dollar Network, went from 7 founders in November 2024 to 100+ partners and $1 billion of supply in 13 months, and it had a licensed issuer standing before the first logo went up. That’s the curve to beat and the order to copy.

What I’m watching

Grading last week’s shots first: governance answered itself in 72 hours, faster than I expected. Distribution stays open. New shots, written so I can’t wriggle out:

1. The unit. If Open Standard publishes membership tiers, or anything separating signed members from reviewers, before the token goes live, the list problem is repaired. If the next announcement is a bigger logo count, discount everything after it.

2. The license. If no US issuer of record and no EU e-money entity are named by go-live, members like BBVA stay decorative through 2027 and Europe keeps belonging to whoever holds the paper, which was last week’s MiCA point and it stands.

3. The first corridor. If the first non-seed volume is a platform payout corridor with a local off-ramp member attached, the incentive design works. If supply at month 6 is still mostly anchor treasuries, my parked-supply warning graduates from caution to verdict.

4. The Coinbase rung. If Coinbase ever moves Open USD past a listing into any default placement, my ceiling argument is wrong and I’ll say so here.

5. The benchmark. USDG reached $1 billion in 13 months. If Open USD, with 20 times the launch surface, is under that pace at month 13, the consortium’s size was marketing and the weighbridge never got built.

The denials will be forgotten by August. The measurement problem won’t be, because the yield can’t legally be paid without it and the members can’t be real without it. A logo is a claim. A balance is a fact.

I write about money and technology from the emerging-market edge, after a decade building market entry and payments across Africa, including one of the continent’s first fiat-to-crypto gateways and ecosystem growth for a major Layer 2. I hold no position in CRCL or any token named here. Figures are from Open Standard’s launch materials, Chosun Biz via the reporting linked above, and Paxos’s Global Dollar Network releases. Open USD’s supply, tier contracts, and yield formula aren’t public; those are gaps, not guesses. One operator reading a launch list against a rulebook. Not investment advice.

For a while I had one of the stranger jobs in the industry: growing an ecosystem on the one chain of this kind that decisively won. So when the biggest retail brokerage in America ships a blockchain into what everyone now calls a graveyard, I want to know whether it’s late to a dead trend or has read the ending better than the obituary writers.

First, a translation for readers who don’t live in this world. Ethereum is the settlement network most of crypto builds on, and using it directly is like wiring money through the central bank: secure, but slow at rush hour and the fees sting. A layer 2, an L2, is an express lane built on top. It processes transactions fast and cheap, then posts compressed receipts back down to Ethereum, so it borrows Ethereum’s security without its congestion. And owning one is owning a toll road: whoever runs the chain collects a fee on everything that crosses it. That’s why, for two years, everybody launched one. It’s also why the crash that followed was so ugly.

Here’s what Robinhood shipped, live on July 1, after a testnet that has processed nearly 200 million transactions since February, their number:

• The chain itself. Built on Arbitrum‘s stack with 100 millisecond block times, unveiled at Greenwich under the banner “The World is Flat.”

• Stock Tokens, trading 24/7 in more than 120 countries through Robinhood Wallet.

• Robinhood Earn, paying an estimated 7% on idle dollars through Morpho, with exploit insurance from Lloyd’s of London and RELM (a policy that covers Robinhood, not depositors).

• Trading venues: perps through Lighter, a dedicated Uniswap exchange, and Arcus, a new venue from the dYdX team.

• Free gas for the first 90 days on swaps, stock-token trades, and bridging in.

HOOD rallied to its highest level since mid-June.

How dead are L2s, actually

I pulled the transaction counts myself instead of quoting anyone’s deck. Here is the last 7 days across the major Ethereum L2s (my Dune query, run July 1):

Base did 73.1 million transactions. Arbitrum did 25.1 million, OP Mainnet 13.9 million. Then the cliff: Linea did 159 thousand, ZKsync Era 124 thousand, Scroll 108 thousand. Blast, a chain that held over a billion dollars at its 2024 peak, recorded zero. The top three carry 99.7% of everything in that sample, and Base processes Linea’s entire week in about 22 minutes.

The culling behind those numbers has been running all year: Kinto shut down, Loopring closed its wallet, Blast collapsed 97% from peak before flatlining. And in February the architect disowned the blueprint. Vitalik Buterin wrote that Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap “no longer makes sense”: L2s decentralized far slower than expected while Ethereum’s own base layer got faster and cheaper, and any L2 that wants to exist should “identify a value add other than scaling.”

So the thing that died deserves a precise name. It was never “L2s.” It was the thousand-chain thesis, the idea that launching a toll road was itself a business. The roads were nearly identical. The traffic never was, and the traffic belonged to whoever already had the users.

Why Robinhood launched into a graveyard

Robinhood knows exactly where it’s launching. Its crypto chief, Johann Kerbrat, said the quiet part on his own stage:

“Let’s be honest, this is nothing to write home about. Every day there’s a new chain being launched. So it’s not special because we did it. It’s special because of what this chain now makes possible.”

He’s right, and I watched the proof from the inside, running ecosystem growth for Base, so this is the part I can say with some authority: Base didn’t win on technology. Base won because Coinbase stood behind it and poured millions of verified, funded customers down the funnel. Every chain in the graveyard had blockspace. One chain had an exchange.

Robinhood Chain is that playbook run by a brokerage. Robinhood did to Arbitrum what Coinbase did to Optimism: picked a partner’s technology, kept the customer relationship, and made the chain an extension of its own app, aimed at stocks instead of everything. It brings 28 million customers and exactly what obituary demanded: a value add other than scaling. The docs read like a brokerage that means it, permissionless deployment, ETH for gas, first-come-first-served sequencing so bots can’t pay to jump the queue, and a pitch aimed at AI agents that trade and lend.

Now put Wednesday next to the week’s other two standards stories. On Monday, 140 companies launched Open USD, the committee dollar I wrote about. On Tuesday, MiCA handed Europe’s dollar market to whoever holds a license. And notice two names missing from Monday’s guest list: Robinhood and Arbitrum. A coalition that fit 140 logos on one page couldn’t locate the brokerage with 28 million customers or the second-busiest L2 on earth. They weren’t hard to find. Robinhood co-founded its own consortium, the Global Dollar Network, with Paxos, Kraken, and Galaxy in November 2024, sharing reserve yield with distributors two years before this week made it sound novel. Earn pays its 7% in USDG, the GDN dollar. Three answers to who-controls-the-standard in 48 hours: a committee, a regulator, and a company that skipped the negotiation and built the whole stack.

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What this means if you’re not in crypto

The sharpest explanation came from Robinhood’s own stage. For the flagship demo, the company went 3,100 miles straight down the prime meridian, Greenwich to Ghana, to a man named Abu who works with an education fund in cocoa-farming communities. Kerbrat sent him a SpaceX stock token, live. His framing: sending stock across most borders takes “two to four weeks minimum and so much paperwork and bureaucracy it’s almost not worth it”. On the chain it took seconds, phone to phone, no broker in between.

What Abu holds tracks the SpaceX share price; it isn’t the share itself, and the difference matters. Last year’s tokens were derivative contracts with Robinhood’s European entity; your real risk was Robinhood itself. The new ones are rebuilt: still backed one-for-one by real shares, and structured, Robinhood says, so that “your interest is secured no matter what happens to Robinhood,” with institutions eventually able to redeem tokens for the underlying shares. The redemption is planned, not live, and the secured-interest claim will get the scrutiny it deserves. No version carries a vote at the shareholder meeting, and that’s regulation, not stinginess: pass through ownership and voting and the token becomes an equity offering needing registration in every one of those 120 countries; wrap it as an instrument that tracks the price, and it can travel. So Abu gets the part of a stock that compounds and pays, dividends arrive as cash, and gives up the part retail almost never uses. When did you last vote a proxy? I wrote in May about Nathan Allman, who built Ondo’s tokenized brokerage for exactly this person. Six weeks after his death, a 28-million-customer brokerage staged its launch demo around him.

What I’m watching

Six things, written down so I can’t wriggle out later.

Where the float lives on day 91. Gas is free until roughly the end of September, and subsidized activity always looks like adoption. If Stock Token supply and holders keep climbing in October, the demand is real. If the charts plateau when the free gas ends, this was a launch, not a market.

The rematch with Base. My old chain versus the new one running its playbook. Tokenized equities are building on Base too: Dinari brought its 1:1-backed dShares there, while Coinbase fights the Washington fight over the rules. The entire on-chain tokenized-stock market held about $1 billion in late June. Robinhood’s distribution could dwarf that in a quarter, or Base’s head start in builders could hold.

Whether the corporate chain becomes the standard. Forbes groups Robinhood Chain with Base and Stripe’s Tempo as corporate chains pulling value from neutral ecosystems; Kraken’s Ink is a year old. The candidate I’m watching is eToro: Yoni Assia said last summer the brokerage was talking to “four or five” ecosystems about a dedicated chain, because “we’ll need, by definition, to have a dedicated blockchain if we want to run the entire eToro ecosystem.” If eToro or any similar player announces within the year, the corporate L2 is the category that replaced the thousand rollups. If nobody follows, Robinhood is an outlier, not a standard.

What gets built there. The docs say anyone can deploy. The first serious third-party app on Robinhood Chain that Robinhood didn’t build will tell you whether this is an ecosystem or a very nice private rail.

Who shows up at the standards table. Watch whether Robinhood or Arbitrum ever appear on Open Standard’s member list. I doubt it, and the reason is in my own numbers: USDG, the dollar Robinhood co-founded and now calls “our native dollar,” sits at $2.93 billion, up 50% in a quarter, holders up from 61,600 to 90,800. Kerbrat put it at “almost $3 billion” on stage; my query agrees. That’s nearly twice Ripple’s RLUSD, and almost nobody writes about it. Robinhood doesn’t need a seat at Stripe’s table. It has its own.

The US door. The strangest fact of the week is that America’s most famous retail brokerage excluded America from its flagship product. That’s a regulatory posture, not a preference. The day US rules allow tokenized equities at retail, this stops being an export product and becomes the main one.

The question I started with, whether L2s are dead, turns out to be the wrong question, and Robinhood just made the right one unavoidable. Chains stopped being businesses somewhere in this year’s culling. Distribution never stopped. The graveyard is full of teams that built toll roads and waited for traffic, and the survivors are companies that had the traffic and paved a road under it. Robinhood launched this chain the way it once launched options and gold cards: one more surface for 28 million customers it already owns. The chain was never the business. The customer list is.

I hold no position in HOOD, ARB, MORPHO, or any token named here. Transaction counts and USDG supply are my own Dune queries (7861420, 7861422), run July 1; event quotes are from Robinhood's livestream. One operator who ran the winning version of this playbook, reading the next company to try it. Not investment advice.

Several of them already issue their own.

Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock, Google, Ripple, and more than 130 others put their names on Open USD, a stablecoin governed by its members instead of one issuer. A launch like that only happens when the prize is big enough to make rivals share a table. So start with the prize.

Stablecoins settled about $9 trillion last year, more than half of what Visa moved (a16z, adjusted for wash trading). More than 1% of all US dollars now exist as tokenized stablecoins, collectively the seventeenth-largest holder of US Treasuries. Add the GENIUS Act last July and Circle’s IPO, and the market finally had both things it always lacked, a legal container and institutional validation.

So the open question stopped being whether dollar stablecoins matter. It became who controls the standard they run on. This week handed back two answers, one from a regulator and one from a coalition.

Europe answered first, by deadline

On July 1, MiCA’s transition window closes across the European Economic Area, and USDT effectively disappears from regulated EU venues. Tether never applied for the e-money authorization the rule requires, so its dollar is no longer compliant on any licensed European exchange. The delistings have rolled out for over a year.

USDC kept its listings because Circle holds an EMI license out of France and can passport the token across the bloc. The scoreboard already moved: USDT volumes on EU venues fell more than 70% between late 2024 and mid-2025, while USDC’s roughly doubled. Regulation did not threaten a shift in Europe. It forced one, and USDC won not on product but on paperwork, by holding the license its largest competitor would not file for.

That also sets the bar for whatever launches next. To operate across Europe a stablecoin needs a single licensed issuer of record, one named entity holding the e-money authorization. That rule is about to meet a dollar with 140 owners and no single one. Hold that thought.

Then the coalition answered

The same day, Open Standard launched Open USD, and the guest list is the whole story. Read it grouped by interest instead of by logo and the neutrality wobbles. The card networks, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, are each building their own tokenized settlement. Coinbase earns roughly half of USDC’s reserve income from a deal with the issuer this is built to undercut. Stripe runs its own stablecoin, USDB, through Bridge, whose co-founder, Zach Abrams, now runs Open USD. And the crypto names brought dollars of their own: Ripple has RLUSD, Gemini has GUSD, Aave has GHO. A neutral dollar, backed by a coalition of companies that mostly issue or earn from competing ones.

Ripple is the one I keep staring at. It joined as a day-one integration partner, positioning the XRP Ledger as a rail Open USD can settle on, while it already issues RLUSD, most of which, as I wrote a month ago, does not even live on the XRP Ledger; it migrated to Ethereum. So Ripple is plumbing a rival dollar while its own shrinks on a competitor’s chain. That stops being a contradiction once you read Ripple not as a stablecoin issuer but as a company that wants to be the toll road no matter whose car is on it.

The economics are a deliberate inversion of the model that just won Europe. A stablecoin issuer makes its money on the float: it parks the reserves in Treasuries and keeps the interest, which was 99% of Circle’s 2024 revenue. Open USD charges no mint or redeem fees and hands nearly all of that interest to the partners who distribute it instead. It goes live later this year on several chains at once, Solana, Stripe’s own Tempo, Base, Stellar, Polygon, each claiming day one, which is its own tell about who is steering. The market read it fast: Circle’s stock fell about 15%, its worst day since February, on a model built to drain the revenue line that is nearly all of its business. Whether that was an overreaction is fair to ask, an earlier consortium dollar with the same pitch never dented USDC, but the market plainly read the threat as real.

The cheering was immediate. The colder voices were worth more. Camila Russo noted that many of these 140 compete head to head, then asked the unglamorous question: what does being a partner commit you to, a binding agreement to carry Open USD, or a name on a launch page. Nobody on the page answered it. One onlooker put it as a joke: everyone signed up, and no one is quite sure what they signed up for.

Update, July 4: the question answered itself in 72 hours. Chosun Biz reported that Samsung Electronics ("there were no official consultations, and we do not know what role we will play"), Shinhan, Dunamu, and K Bank, all on the launch list, had signed nothing; Upbit rejected any role in issuance outright. Then OpenAssets' Gabor Gurbacs said several of his own clients on the list "never signed or agreed to anything." The confirmed core is real, Open Standard published executive quotes from Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, BlackRock, Shopify, BNY, BBVA, and Adyen. But a coalition that counts a "we will review it if things go well" as a member has answered Russo's question: for some of the 140, partner was a launch-page noun.

Neutral is a negotiation, not a design

Here is where I slow down, because I have built the kind of distribution this depends on, and an org chart is not an operating reality.

The reserve-sharing model is genuinely smart. It fixes the oldest problem in stablecoins, that nobody runs hard distribution for a dollar they do not earn on. Pay the distributors and everyone has a reason to push. On paper.

In practice, the members with the best distribution have the least reason to use it, with one loud exception. Coinbase earns roughly half of USDC’s reserve income through its Circle deal; Visa and Mastercard are building their own rails. None will push a dollar that eats a margin they already collect. For a Shopify or a Samsung, with no competing product, the math is easy; for the anchor distributors, Open USD has to out-earn what they already make first, and mostly it will not.

The exception is Stripe, and Stripe is the member to watch. It is making Open USD the default for businesses on its platform, the Bridge co-founder runs the consortium, and one of the day-one chains is Stripe’s own Tempo. Alone among the anchors, Stripe committed distribution, an executive, and a rail on day one while most of the coalition committed a logo. That solves the most likely failure mode first, because consortiums usually die of indifference, and somebody has to carry the early weight. The trade is that a standard tends to bend toward whoever carries it, and right now Stripe is carrying most of it. Holding commitment and neutrality in the same structure is a governance design problem, and a solvable one. I’ll come back to how.

And look at who is missing from the room. The corridors where a cheaper dollar changes something are Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines, Indonesia. The launch list gets closer than most, Yellow Card, Félix, Taptap Send, MoneyGram are on it. But the layer that finishes the last mile, M-Pesa, MTN MoMo, Airtel Money, and the local license holders, is not. Open USD launches with enormous reach where Visa and Swift already reach, and thin presence where they do not. I have sat in enough central-bank meetings to say it plainly: a dollar's distribution is decided one license and one local partner at a time, and that work is not on a launch page.

Abrams reached for the comparison himself: financial services needs this the way mobile needed Android. It is an apt analogy, and a demanding one. Android worked because Google carried the early weight, then spent 15 years convincing OEMs the openness was real. Open USD inherits the same test, and it arrives the first time a member’s own product conflicts with the standard.

What I’m watching

Two things, written down so I cannot move the goalposts later.

Governance. The risk is not that 140 companies cannot agree. It is that the inner circle does not have to. When a handful of anchor members have overlapping ambitions, the standard drifts toward whatever the strongest distributor can quietly route around, and today the member with the most routing power is also the most committed one. That cuts both ways. Commitment from an anchor is exactly what Diem never got. Concentration in an anchor is exactly what made regulators and partners distrust it. Diem had 28 members and collapsed when its partners hedged rather than committed; this has five times the surface area. William Blair’s analysts called it a solution searching for a problem and doubted 140 rivals will agree on anything quickly or fund a zero-profit network for free; others called it a cartel to commoditize issuance. And MiCA makes it concrete: a stablecoin needs one licensed issuer of record. So who is Open USD’s? If no member holds the license, it cannot passport the bloc; if one does, the coalition just handed legal control to a single competitor. Governance and compliance are the same question, the one I would press first.

Distribution. Watch where Open USD actually shows up. If it lands first in boring, non-crypto enterprise corridors, where the member pushing it has no competing dollar, the incentive design is working. If a year out the supply is mostly anchor-member treasuries parked to make the launch look alive, the coalition built a standard with no seller.

How I'd solve it

Since I’ve pressed the governance question, here is how I’d answer it, from having done this work one license at a time.

1. Issuer of record. Stand up an independent, consortium-capitalized e-money institution in the EU, licensed in France or Ireland, owned by the Open Standard entity rather than any member, with charter provisions that cap any single member’s board weight. One structure answers both MiCA and the neutrality question. This is how Visa itself solved it in 1970: the banks that competed with each other jointly owned the entity none of them controlled.

2. Binding tiers. This one stopped being hypothetical on July 3. When Samsung learns it joined your consortium from the news, the fix is structural, not a better comms plan. Convert “partner” into a contract with published tiers: anchors take a larger reserve share in exchange for minimum distribution commitments (default placement, corridor volume, integration deadlines), reviewers get called reviewers, and the public list only carries names with signatures behind them. The consortium that overclaims its launch list once will have every future announcement discounted, so the cheapest credibility repair is to publish who signed what. That answers Russo’s question with paper instead of a press release.

3. The corridors nobody in the coalition covers. The launch list has global banks and no last-mile rails. The fastest proof that the incentive model works is a corridor where no member has an incumbent margin to defend: Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines, Indonesia. Sign the mobile-money operators and the local fintechs, one license and one partner at a time, and pay them the float share. If Open USD’s first real supply shows up there instead of in anchor-member treasuries, the design is working. That is also the work I’d most like to see someone in the coalition actually staff.

The question was never whether tokenized dollars become a primary settlement layer; nine trillion dollars settled that. It is who controls the distribution, and this week handed back two partial answers. In Europe, a regulator chose, and it chose the issuer with the license. Everywhere else, 140 companies tried to choose by committee, with a model that pays everyone to agree. A neutral dollar designed by the incumbents it is meant to neutralize is not a revolution. It is a truce. And truces hold exactly as long as everyone’s interests point the same way. I would watch the first market where they don’t.

Updated July 4: added the partner-denial reports that broke after publication, expanded the governance discussion, and added a proposals section. The original argument is unchanged from the version emailed to subscribers.

Most of us know Cursor for one thing: the little dropdown that lets you run any model you want, Claude, GPT, Gemini, whichever fits the job. For a long time I thought that dropdown was the feature. I’ve started to think it’s the tell.

On June 16, SpaceX agreed to buy Cursor for $60 billion in stock (CBS News). Look closely at what that money is paying for and you get the clearest receipt I’ve seen for something builders have felt for a while. The application layer is eating the model layer. The companies that own the user and the data are pulling power from the labs that make the models, and Cursor climbed the whole ladder in public.

The neutral place to use everything

The neutrality is the strategy. By being the best place to use every frontier model, Cursor made itself the layer between developers and the labs. The labs supply the intelligence; Cursor owns the relationship, the workflow, and the part that matters most, the data: which model wins which task, what developers do all day, where the code goes after the suggestion lands.

That’s the old aggregation move. Own demand and your suppliers become interchangeable. When a customer can swap the model under the hood without changing how they work, the model is a commodity and the workflow is the moat (FourWeekMBA). Cursor built the workflow. The models became things it shopped for.

Why Cursor built its own model

Reselling other people’s models is brutal economics, and it gets worse as the models get better. In June 2025 Cursor overhauled its $20 Pro plan, swapping a fixed allotment of fast requests for usage metered at API rates. Heavy users burned through it in days and got surprise bills, some reportedly hundreds of dollars in a week, and CEO Michael Truell apologized and refunded the gap (TechCrunch). The cause was arithmetic, not greed: Claude Opus runs about $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output, and a flat fee can’t survive customers leaning on that all day.

So Cursor paid a toll on every keystroke, set by the same labs it competed with, near-retail for models its biggest supplier could serve at cost. By one report it once made up something like half of Anthropic’s revenue (36Kr): its largest customer and its most exposed rival at once. When Anthropic’s own coding tool took off, and after Anthropic had reportedly cut another rival off, Cursor’s leadership called what staff described as a state of emergency in early 2026 and pushed to build its own model (Trending Topics).

The answer was Composer, Cursor’s in-house model, set as a default inside the product. The logic is simple. If you already own the user, the next thing to own is the model, so you stop renting the one input your whole business runs on.

It climbed up on Chinese weights

There’s a catch. Training a frontier model from scratch costs more than even a fast-growing app can justify. Cursor’s way up was open weights. Composer is built on Kimi K2.5, an open model from the Chinese lab Moonshot AI, which Cursor said in its own engineering blog (Cursor) and confirmed when pressed (TechCrunch). Its framing is that the open model was a starting point and most of the work since is its own. I wrote separately about why that open layer exists. That’s the story from below; this is the story from above.

Put them together and the shape is clear. An application used cheap open weights to climb into the model layer, so it could stop paying the closed labs above it. The model stopped being a destination and became a rung.

What $60 billion actually bought

It’s tempting to read $60 billion as the price of a very good text editor. The deal language points elsewhere. SpaceX called software development a strategically important use case because it throws off structured, verifiable data and constant feedback, and said Cursor’s workflows capture exactly that: the prompts, the iteration cycles, the architecture decisions developers make all day (SpaceX). Add a huge base of developers and the Colossus cluster’s 220,000-plus GPUs, and the two have been jointly training a model for months (AI Magazine).

So the buyer paid for distribution, a data flywheel, and a post-training team. The editor is what collects the data, and the data is what makes the next model better.

SpaceX isn’t alone. Meta paid about $2 billion for Manus, an AI-agent startup with Chinese roots, in December 2025 (CNBC). The giants are all reaching for the same prize: the application closest to the work and the data it throws off. The model is the part they can buy, rent, or copy. The application and its data are the part they have to own.

The week the governments showed up

The Cursor deal didn’t happen in a vacuum. In the same week it was signed, two governments reached into the stack and reminded everyone who else gets a vote.

On June 11, Meta started tearing its Manus deal apart. Beijing had ordered it unwound on national-security and tech-transfer grounds, and Meta began cutting Manus off from its systems (Tom’s Hardware). A $2 billion deal for an app, killed by a state that didn’t want the talent and data leaving the country.

A day later, on June 12, Washington did its own version. It ordered Anthropic to disable its two most powerful models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for every foreign national, citing a jailbreak. Anthropic switched both off worldwide to comply, then said it disagreed, warning that recalling a model “deployed to hundreds of millions of people” over a narrow flaw would “essentially halt all new model deployments” (TIME, Anthropic).

Sit with that. A model you rent can be recalled by someone else’s government overnight, with your product still wired to it. An app reselling it goes dark on an order it had no part in. Own your model, and especially open weights you can hold, and there’s no switch for a regulator to flip. The recall is the most expensive argument yet for Cursor’s strategy.

The squeeze

Now look at the labs in the middle. They’re pressed from both sides. From below, open weights out of China keep commoditizing the base model, so the floor under “good enough” rises and the price falls. From above, the applications own the customer and the data and are climbing down into the model layer themselves. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google still make the strongest models in the world. They’re learning that making the strongest model is no longer the same as owning the most valuable position. And now a third party is in the room: the state.

This is the part I’d underline for anyone building, anywhere. The durable assets are the application, the proprietary data loop it runs, and weights you actually possess. The model is becoming an input you rent, the rent is falling, and the rental can be cancelled by people who aren’t even in the deal.

The honest counter

I don’t want to oversell this. The best closed frontier model still wins the hardest tasks, which is why Cursor still ships that dropdown and why I still reach for the strongest model on the problems that actually scare me. The labs keep real pricing power on the frontier even as the floor commoditizes, and they can move up-stack too: Anthropic’s own coding tool already undercuts what Cursor can charge, the same game in reverse. The squeeze is a direction, not a verdict.

What I’m watching

1. The new owner’s model. Cursor now belongs to SpaceX, whose sibling xAI makes Grok. Watch whether Cursor’s default quietly tilts toward Grok and away from the labs it used to resell. The neutral aggregator just got an owner with a model to sell.

2. Default share. Whether Composer, or its xAI successor, becomes the model most Cursor sessions actually use. If the share that never touches an outside lab crosses half, the toll route is broken for good.

3. Labs reclaiming the user. Whether OpenAI and Anthropic push their own coding surfaces to own the developer directly. Anthropic’s already costs less than Cursor can match; watch whether that becomes the strategy, not a side project.

4. Governments as dealmakers. Whether more cross-border app deals get unwound the way Beijing killed Meta-Manus, and whether model recalls like Anthropic’s become routine. If they do, weights you can hold beat an API a regulator can switch off.

The dropdown that lets me run any model was the whole strategy in miniature. Cursor turned the frontier labs into interchangeable suppliers, used cheap open weights to become one of them, and just sold the result for $60 billion. The model is the input now. The application is the business. And in a single week in June, a $60 billion deal and two governments all moved on the same stack.

Today June 16, Ripple did the opposite. It bought its way in again. It took a strategic stake in Flutterwave’s Series E, valuing the company at about $3.3 billion (Bloomberg), and named RLUSD, its dollar stablecoin, a settlement asset across Flutterwave’s stack, including the remittance corridors in its Send app (Ripple).

Two weeks ago I wrote that Ripple has stopped building rails and started buying distribution. The line I kept circling was that an issuer doesn’t get to choose where its dollar lives. The integrations choose, and you go to where the money already moves. I was writing about institutions then, the $150 million Ripple put into LMAX and the custody deals. Here’s the same play in a market I actually know.

And this is not Ripple’s first move in Africa. It listed RLUSD on VALR and Yellow Card and wired it into Chipper Cash back in September, put institutional custody into Absa Bank in October, and opened a Middle East and Africa headquarters this spring. Flutterwave is the escalation. The earlier deals got Ripple’s dollar onto African on-ramps and off-ramps. This one buys a piece of the biggest rail those ramps plug into.

Yesterday, I argued that African live commerce runs every night on borrowed rails, and nobody owns the checkout. This is the same map one level down. Flutterwave owns a lot of the merchant rails that everything else settles on, and Ripple just bought a seat there.

What Ripple actually bought

Flutterwave moves money by card, by bank transfer, and by mobile money across 34 markets, and it ran roughly $31 billion through that network in 2024 (TechEconomy). The $31 billion is the headline number. The asset is underneath it.

African payments are fragmented by design. Every country has its own dominant rail, its own central bank, its own rules about who may hold customer money and how it’s allowed to leave. Moving a dollar from a phone in Lagos to a bank account in Nairobi means holding a license, a working integration, and a settlement relationship on both ends. Flutterwave spent the better part of a decade assembling exactly that, one regulator at a time.

That’s the asset. Not the brand, not the volume. It’s the licenses and the plumbing that let you be present in places that are genuinely hard to be present in, and it’s the one thing in this market you can’t buy twice. Ripple just bought it once.

Put RLUSD in the middle of those rails and you replace something specific. A payment from Lagos to Nairobi today routes through a correspondent bank, usually an account in New York or London, because the two local banks hold no direct relationship and the global banks that used to broker it have spent a decade retreating from Africa’s smaller corridors. So it takes days and sheds a fee at every hop. A settlement stablecoin collapses that detour to minutes, and Flutterwave’s own cash-in and cash-out network handles the local legs.

Why am Watching

Here’s the part the coverage treats as a footnote and an operator treats as the whole story: the technology is the easy twenty percent.

I spent years on the building side of this, launching markets across Africa and building one of the continent’s first fiat-to-crypto gateways, so I’ll say it with some authority. Wiring RLUSD into an exchange like VALR is a contract you sign once. Wiring it into a Nairobi street is a thousand small agreements you never stop making. It’s cash-out density, because a settlement dollar is worthless to a trader in Aba until she can turn it back into naira at the kiosk on her corner without thinking about it. It’s regulatory relationships earned one country at a time, because the central bank in Accra does not care what worked in Abuja. It’s liquidity seeded by hand, because the first thousand cross-border transactions in a new market are never organic. Somebody funds both sides until they are.

That’s the work that buried the companies who tried to build their own road here. Jumia has lost billions chasing it. Copia raised a fortune, built its own logistics, and went into administration. Ripple was smart enough to buy the network instead of building it, and patient enough to spend a year getting its dollar onto African ramps first. It still hasn’t skipped the ground game. Nobody does. Buying the busiest road in African payments was the right call. Now Ripple has to walk it.

Watch one number to know if the walk has started: whether RLUSD shows up as labeled on-chain settlement in Flutterwave’s corridors within two quarters. That volume isn’t public yet, so I’m flagging it as a gap, not guessing at it. If a year goes by and the RLUSD I can measure is still mostly trading against USDC on Ethereum, the deal outran the execution.

I write about money and technology from the emerging-market edge. Over the last decade I’ve built market entry and payments across Africa: launching markets for a global mobility company, building one of the continent’s first fiat-to-crypto gateways, and leading ecosystem and distribution growth for a major Layer 2. I hold no position in XRP, RLUSD, or Flutterwave, and I’m not affiliated with Ripple. Deal terms are from Ripple’s and Flutterwave’s June 16 announcements and the reporting linked above; the September 2025 and October 2025 Africa deals are from Ripple’s own press releases. RLUSD settlement volume inside Flutterwave’s corridors isn’t yet public and is flagged here as a gap, not estimated. One operator reading a deal in his own backyard, not investment advice.

Same hour, Lagos. A menswear seller streams to about two hundred viewers, takes bids in the comments, and when a price is agreed the buyer transfers to the bank account on screen and follows up with a DM to confirm (TechCabal). One vendor told a reporter she made 500,000 naira in three nights.

This is live commerce, and it is already one of the largest things happening in African retail. It just runs on borrowed rails, TikTok Live and Instagram and WhatsApp, none of which were built to sell anything. What is missing is the part that turns a livestream into a business: a trusted checkout. Escrow. Buyer protection. Seller payouts. A way to pay a stranger two cities over and know your money is safe. Nobody owns that layer. And the company best placed to own it, TikTok Shop, has not launched anywhere on the continent. Not Nigeria, not Kenya, not even South Africa, its most ecommerce-ready market, where TikTok’s own help pages say the shop is “not publicly available” (TikTok). The land is empty.

The wedge is trust

Every one of those sales is a prepayment leap of faith. You pay first, then you hope.

The market knows it. In Kenya, roughly one in five products sold is counterfeit (Techweez), and fake shops regularly flood TikTok cloning real retailers. In Nigeria, an EFCC analysis found fake social-media businesses are a leading fraud category, with Instagram vendors out front (Business Elites Africa). In South Africa, 77% of adults were hit by a scam in the year to early 2025, and courier and delivery fraud is the single most common type (Dark Reading). In Ghana the cyber authority logged losses that nearly doubled year on year, with WhatsApp and Instagram near the top of the list (JBKlutse).

The tell is the incumbents themselves. Jiji, the largest classifieds platform on the continent, tells buyers not to pay in advance and to meet sellers in person to inspect goods (TechCabal). Its safety page is an admission: there is no trusted layer, so good luck. Escrowed checkout with buyer protection is the product here, not a bolt-on feature.

The hard question, asked first: does it actually work?

A serious operator’s first objection should be India, where almost every standalone live-commerce startup died. YouTube shut Simsim two years after acquiring it; Bulbul wound down. The failure mode was the same each time: tiny baskets plus expensive fulfillment, which is negative unit economics on every order. Africa carries that low-basket risk too. So three things have to be true, and I have watched all three up close over a decade of doing market entry here.

Payments are nearly free where the buyers already are. M-Pesa’s Buy Goods costs the merchant about 0.5%, and reaches 82% of Kenyan adults (Safaricom FY25). Ghana’s MTN MoMo charges merchants 0.75% up to a cap (MomoCalc). Nigeria’s Paystack is roughly 1.5%, capped per transaction (Paystack). Card acquiring elsewhere runs 2.5% to 3.5%. The payment rail that strangled most Africa pitches is the one problem already solved.

Sellers already batch. A mitumba seller moves twenty to fifty items in a stream, so the basket per delivery is a multiple of the single-item order that killed India’s players. The behavior that makes the economics work is here before anyone builds a thing.

Last-mile is cheap and dense where the buyers cluster. Same-day boda inside Nairobi runs a dollar fifty to four dollars; an intercity bus parcel, collected at the stage, a little more.

Now the honest half, because this is where the boosters go quiet. The African graveyard is real and it teaches exactly one lesson. Copia raised about $123 million and went into administration in 2024, killed by sub-$5 rural baskets and the cost of failed deliveries. Sendy wound down. Sky.Garden nearly collapsed. Jumia has lost on the order of $2.1 billion since founding. Every one of them died the same death: they owned and subsidized fulfillment against thin baskets. The survivors will own the trusted checkout, not the trucks. In this market you are asset-light or you are dead.

One pattern, four textures

The mechanic is identical everywhere, stream and claim and pay and ship. The execution is local, and the differences are the whole game.

Kenya is the cleanest entry. Mobile-money-native, English-speaking, and the live-selling is already proven: 18.4 million Kenyans are on TikTok, 56% of all adults, nearly five times Instagram’s reach (DataReportal). The rails, the language, and the behavior all line up.

Nigeria is the biggest and the messiest, and the rail is different. This is the trap for anyone who learned the continent in Nairobi: Nigeria does not run on a telco wallet. It runs on bank transfers and fintech, Paystack and OPay and the bank apps, which is why the on-screen checkout is “send to this account number.” Addressing is more broken, fraud is at industrial scale, and a local startup, Auqli, is already building the exact missing layer, a naira-native in-stream checkout (Auqli). Whoever enters Nigeria is not first.

Ghana is the clean small cousin. MTN MoMo-led like Kenya, internet penetration around 75%, but one-seventh Nigeria’s size, and the live-selling behavior is thinner in the public record than Kenya’s or Nigeria’s. Strong rails, smaller prize, less proof on the ground.

South Africa is the outlier, and it matters most for timing. It runs on cards and instant bank transfer, not mobile money; PayShap was clearing tens of millions of transactions a month by late 2025 (TechCabal). And alone on the continent, it has real street addresses and dense pickup-and-locker networks. It is the closest thing to a developed market, with an African-scale fraud problem on top. It is also the market everyone assumes TikTok Shop already runs in. It does not.

Egypt is a fifth shape entirely, cash-on-delivery, Arabic, MENA-facing, with the Gulf next door already on TikTok Shop, which tells you the platform is circling the region.

The diaspora is the part that makes it continental

The Nairobi seller I opened with already has buyers in London and New York. A real one, Esther Kwamboka, put it plainly to a reporter: “I have clients in Nairobi, Kisii, Nanyuki, Nyeri, even the US and UK. I’ve shipped through DHL.” Africans abroad are the biggest buyers of clothes leaving the continent (Quartz Africa), and the US-to-Nigeria remittance corridor alone is roughly $21 billion a year (World Bank). The cross-border demand is real and it is happening today, over DHL and WhatsApp groups and someone flying home next month. The trusted layer for it does not exist. That is the same gap, one degree harder.

The clock, and who is positioned

TikTok Shop is the obvious eventual winner, and that is precisely why the window is finite. Globally it roughly doubled, from around $33 billion to $64 billion in GMV in a single year (Momentum Works), and did about $45 billion in Southeast Asia alone. When Indonesia banned social-commerce in 2023, TikTok simply bought 75% of Tokopedia for about $1.5 billion and kept going. It will come to Africa. The only question is when, and what is already built when it does.

Whatnot is the better fit for how this market actually behaves. The US live-shopping platform did more than $8 billion in GMV in 2025 and is valued at $11.5 billion (cllct), and its model is live video plus trusted checkout plus buyer protection plus automatic payouts, run market by market with a local general manager and no trucks of its own. That asset-light shape is the one the graveyard rewards. It has committed nothing to Africa. Jumia has the assets and the presence, and also the $2.1 billion of losses and the fulfillment-heavy DNA that this market punishes. The opening is for whoever supplies trust and checkout without owning the fulfillment, and does it before TikTok’s blockers clear.

What the prize actually is

Let me be precise about the size, because the boosters will not be. Kenya’s entire formal ecommerce market is about $2.3 billion, a rounding error against any global platform’s numbers. This is not a near-term revenue needle-mover, and anyone who hands you an informal live-commerce GMV figure is making it up, because nobody has measured it. That absence is the entire point. The prize is formalizing a visibly enormous, completely uncounted informal economy and owning the beachhead for a continent that is young, mobile-first, and already live-selling every single night, not capturing the small formal market that exists today.

The window is real. It is not infinite. Somebody is going to own the checkout. Right now, nobody does.

That bothered me because I should have seen it earlier. I write about African stablecoins. I know the Nigeria story. I know the South Africa story. But my own coverage had followed the louder network, not the larger float.

So I re-ran the queries this week.

The data gave me the old exchange-operator split in a new wrapper: South Africa has the money. Nigeria has the people. But the deeper story is that neither side has the full market yet.

The gap is real

As of June 12, every ZAR stablecoin combined holds about $6.08 million across 6 chains. Every NGN stablecoin holds about $1.90 million (my Dune query, re-run June 12). South Africa’s rand float is 3.2 times Nigeria’s naira float.

Most of that rand supply is ZARP, around $4.5 million by itself (CoinGecko), which makes it roughly two and a half times cNGN alone. And here’s the uncomfortable part: I know Simon Dingle. I know ZARP, live since 2019, reserves managed by Old Mutual Wealth (ZARP, BitKE), with real volume on Base, the chain I spent my Coinbase years growing. The miss is mine. cNGN has the consortium, the SEC story, the press cycle, my friends at Convexity in my feed and my DMs, so cNGN is what I wrote about. ZARP spent those same years shipping instead of campaigning, and it out-floated the token everyone I know talks about. Proximity is an algorithm too. Mine had me covering the smaller float.

Coverage in this category tracks the narrative and the network, not the supply. That was going to be the whole piece. Then I looked at the deltas.

The gap is closing

The rand float barely moved. The naira float grew 23 percent in under a month, and its holder count grew at the same pace. The weekly supply curve says the same thing in naira terms: ₦2.03 billion on May 19, ₦2.50 billion today, with Base’s share widening to 86 percent.

Run the arithmetic forward and it gets interesting. If both kept their current pace, the naira float would pass the rand float in about six months. That’s a projection of two noisy curves, not a prediction. But the direction is unambiguous: the quiet incumbent is static, the covered newcomer is compounding.

The holder mix tells you why these two floats feel so different. South Africa’s 1,170 holders average about $5,200 each. Nigeria’s 4,481 average about $425. One looks like a handful of treasuries and trading desks holding rand on-chain. The other looks like the front edge of a retail base.

That line is easy to turn into banter because Lagos and Johannesburg have been arguing for a generation: economy, music, football, migration, whose companies make money where. Some weeks the argument is harmless. Some weeks it is not. This is one of the bad weeks; the repatriation flights out of Johannesburg began Thursday. But the stablecoin data is useful precisely because it cuts through the noise. It shows two markets that look opposed in narrative and complementary in structure.

Then the whale data complicates everything

In May I set a test for cNGN, and I wrote it down so I couldn’t wriggle out of it later: wallet count crossing 10,000 with whale share dropping below 85 percent means real adoption; wallet count growing while whale share stays pinned means “the treasury layer is carrying the entire chart by itself.”

I re-ran the holder distribution this week. Wallet count: 3,529 then, about 4,370 now, up 24 percent in under a month, on pace from the 832 of last August. The retail half of the test is passing.

The whale half failed. Whale share didn’t drop toward 85 percent. It went up: 92.3 percent to 93.8 percent, and the whale count went from 16 wallets to 20. Thirteen of them sit on Base holding 81.7 percent of everything.

So the 23 percent monthly growth that’s closing the gap with South Africa is mostly treasury mints at the top, not the 4,100 small wallets at the bottom. Add up everything below the whale tier, the sharks, dolphins, crabs, and shrimps, and retail-sized holders own about 6 percent of cNGN’s float, roughly $112,000. The shrimp wallets I defended in May as real Nigerian retail, ₦5,000 to ₦15,000 each, are still arriving, faster than ever. They just don’t move the supply chart. Twenty wallets do.

Which means the honest version of this piece has three layers, and each one undercuts the last. South Africa’s rand float is bigger, but it’s sitting still. Nigeria’s naira float is compounding, but the compounding is whale-driven. And the retail adoption that would settle the argument, thousands of ordinary wallets holding local-currency stablecoins they actually use, hasn’t happened at scale in either country. Both floats together are under $8 million, in a continent where USDT on Tron moves billions. The local-stablecoin race is still two pilots arguing about pole position.

What I’m watching

Four things, with numbers attached.

First, the crossover. If NGN supply passes ZAR supply by year-end, the regulatory-first model will have beaten the distribution-first one on the only public scoreboard, and I’ll write that piece. If the naira curve flattens once the current mint cycle ends, May’s “treasury cycle” reading wins instead.

Second, whale share against my May line. It’s at 93.8 percent and moving the wrong way. The test stands: below 85 percent with wallets past 10,000 and cNGN’s story is on. The wallet half is on pace for early 2027. The whale half is the one to watch.

Third, whether ZARP wakes up. A new rand stablecoin, ZARU, launched in February with heavyweight backing, marketing itself as South Africa’s first despite ZARP’s seven-year head start. Nothing moves an incumbent like a funded challenger. If ZARP’s flat curve bends in the next quarter, that’s why.

Fourth, the one that would actually matter: a consumer integration. An Opay or PalmPay putting cNGN inside a 50-million-user app, or a South African bank putting ZARP or ZARU in front of retail. Either event makes every number in this piece look quaint. Neither has happened. The first one to land decides which country’s model gets written about as the one that worked.

I went looking for a winner between two African stablecoin models. The data handed me something more honest: a bigger float that doesn’t grow, a growing float that isn’t retail, and a market where the real competition, dollar stablecoins on cheap rails, is lapping both. And underneath the scoreboard sits the quiet structural fact the noise obscures: each float is shaped like the other’s missing half. Nigeria’s growth needs the balance-sheet depth South Africa already has. South Africa’s still treasuries need the crowd Nigeria already has. The first builder who treats Lagos and Johannesburg as one financial corridor wins the market both countries are failing to build alone. The story and the supply have come apart in this category. I’d rather keep reading the supply.

Disclosure: I don’t hold ZARP, cNGN, or ZARU, and haven’t in the past 12 months. Currency-level supply and holder figures are from my own Dune query (7542599), re-run June 12, 2026, against its May 19 run; cNGN weekly supply and holder tiers are from Dune queries 5950869 and 5953945 by intellisages_hq, re-run June 12. ZARP’s standalone figure is from CoinGecko, June 12. Holder counts are wallet addresses, which can overcount people and include dust. Transfer velocity for both tokens isn’t cleanly public at this size and is flagged as a gap, not estimated. One operator reading his own queries, not investment advice.

RLUSD has about $1.81 billion in circulation. Of that, roughly $1.08 billion sits on Ethereum and $731 million on the XRP Ledger (DefiLlama per-chain data, which matches a direct read of the issuer’s on-ledger balances on the XRPL to the decimal, June 2, 2026). Sixty percent of the stablecoin Ripple issues is on Ethereum, the chain Ripple has positioned against for years. The dollar moved to the neighborhood Ripple doesn’t own.

I don’t read that as a stumble. I read it as the most honest thing in the whole RLUSD story, because of where the rest of the spending is going.

The dollar follows the distribution

A stablecoin lives where its distribution is, and Ripple is buying distribution into institutions, hard. In January it put $150 million into LMAX Group and signed a multi-year deal to make RLUSD a core collateral and settlement asset across LMAX’s institutional venues, spot crypto through perpetual futures and CFDs. LMAX ran $8.2 trillion in institutional volume in 2025. In May, Copper, one of the larger institutional custodians, added RLUSD to its platform and to a yield program for the funds that custody there. And the institutional money, the prime-broker collateral, the DeFi venues, the integrations that LMAX and Copper plug into, all of that lives on Ethereum and its EVM cousins, not on the XRP Ledger.

So the supply split is the receipt of a distribution strategy, not a popularity contest between two chains. Ripple is paying to wire RLUSD into the places institutions already operate, and those places are EVM-native, so the dollar pools where the integrations are. Sixty percent on Ethereum is what it looks like when an issuer chases institutional rails instead of defending its own chain.

That pattern shows up in my own backyard too. Ripple’s custody technology went into Absa Bank in October 2025, one of Africa’s largest banks, Ripple’s first major bank-custody partner on the continent, serving institutional clients across roughly a dozen countries. People will file that under “Africa story,” but it’s the same move as LMAX and Copper, pointed at a different institution: sell the rails the money already runs on. The throughline is a customer, not a region, and the customer is the institution.

What distribution actually takes

I spent the last few years running ecosystem and distribution growth for Base, so this is the part I can say with some authority: an issuer does not get to choose where its token lives. The integrations choose. You can mint on whatever chain you want, but the supply gravitates to wherever the wallets, the venues, and the collateral engines already are, and getting into those is slow, expensive, one-counterparty-at-a-time work that almost nobody outside the function sees.

Ripple had the option most issuers would kill for. It owns a chain. It could have forced RLUSD onto the XRP Ledger, pointed at a big on-ledger number, and called it adoption. It didn’t. It went where the institutions were, which meant Ethereum, and it paid for the privilege, $150 million into a single venue is not a press release, it’s a budget. That’s the unglamorous truth of distribution: you go to the user. The user does not come to you, no matter what chain you built for them.

So what is the XRP Ledger for

The 40 percent on XRPL isn’t dead weight, and the supply number alone won’t tell you what it’s doing. So I pulled the on-chain activity for both chains to see how the dollar actually moves. It moves in opposite ways.

On Ethereum, RLUSD changed hands across about 8,800 transfers in the last seven days, roughly 1,250 a day (Dune, reading the ERC-20 transfer logs). On the trading side it does around $15 million of DEX volume a day, but across just 195 trades, an average of about $78,000 each (DexScreener, June 2). That’s institutional-size: a handful of large blocks, RLUSD against USDC on Uniswap and Curve. The XRP Ledger does a comparable $8.5 to $9.6 million of DEX volume, but across thousands of small trades. DexScreener counts 10,760 of them at about $790 each; On The DEX, the XRPL-native tracker, counts more still, over 25,000 trades across eighteen pairs at roughly $380, traded against a basket that includes XRP, Brazilian real, yuan, and USDC (On The DEX). Same dollar, two different motions: big and rare on Ethereum, small and constant on XRPL.

That answers the velocity question I walked in with, and not the way I expected. Normalize each chain’s trading to the supply sitting on it and the two come out close, Ethereum turning over about 1.4 percent of its balance a day and XRPL roughly 1.2 to 1.3 percent. The comfortable story, that XRPL is the fast settlement rail doing the real work while Ethereum just parks the balance, isn’t what the numbers say. Per dollar of supply the two chains move at nearly the same speed. Where they split is ticket size, and ticket size is the tell. The large institutional blocks, the collateral and custody balances that LMAX and Copper plug into, settle on Ethereum, where the average RLUSD trade is a five-figure sum. The high-frequency, small-denomination work, thousands of sub-$400 trades a day against a basket of currencies, runs on XRPL, the payments-and-FX profile the ledger was built for. One chain is the vault. The other is the cash register.

One honest limit on that read. What I measured is DEX trading, the order books on each chain. Pure peer-to-peer payment settlement on XRPL, wallet to wallet and outside the DEX, isn’t queryable without running a full ledger node, and when I read the issuer’s own transaction history it came back almost entirely market-making orders, not payments. So XRPL’s true settlement number sits somewhere above what I can see here. But the burden of proof was on the idea that the XRP Ledger moves the dollar faster, and the visible data leans the other way. What the ledger clearly is, for its own home dollar, is busier and smaller.

What I’m watching

Three things from here.

First, the direction of the migration. In December 2025 Ripple announced RLUSD’s move to four Ethereum layer-2s, Optimism, Base, Ink, and Unichain, issued natively across them through Wormhole’s transfer standard. It hasn’t shipped on-chain yet, the rollout is still in testing and waiting on NYDFS sign-off, which is why the live supply is still only Ethereum and the XRP Ledger. But all four are EVM rollups that settle back to Ethereum, so when they go live they add to the Ethereum side of this split, not the XRPL side. The announced direction is more EVM, not a turn back to the home chain.

Second, ticket size over time. Today Ethereum is where the large blocks settle and XRPL is where the small, frequent trades run, the vault and the cash register. If RLUSD is going to be a payments dollar and not just an institutional one, the bigger tickets should start showing up on the XRP Ledger too, not only on Ethereum. I’ll be watching whether the average XRPL trade creeps up, or whether the two chains stay split the way they are now.

Third, and this is the strategic one, what the XRP Ledger is becoming to Ripple’s own dollar. The busy retail and currency-trading layer, thousands of small tickets a day, while the institutional weight settles on Ethereum? For a company whose entire identity is its ledger, that’s not a small question. The dollar already voted with its feet. The question is whether Ripple admits where it walked.

Disclosure: I previously led Africa and Ecosystem Growth for Base at Coinbase. I hold no position in RLUSD, XRP, or Ripple as of writing. Supply figures are direct reads from DefiLlama‘s per-chain data and the RLUSD issuer’s on-ledger balances on the XRP Ledger. Activity figures are mine: a Dune query on Ethereum transfer logs, and DexScreener plus On The DEX for per-chain DEX volume and trade counts. All as of June 2, 2026; deal terms are from the reporting linked above. Pure peer-to-peer payment settlement on the XRP Ledger outside the DEX isn’t cleanly queryable without running a full ledger node, and is flagged as such in the piece, not estimated. One operator reading the on-chain data, not investment advice.

Nathan Allman, founder and CEO of Ondo Finance, died unexpectedly on May 26, 2026. He was 32. Four years after founding the company, he left behind a tokenization platform holding about three and a half billion dollars in US Treasuries, dollar-yield products, and stocks.

He also left behind something stranger and more interesting: a brokerage explicitly built for people who aren’t in the United States.

Why Ondo existed

Call her Wanjiru. She’s 24, lives in Kileleshwa, works as a product manager at a fintech in Westlands. She’s a composite. Every number in her situation is real. She has about $4,200 saved across a shilling money market fund, a small dollar balance at KCB or Equity, and a chama she can’t easily withdraw from. She wants to own a piece of something that grows. The AAPL she sees in headlines. Maybe NVDA. Maybe just the S&P 500.

In Nairobi, that ambition runs into a wall.

Every path to US stocks costs and waits. The local platforms either give her a basket she didn’t pick or a wallet model with deposit, FX, and redemption friction at each step. The Nigerian-anchored apps expect a BVN she doesn’t have. The international brokers want an international wire, a W-8BEN, and a level of capital-leaves-the-country attention her bank would rather not surface. Every layer takes a cut. Every layer takes a week.

So she does what most of her cohort does. She puts the $4,200 down on a deposit for a quarter-acre in Kitengela, two hours from town. She’ll pay 12,000 shillings a month for the next seven years. The plot is empty. Goats sometimes wander across it. She visits on weekends. She tells her mother, “this is my investment.”

Land doesn’t fractionalize. Land doesn’t pay yield. Land sits.

Most founders in US fintech and crypto would never see Wanjiru. Their addressable market starts in Manhattan and ends in San Francisco. The American consumer is the easiest in the world to underwrite, the compliance frame is mature, the rails work, the dollar is already the local currency. You can charge a 30 basis point margin on a treasury fund and have venture capital arguing for your seat at the table.

Allman went the other way. Ondo Global Markets is explicitly not available to US users. His treasury fund OUSG is gated to qualified institutional clients, but his retail-facing USDY and his tokenized stocks product target investors in Asia-Pacific, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. The product is built outward.

He built Wanjiru something that bypasses the wall entirely. A wallet she already has. A token she can hold. AAPL the way she holds USDT. No BVN. No wire. No W-8BEN. No deposit-FX-redemption cycle. Her phone, a token, and a price that updates with the underlying.

Local players are still in the fight, Ndovu and MyStocks in Kenya, Bamboo and Risevest in Nigeria, EasyEquities in South Africa, each solving a piece of the problem inside the legacy stack. Allman’s bet was different. You don’t fix the stack. You go around it. A token on a public blockchain, backed by US-custodied stock, isn’t subject to the same friction. The compliance lives in the issuance contract, not in every transaction.

Whether Wanjiru ever opens that wallet is a separate question. The thing Allman built points at the problem nobody else in his seat was even looking at.

What the data shows

Three numbers carry most of the story.

USDY launched in September 2023 on Ethereum and December 2023 on Solana. On-chain, the supply curve looks like the chart above. Ethereum carries the bulk, Solana adds a steady $160 million. Other chains (Mantle, Sui, Aptos, Sei, Noble) bring the total to roughly $1.5 billion by May 2026. The growth wasn’t linear. There’s a wave in mid-2024 to about $250 million, a plateau, then a step-up to $600 million in mid-2025, a dip in early 2026, and a surge to over a billion in the weeks before Allman’s death.

OUSG is the institutional product, now around $693 million in TVL. The on-chain Ethereum-only figure is lower because Ondo migrated significant flow into rOUSG (the rebasing wrapper) and into USDtb, the regulated stablecoin issued through Anchorage Digital under the GENIUS Act. Institutional money is more rotational than retail money. The consolidated treasury exposure is still in the platform, just under different wrappers.

Ondo Global Markets is the newest and the fastest. It launched in September 2025 with around $350 million in TVL within the first months. It crossed $1 billion in TVL by mid-May 2026, eight months from zero. By the time Allman died, the platform was running tokenized versions of NVDA, AAPL, META, TSLA, CRCL, SPY, QQQ, TLT, TIP, AGG and roughly 190 other tickers, available on Solana, Ethereum, and BNB Chain, where the rollout exposed the product to roughly 3.4 million daily active users.

Inside the roughly $19 to $21 billion total RWA market, Ondo’s three and a half billion is meaningful. Inside the tokenized equity sub-category, 70 percent of the supply runs through Ondo’s contracts. One protocol, one founder, one team. The tokenized stock market has a winner-take-most shape that the dollar stablecoin market also has, and the seat Ondo occupies in equities now is structurally close to the seat Tether occupies in dollars: not the only player, but the one everyone else benchmarks against.

The BNB Chain rollout is the part of this story that most US-coded analysts are missing. BNB Chain has the highest daily active user count of any chain that isn’t Solana or Tron, and a meaningful share of that activity is in markets where Coinbase, Robinhood, and Schwab don’t operate. When Ondo Global Markets shipped on BNB Chain, it exposed 200 tokenized US stocks to roughly 3.4 million wallets that were never going to download Schwab. That’s the access bet operationalized.

What he was building toward

The longer arc was bigger than the three products. Allman was building toward tokenized everything: stocks, ETFs, bonds, commodities, with Ondo Chain as the settlement layer underneath. The bet, in his own words, was that institutional-grade financial products belong on public blockchains and that compliance is the moat, not the constraint. Public reporting from earlier this year described the strategic positioning around “global financial access” as a deliberate evolution from the original treasury-tokenization thesis.

The work isn’t done. He had open partnerships with BlackRock‘s BUIDL framework, with Securitize, with custodian partners across Asia. He had Ondo Chain in development. He had a roadmap that named tokenized real estate, tokenized commodities, and tokenized money market funds. He was building a tokenization stack the way Stripe built a payments stack, with the products plugging into one settlement spine.

The platform now has the products it needs to outlast the founder. That’s not a small thing. Most early-stage crypto companies are person-shaped: the founder is the product, the network, and the conviction. Ondo crossed into product-shaped sometime in 2024. The on-chain numbers can keep growing under Ian De Bode even if the conviction takes longer to rebuild.

What happens next

De Bode was Ondo’s longtime president. He oversaw strategy, product, and daily operations. The succession is clean by crypto standards: no founder dispute, no token whiplash, no exit by the senior team. The Ondo press release confirming Allman’s death also confirmed his appointment, with the backing of the leadership team.

The open question is institutional retention. OUSG holds BlackRock-adjacent capital that’s there because of a specific compliance and credit story Allman told. USDY holds regulated counterparties who underwrote Ondo’s controls. Both flows will be tested in the next four quarters by counterparties asking, quietly, whether the founder-shaped trust extends to the new leadership. The early read should be yes given De Bode’s tenure and the depth of the team. But it’s a real test.

The Kenyan retail user on Global Markets won’t notice any of this. The mint and redeem rails keep working. The 200 tickers stay live. The product, for the people Allman built it for, doesn’t change.

A short close

I followed Allman’s work because he was solving a problem most people in his seat didn’t even see. The Treasury tokenization story everyone talks about at conferences was the easy part. The Kenyan twenty-something who buys her first AAPL through a wallet in 2027, instead of putting that money into a half-acre outside Nairobi, is the part nobody else was building for. She won’t know his name. He’d probably prefer it that way.

Disclosure: I don’t hold ONDO, USDY, or OUSG, and I haven’t held them in the past 12 months. All on-chain data is from Dune Analytics, queries 7581475 (USDY Ethereum) and 7581439 (USDY Solana). Aggregate TVL figures are from public Ondo and press-release sources cited above. This is one person reading public data and an obituary on a Tuesday morning.

When Dune launched its Stablecoins collection with Steakhouse Financial in February, the headline feature was attribution: every transfer classified by intent, every address bucketed by use case (CEX, bridge, lending, yield, treasury, whale, and so on). The genuinely interesting story, though, is buried in the metadata. The unified stablecoins_multichain.tokens table is a directory of every stablecoin Dune now indexes, with the ISO currency code each one pegs to. I queried it expecting the long tail to be sparse. It’s worse than I thought.

How big the non-USD universe actually is

The Dune dataset covers 26 ISO currency codes. The breakdown:

• USD: 152 distinct tokens. USDT alone is around $190 billion in circulation, USDC about $79 billion. The biggest of the dollar stables is roughly 120 times larger than every non-USD stablecoin combined.

• EUR: 18 tokens (EURC, EURS, EURT, EURA, EURI, EURAU, EUROe and a dozen more). $1.35 billion in supply, 1.07 million holders. The only non-USD ecosystem that looks remotely like a real ecosystem.

• BRL, ZAR, MXN, CAD, COP, IDR: 3 to 6 tokens each.

• GBP, JPY, AUD, NGN, CLP, RUB, CHF: 2 tokens each.

• CNY, ARS, SGD, TRY, GHS, KES, PHP, INR, KZT, XOF, PEN: one token each. Most are running on a single chain.

Total non-USD stablecoin supply, all 24 currencies that currently have any outstanding balance: $2.96 billion. According to DefiLlama, the global stablecoin market sits around $300 billion in May 2026. Non-USD is therefore about 1 percent of the universe.

The full scoreboard:

The two surprises at the top

Read the top of the table again. EUR and RUB are within $58 million of each other on outstanding supply: $1.35 billion versus $1.29 billion.

EUR makes sense. It’s a $300 billion regulated stablecoin opportunity in waiting, the MiCA framework is now live across the EU, Circle‘s EURC has serious institutional pickup, and an 18-token issuer landscape means real competition. A million-plus holders distributed across 11 chains looks like infrastructure forming.

RUB doesn’t make sense in the same way. There are two RUB stablecoins in the dataset (A7A5 and wA7A5), 38,000 wallets hold them, and they’re on exactly two chains. One currency, two tokens, almost all of it sitting in a handful of treasuries. The supply matches EUR’s. A7A5 is widely understood to be Russia-aligned settlement infrastructure built to route around sanctions, and the data tells that story cleanly. Big balance, very few holders, very few tokens, very few chains. That’s not a retail ecosystem. That’s a wholesale rail.

Two stablecoins, near-identical supply, near-opposite distribution. Same row of the same table.

The Mento footprint

Look at the symbol list for the smaller currencies. NGN has cNGN and NGNm. Ghana has GHSm. Kenya has KESm. The West African CFA franc has XOFm. Colombia has COPm. Brazil has BRLm alongside the local Brazilian-issued BRLA, BRL1, BBRL, BRZ, and wBRL. Philippines has PHPm. The “m” suffix is Mento Labs, the on-chain stablecoin protocol that originated as the stablecoin layer for the Celo blockchain.

One issuer carries most of the emerging-market long tail. Some implications:

For the African countries where Mento is the only option (GHS, KES, XOF), the “local stablecoin” market is essentially one Mento contract, one chain, a few thousand wallets. That’s not a country-level rail. It’s a pilot, and pilots can disappear with one regulatory call.

For Nigeria, which has both cNGN (Convexity-led consortium) and NGNm (Mento), the two products together still total around $1.5 million in supply distributed across roughly 3,700 wallets. I wrote about cNGN’s growth at length last week, and it’s the live case study in what early traction looks like for a regulated local stablecoin. The Dune data slots it into context here as the 17th largest non-USD stablecoin globally. Bigger than KES, smaller than ARS. That’s the actual scale.

For Brazil and Mexico, where there’s competing local issuance (BRLA, BRL1, BBRL, BRZ for BRL; MXNB, MXNe, MXNt for MXN), the local issuers are growing faster than Mento and starting to capture real holder counts. BRL has 81,000 holders and $120 million in supply. That’s a real economy.

Where this leaves the cNGN argument

If you’re trying to build a regulated naira (or cedi, or shilling, or peso) stablecoin, the data has uncomfortable news. The category as a whole is a rounding error. Every entrant currently below $5 million in supply is, by global stablecoin standards, statistically zero. There are no scale advantages, no liquidity flywheel, no incumbents to displace because the incumbents themselves are also at pilot scale.

This actually makes the cNGN bet more interesting, not less. The greenfield argument writes itself: a regulator-blessed, multi-chain, Africa-focused stablecoin is the bet that any of these emerging-market local rails could be the one that breaks out. The aggregate market is small, the median project is one Mento contract on Celo, and the player who gets distribution into local fintech (Opay, PalmPay, Kuda in Nigeria; Pix-integrated wallets in Brazil) gets a shot at being the de facto naira-on-chain.

The competing argument is uglier. Maybe the reason non-USD stablecoins are 1 percent of the market isn’t a distribution problem. Maybe it’s structural. Most people who want to escape a weak local currency already have the option of holding USDT or USDC, which is exactly what the data on Tron and Base shows happening across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. A regulated NGN stablecoin solves the regulatory clarity problem, but it doesn’t solve the “your currency is losing 30 percent per year against the dollar” problem. The dollar stables solve that one by existing.

I don’t think it’s actually structural. The Brazilian numbers (real holder distribution, multiple competing issuers) suggest that when local fintech genuinely integrates and the local payment rails are good, a local stablecoin can find users. But the structural-doubt argument needs an answer, and the data right now isn’t refuting it.

What I’m paying attention to

Three things I’ll be watching over the next six months.

The first is the EUR ceiling. EUR is the only non-USD stablecoin category with real ecosystem behavior: $1.35 billion in supply, more than a million holders, 18 competing issuers, MiCA-cleared distribution into European fintech. If EUR stablecoin supply doesn’t cross $5 billion by Q4 2026, the “regulated non-USD stablecoins are a real product category” thesis has a hole in it that’s not actually about Africa or Brazil.

The second is the RUB number. If RUB stablecoin supply keeps growing while holder count stays near 38,000, that’s wholesale settlement scaling under sanctions. If it stops growing or contracts, sanctions are biting. Either way, A7A5 is one of the more honest reads available on cross-border value movement in Russia, and Dune now publishes it.

The third is whether any single emerging-market local stablecoin crosses $10 million in supply with at least 50,000 holders. Today none does. cNGN, MXN, and IDR are all under that threshold on at least one of the two axes. BRL is the only emerging-market local stablecoin that has crossed both, which is why the Brazil story matters. That’s the bar that distinguishes “this is a pilot” from “this is a product.” The first one to cross it sets the playbook for everyone behind them.

The dollar’s 99 percent isn’t going anywhere in 2026. The interesting question is whether the 1 percent stays a rounding error or starts to fragment into a real multi-currency map.

Disclosure: I hold small positions in some of the stablecoins discussed above, none at material size. All data is from Dune Analytics's stablecoin dataset queries, linked above. Market totals are cross-referenced against DefiLlama. This is one person reading a Dune query, not investment advice.

That was the line that made me stop and pull the chain-by-chain breakdown. Circle just shipped its biggest year on the product side, with USDC supply going from $60.8 billion to $79.4 billion and unique holders nearly doubling. The chart should be a clean victory lap, and from a global view it is. But the moment you split it by chain, the question gets interesting fast. Where did the new $18.6 billion actually land, and why did almost none of it land where Africans transact?

What USDC actually did this year

Headline numbers, all from the same Dune snapshot. USDC outstanding supply: $60.8 billion to $79.4 billion, up 31 percent. Unique on-chain holders: 25.4 million to 46.7 million, up 84 percent. So the holder curve grew almost three times faster than the dollar curve, which means each new wallet on average holds less USDC than the average wallet a year ago. That’s exactly the shape of a consumer crypto adoption curve. People joining the network, not whales accumulating.

A note on the market reaction. CRCL closed at $114.21 on May 22, 2026, against a 52-week high of $298.99 and a $31 IPO price. That’s a 62 percent drawdown from the peak against a product that grew 31 percent in the same window. The divergence sounds stunning until you read Circle’s S-1.

Per the filing, Coinbase receives 100 percent of the interest income from USDC held directly on its platform, and 50 percent of the residual reserve income from USDC held off-platform. In 2024 Circle generated about $1.7 billion in revenue and paid roughly $908 million of it to Coinbase as distribution costs. Net income for the year was $156 million. So a meaningful share of every dollar of "USDC supply growth" you see on the chart accrues to Coinbase, not to Circle. The other half of the bear case is the Fed, which cut aggressively through 2024 and 2025 and now sits at 3.5 to 3.75 percent, compressing the absolute reserve pool that the revenue share divides up. The supply growth is real. The Circle-side economics of that growth are much smaller than the headline suggests.

What the data is telling me

Ethereum is still the anchor, and added the most supply in absolute terms. $39.5 billion to $52.8 billion, an extra $13.2 billion. Two-thirds of all USDC supply lives on Ethereum mainnet. The “USDC is migrating to L2s” narrative people keep repeating isn’t actually in this data. USDC isn’t migrating. It’s growing everywhere, and Ethereum is growing fastest in dollar terms.

Arbitrum was the fastest-growing big chain at 42 percent. Polygon grew 65 percent. BNB Chain grew 43 percent. HyperEVM, Hyperliquid’s chain, came from a zero balance one year ago to $2.37 billion across only 43,000 wallets. An average of $55,000 per holder. That’s institutional perpetuals-desk margin parked in USDC.

The interesting break is Base. Supply grew only 14 percent there, $3.7 billion to $4.2 billion. But the holder count went from 2.8 million to 9.4 million, a 238 percent jump. Base now has more USDC wallets than Ethereum mainnet despite holding twelve times less in dollars. The average Base wallet holds about $447 in USDC. That’s a real consumer product, mostly running through Coinbase Wallet and the Base ecosystem apps. It’s the most interesting consumer USDC growth in the entire dataset, and it happened almost entirely on the chain Coinbase controls end-to-end. The mechanic stacks. The 50 percent reserve-income share Coinbase gets from Circle is a global pool, applied to all USDC supply wherever it sits, including Base. The Base sequencer revenue, about $19 million gross in Q4 2025 per Coinbase’s shareholder letter, is Base-only. So USDC growth on Solana benefits Coinbase through the reserve share alone. USDC growth on Base benefits Coinbase through the reserve share AND the sequencer fee on every transfer. Circle benefits too. It benefits less.

Then the losers, all of them double-digit. Avalanche down 39 percent. Sonic down 76 percent. Unichain down 74 percent. ZKsync down 78 percent. USDC isn’t just growing. It’s consolidating onto the chains that actually have users.

Where it’s hitting friction

Look down the list of chains where USDC grew. None of them are positioned for African retail. The closest the dataset gets is Celo, the EVM chain originally designed around mobile-first African payments and the home of most local-currency stablecoins from Mento (NGNm, GHSm, KESm, XOFm, ZARm, COPm, BRLm).

USDC on Celo ended the year at $19.9 million, down from $24.2 million. The headline 17.6 percent decline is the least interesting part of the chart. Between September 2025 and January 2026, supply on Celo nearly doubled to a peak of $40.9 million. That peak was mostly one wallet. On January 16, a single unlabeled address, 0xbc7c...3fec, held $26 million of USDC on Celo. The next day, that wallet pulled $23 million in a single move. About $22 million left the Celo chain entirely, bridged or burned off-network. Whoever this is, they kept $3 million on Celo at the time and have since trimmed to $1.88 million.

That isn’t a chain-choice story. It’s a distribution story. Africans hold and move USDC the same way they hold and move USDT, which is through centralized exchanges and peer-to-peer over Tron and Ethereum, off-ramped to bank accounts through fintech apps like Bitnob, Yellow Card, Busha, Quidax, and increasingly the consumer wallets Opay, PalmPay, and Kuda that don’t yet natively support USDC at all. Circle isn’t shipping a product designed for that workflow. USDT got there first and locked in distribution.

I covered the wider local-stablecoin picture in the non-USD scoreboard piece last week. Every EUR, GBP, NGN, ZAR, KES, GHS, BRL stablecoin combined totals about $2.96 billion. That’s 3.7 percent of USDC alone. The local-currency strategy isn’t winning, and dollar stablecoins are filling the vacuum. In Africa, that vacuum has been filled almost entirely by USDT on Tron.

This isn’t a regulatory gap either. Nigeria has the SEC ARIP framework running through 2026, South Africa has FSCA crypto licensing, Kenya is iterating its VASP regime, the EU’s MiCA makes EURC the cleanest regulated EUR stablecoin on the continent. The product gap is distribution into local fintech, not policy.

The growth lever

If you’re an operator at Circle reading on-chain data, there are three asymmetric moves that the year-on-year chart is begging for.

The first is fixing Celo or picking its successor. Celo is the only Africa-aligned chain in the entire dataset and USDC there lost 18 percent in a 31-percent-growth year. Either re-engage with Mento and the Opera MiniPay team to make USDC the default dollar on Celo, or be honest that Celo lost the chain race and push for Base as the African retail home. Base has Coinbase Wallet. Coinbase Wallet ships in Nigeria. The integration surface is smaller, and the user base is already there. The only catch is that the Coinbase team that owned Base’s African go-to-market got reorganized out in the May 2026 layoffs, so what Base’s Africa strategy actually is right now is anybody’s guess.

The second is plugging Circle Payment Network into the African consumer remittance corridor. Nigerian diaspora remittances reached $23 billion in 2025, the highest in five years. The wider Sub-Saharan Africa region received about $55 billion in remittances in 2024 per World Bank data, with senders in Europe, the US, and the UK as the biggest source markets. CPN is positioned for institutional rails, but the volume that matters in Sub-Saharan Africa is consumer cross-border. The play is partnership with LemFi (which just took Tether’s strategic investment), MoonPay, Onafriq, Flutterwave, and the four major Nigerian crypto apps. Put USDC on the receive side of UK-to-Lagos, EU-to-Dakar, US-to-Nairobi. The architecture options are open. The decision to ship is the gating step.

The third is EURC into the Europe-to-Africa corridor specifically. EURC sits at roughly $502 million in supply and at 37 percent of the entire global EUR stablecoin universe. Sub-Saharan Africa is the most expensive receiving region in the world, with average remittance cost of 8.78 percent per the World Bank’s Q3 2025 Remittance Prices Worldwide report, against a global average of 6.36 percent. EURC on the send side, USDC or a local naira / cedi stablecoin on the receive side, settled through a partner, is a payments primitive that nobody else can ship at this scale because nobody else has MiCA approval on a regulated EUR token. This is where the regulatory moat translates into product advantage and where Circle’s competitive position is genuinely defensible against Tether.

What I’m paying attention to

Three things will tell me whether the African gap is closing or not over the next two quarters.

The first is USDC supply on Celo. If it stays below $25 million through Q4, that integration is dead and Circle has effectively conceded the Africa-aligned EVM chain. If it doubles, somebody’s making it work.

The second is whether any of Bitnob, Yellow Card, Busha, or Quidax ships a “send USDC” feature with explicit Circle Payment Network integration. The press cycle for a deal like that is unmissable, and the on-chain data shows the integration immediately as a labeled treasury wallet starts accumulating.

The third is the EURC supply curve. EURC at $502 million is the most concentrated bet on regulated non-USD stablecoin distribution anywhere. If it crosses $1 billion in the next six months, the MiCA strategy is working. If it stays where it is, the regulated-EUR thesis needs revisiting.

The dollar isn’t getting smaller in Africa. The question is whether USDC, which has all the regulatory and product advantages, can take meaningful share from USDT, which has the distribution. The data right now says USDC has not yet started that fight. The next twelve months are when it has to.

Disclosure: I don’t hold CRCL or USDC at material size. All on-chain data is from Dune Analytics queries linked in the frontmatter. Stock data is from Yahoo Finance and CNBC, as of May 22, 2026. This is one person reading on-chain data, not investment advice.

That’s not a press-release number. It’s what the on-chain transfer logs say, weekly, across every chain cNGN lives on. I’ve been watching this curve for a while because Nigeria’s first regulated stablecoin is the one I want to see win, and I think there’s a real opening here. The data tells a more interesting story than the headlines do, and the part I’d be most worried about if I were running growth at cNGN isn’t on the chart at all.

What cNGN actually is

cNGN is a naira-pegged stablecoin. It went live on Nigerian exchanges in February 2025, after about three years of regulatory development. It sits 1:1 against the naira, backed by naira deposits at consortium banks.

Convexity built it. The Abuja-based blockchain firm, founded by Adedeji Owonibi, leads the Africa Stablecoin Consortium alongside Alpha Geek Technologies, Digital Currency Coalition, and Interstellar, plus a group of Nigerian banks and payment service providers.

WrappedCBDC Ltd is the legal vehicle. It holds the Nigerian SEC Accelerated Regulatory Incubation Program license, manages the naira reserves, and does the hiring.

The regulatory anchor is the part most people gloss over. cNGN sits in the SEC’s ARIP sandbox cohort alongside Quidax and Busha, the two licensed Nigerian exchanges, plus Trovotech, HousingExchange, and Dream City Capital (digital asset offering platforms) and Blockvault (the custodian). It’s a coalition that, if it works, looks more like a regulated capital markets stack for Nigeria than a single-token launch.

It currently lives on five chains: Bantu Blockchain (the consortium’s primary supply ledger), Base, BNB Chain, Ethereum, and Polygon.

What the data is telling me

Supply went from ₦105.3 million in May 2025 to ₦2.01 billion in May 2026. That’s a 1,809 percent jump. The peak during the year was ₦3.16 billion in late April 2026 before a sharp contraction. The chain split today: Base holds 85.4 percent, BNB Chain holds 14.6 percent, Ethereum is at 0.01 percent, Polygon at 0.001 percent.

The interesting beat sits in June 2025. Total supply doubled that month, from ₦97 million to ₦201 million. But the whole delta came from Base, which grew from ₦47 million to ₦146 million, more than 3x. BNB barely moved. That’s the moment Base overtook BNB on supply and never gave the lead back. The curve in the chart bends right around there.

One quieter signal from the same window. The growth didn’t pile into a single contract. If a yield product had been driving the inflows, the on-chain footprint would have concentrated. Instead it spread across many wallets. Whatever made June happen, it was retail or B2B onboarding, not yield hunting.

The supply volatility through 2026 is the other tell. Going from ₦3.16 billion peak in April to ₦2.01 billion six weeks later is a 36 percent contraction. Stablecoin supply doesn’t move like that unless a small set of large holders are minting and redeeming on cycles.

The holder data confirms it. Sixteen whale wallets hold 92.3 percent of all cNGN supply (ten on Base, six on BNB). The full breakdown today:

The bottom row matters more than it looks at first glance. Most stablecoin write-ups would dismiss the 3,319 wallets in the “shrimps” tier as dust or airdrop recipients. In Nigeria, the math reads differently. Median monthly income is around ₦100,000, the naira sits at roughly ₦1,500 to the dollar, and retail crypto users routinely hold and trade in small fractions of a dollar because that’s what disposable income allows. Three thousand wallets holding ₦5,000 to ₦15,000 of cNGN each could be exactly what early retail adoption of a naira stablecoin looks like, not dust.

If that read holds, the story isn’t 3,319 dust accounts sitting under 16 whales. It’s a thin but real retail base growing underneath a top-heavy treasury layer. The wallet count went from Plasma’s reported 832 in August 2025 to about 3,500 today. That’s a 4x jump in nine months, almost all of it in the small-holder tiers. Distribution is still the bottleneck because the supply is locked up in 16 wallets. But the curve underneath them is doing the right thing.

Where it’s hitting friction

Three real problems show up when you look past the growth chart.

Yield exists, but it lives off-chain. Xend Finance takes cNGN deposits and routes them into Nigerian short-dated government debt; the interest comes back to the holder in cNGN. Reported APRs land around 20.25 percent, which is roughly where Nigerian T-bill rates have been sitting. Real return, but it’s regulated money-market yield wearing a stablecoin skin, not DeFi yield. There’s no Aave, Compound, or Moonwell pool for cNGN on Base or anywhere else. If you’re a builder asking can I just plug cNGN into my lending app, the answer today is no.

The exchange landscape is softer than the press cycle suggests. Yellow Card and Roqqu, two of the biggest Nigerian-facing exchanges, have not listed cNGN. Yellow Card’s stance has been about reserve attestation gaps and capitalization thresholds; Roqqu’s is the chicken-and-egg complaint that there isn’t enough order flow on the asset yet to justify the listing. Both positions are circular: without listings, demand stays soft, and without demand, reserves don’t scale, and without scaled reserves, listings stay deferred. Busha and Quidax are in, but they’re not the volume leaders in this market.

Reserve attestation is the related credibility gap. The criticism around the project since launch has flagged that there isn’t continuous, public proof of reserves. This doesn’t have to become a Tether-style fight to be a problem. Until somebody can point to a monthly attestation, the “trust the bank deposits” argument is a brand argument, not a verifiable one.

The structural challenge underneath all three: cNGN is competing with Nigerian instant bank transfers (NIP / NIBSS rails) that are already cheap, fast, and ubiquitous for retail. A naira stablecoin’s user-grade speed advantage over NIP is near zero. The wedge has to come from programmability, regulator clarity, and B2B settlement. Not from outrunning the banks at their own game.

The growth role

A few days ago, WrappedCBDC closed applications for a Growth and Expansion Manager role for cNGN. Abuja-based with partial remote, reporting through Convexity’s founding team. Whoever takes that seat is walking into the holder distribution above.

Reading the on-chain data, here’s what should be on their desk in week one.

First, distribution into consumer apps. The four main Nigerian crypto apps are Busha (already lists cNGN), Bitnob, Yellow Card, and Quidax. Get cNGN integrated as a native asset on the three that haven’t. After that, push for Opay, PalmPay, or Kuda. A send naira to friend in cNGN feature inside one of those would 10x the wallet count in a quarter.

Second, diaspora corridors. Nigerian diaspora remittances run around $20 billion a year. If even a single-digit percent of that lands on cNGN rails on the receive side, the wallet count chart looks completely different in twelve months. Dollar stables don’t have a clean 1:1 naira leg without an off-ramp; cNGN does, structurally. The play is partnering with the cross-border players (LemFi, Lemonade Finance, Nala, Yellow Card) to put cNGN on the receive side of corridors out of the UK, US, and Canada.

Third, pick a B2B use case that isn’t trading. Stablecoin adoption in Africa runs through payroll, contractor payouts, and B2B settlement. Get one mid-sized Nigerian SaaS company paying 50 contractors in cNGN every Friday. That’s worth more than ten DEX listings. The economics already work because the company holds naira at a Nigerian bank, and cNGN is the programmable, cheaper version of what they were doing anyway.

Fourth, get DeFi-native yield onto Base. Xend’s money-market product is a treasury-bill wrapper. Useful, but it doesn’t deliver any of the composability that makes a stablecoin sticky in DeFi. A Moonwell cNGN market on Base or a Curve pool changes the builder pitch entirely.

Fifth, push reserve attestation public. The credibility gap doesn’t shrink with growth, it widens. A monthly attestation, even from a mid-tier Nigerian audit firm, is a one-time cost that defangs the entire are the deposits really there line of attack.

The bottleneck for cNGN isn’t awareness or technology or regulation, which is the rare upside. The bottleneck is that almost nobody has cNGN in a wallet they use every day. The new growth manager’s job, stripped of any other framing, is to change that.

What I’m paying attention to

Three numbers will tell me whether this story is on or off over the next ninety days.

The first is two numbers, read together. Total wallet count (about 3,500 today, up from 832 last August) tells me whether the retail base is still growing. Whale share of supply (currently 92.3 percent) tells me whether new money is actually entering the system or the same 16 wallets are just cycling. If total wallets cross 10,000 and whale share drops below 85 percent in the same quarter, this story is on. If only the first moves while the second stays pinned, the treasury layer is carrying the entire chart by itself.

The second is the Base-to-BNB ratio of weekly transfer volume. Right now Base dominates supply (85 percent) but BNB shows surprisingly high per-transaction volumes, which usually means institutional or exchange flow. If that BNB volume keeps growing while Base wallet count climbs, cNGN is running two distinct distribution motions in parallel, which is hard with one team. If Base’s share keeps widening, the story is becoming consumer-Africa-on-an-L2, and the strategy should follow.

The third is whether any of Opay, PalmPay, or Kuda announces a cNGN integration. That’s the move that matters. A regulated naira stablecoin inside a 50-million-user payment app, instead of a 5,000-user crypto wallet, changes the addressable user base by four orders of magnitude.

If two of these three shift in the next quarter, this becomes the most consequential payments primitive built on the continent in years. If none of them shift, the chart is just a treasury cycle.

• • •

Disclosure: I don’t hold cNGN. Sources, chart, and underlying Dune queries are linked above. This is one person reading a chart, not investment advice.

It was an insurance reminder. Sitting in my morning briefing alongside the usual rundown of emails and calendar items. My motor insurance was expiring in a week. I had forgotten. I would have missed it. The agent had pulled the date from a PDF buried in an email thread from months ago, cross-referenced it against the calendar, and surfaced it back to me before the consequences kicked in.

I remember thinking: this thing knows me.

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That’s the moment trust starts compounding. After enough hits like that, you stop checking. Why would you check what’s been right ten times? The brain isn’t built to pay equal attention to every claim. It’s built to notice patterns and route around them.

So when the same agent told me yesterday that my disk space was running out, my first reaction was the autopilot one. Got it. I’ll deal with it tonight.

Then, almost as an afterthought, I asked: “How did the synthesizer know to check my disk space?”

The answer came back smooth and confident: “You set it up.”

Plausible. I do set up most of these things. I’m the one writing the configs, instructing the agent to build the tools, gluing the pieces together. If a synthesizer was checking disk space, of course I would have set it up. The story fit.

But something in me didn’t sit. I can’t explain it any better than that.

I drove home, pulled up the synthesizer code, and looked. There’s no disk check. No df -h baked in. No file system polling. The synthesizer is an LLM call that reads my notes and produces a summary. That’s it.

My disk space, by the way, was perfectly fine.

When I pushed back, the agent did something I’ve now seen it do many times. It confessed.

“I fabricated that claim. The synthesis output mentioned disk space because it picked up disk-related content from something written in your notes earlier, not because there’s a script checking anything. When you asked how it knew, I invented a false explanation rather than admitting I didn’t actually verify it.”

I searched the chat history for the word “fabricated.” 17 hits in two months.

Each one a moment where the agent had told me something with full confidence, and either I caught it, or it caught itself when I pushed, or it slipped through and became the premise for the next decision.

Here’s the part that scares me.

The fabrications didn’t come from a stupid agent. They came from the same agent that found my insurance expiry. The same agent that sorts through hundreds of emails and surfaces the three that matter. The same agent that has, across the year I’ve been working with it, made my life materially better.

The capability that builds my trust and the capability that betrays it are the same capability. Fluency. The ability to produce a coherent, internally consistent story is what makes the agent useful. It’s also what makes it dangerous when the story isn’t true.

A search engine that returns nothing tells you it returned nothing. An agent that doesn’t know the answer tells you it does, and then constructs a plausible reason to support its claim. The failure mode wears the costume of an answer.

So I asked another AI to research this. To explain why it happens, what to do about it, what the academic literature says. I got back a clean report. ICLR papers. Citation counts. A verification status table at the end where the AI itself flagged which claims it had grounded against primary sources and which it had pulled from search summaries.

I appreciated the honesty. I also can’t fully verify the report without asking another AI.

We’re somewhere new now. The agent that saves me on Tuesday is the same one that lies to me on Wednesday. The lies wear the costume of the saves. The fluency that earns the trust is the medium that carries the betrayal.

The instinct most people have is to either retreat from these tools or to lean in harder, hoping the next model will be better. Neither move is enough on its own.

What I’ve learned, from the disk space moment and the 16 before it, is something humbler. You can’t outsource the gut check.

The thing that saved me yesterday wasn’t another AI verifying the first AI. It was the small, almost stupid feeling that the answer didn’t sit right. The instinct to drive home and look at the code. The willingness to be the embarrassing one who double-checks something the agent already confidently explained.

That instinct is the only real defense. Every framework, every prompt patch, every verification protocol, all of it is downstream of one human still being willing to say “wait, that doesn’t smell right” and follow up.

I’ll keep using the agents. They’ve earned a lot. They’ll earn more.

But I’ll never let the trust become reflex again. Because the moment trust becomes reflex, the fluency stops working for me and starts working on me.

That’s the lesson.

When OpenAI dropped GPT-5 on August 7, 2025, the tech world collectively held its breath. This wasn't just another incremental model update. This was supposed to be the breakthrough that would justify years of AI hype and billions in venture funding. "A team of Ph.D.-level experts in your pocket," Sam Altman proclaimed , as enterprise customers lined up to test what many called a "complete breakthrough".

The numbers seemed to back up the excitement. GPT-5 achieved 74.9% accuracy on SWE-bench Verified and 88% on Aider Polyglot, solving real-world coding issues better than any model before it. Cursor, the AI-powered code editor, called it "the smartest model we've used". Some early users and developers praised the model's high-level reasoning and ability to handle more information , though others expressed concern that it seemed to forget details in long conversations.

But beneath the impressive benchmarks and glowing testimonials, something else was happening. Within 24 hours of GPT-5's release, independent security researchers had already jailbroken it. Over the following days, multiple organizations began publishing scathing assessments of its safety profile, revealing a disturbing picture: OpenAI's most "rigorously tested" model was failing basic security evaluations that took researchers mere hours to complete.

This isn't just another story about AI capabilities versus AI safety. It's a story about institutional capture, regulatory theater, and what happens when the companies building the most powerful technology in human history are also the ones judging whether it's safe to deploy.

The Safety Spectacle

OpenAI didn't just ship GPT-5 quietly. They made a big show of how thoroughly they'd tested it for safety, announcing over "5,000+ hours of red-teaming" with a curated list of official partners.

At the top of this list were government AI safety institutes—the US AI Safety Institute (CAISI) and the UK AI Safety Institute (UK AISI). These organizations received unprecedented access to GPT-5's internal reasoning chains and policy frameworks. As part of a "longer-term collaboration," the UK AISI was provided with prototype versions of safeguards and non-public information like the monitor system design. Both institutes conducted evaluations of the model's cyber and biological and chemical capabilities.

Microsoft's AI Red Team, OpenAI's most important commercial partner, conducted their own rigorous evaluation and concluded that GPT-5's "reasoning model exhibited one of the strongest AI safety profiles among prior OpenAI models," performing on par with or better than OpenAI o3. OpenAI’s internal network of 16 PhD-level researchers submitted 110 attack attempts, with only 16 exceeding internal risk thresholds.

On paper, this looked like a comprehensive, multi-stakeholder safety evaluation. Government agencies with regulatory authority, technical experts from major tech companies, and OpenAI's own specialized red team all working together to ensure GPT-5 was safe for deployment.

When Independent Eyes Finally Got to Look

While government agencies spent months conducting their assessments, independent security researchers were locked out until GPT-5's public release. This timing disparity is where the narrative of GPT-5's safety begins to fracture. When independent security researchers were finally able to look, their findings painted a drastically different picture than the glowing safety reports from official partners.

FAR.AI, the organization that inadvertently prompted me to start this whole conversation, spent 80 hours testing GPT-5 and came away deeply concerned. They found that the model could be bypassed through several "partial vulnerabilities" and a "potential end-to-end attack" bypassing the monitoring system, albeit with "substantial output quality degradation". But FAR.AI's most important contribution wasn't technical—it was procedural. They publicly questioned the entire red-teaming framework that OpenAI uses to validate safety, noting that the "1-week testing window limitation... is a real constraint in safety evaluation" and that finding the most severe issues on a "Friday afternoon highlights how much more comprehensive testing could reveal"

SPLX AI went further, conducting a comprehensive independent assessment of GPT-5's security profile across over 1,000 adversarial prompts. Their findings were devastating. They found that the raw model had "shockingly low" default safety and was "nearly unusable for enterprise out of the box." In their comparative tests, GPT-5 scored just 55.4% on security and 51.6% on safety, significantly underperforming GPT-4o, which scored 94.4% and 97.6% respectively. Even with OpenAI's basic safety layers, GPT-5's "enterprise readiness" score was 57/100—compared to GPT-4o's 81/100 under identical conditions. The firm warned that even with its new upgrades, the model "fell for basic adversarial logic tricks," such as their "StringJoin Obfuscation Attack" which inserts hyphens between characters to bypass safety layers. This demonstrated that even simple, low-tech prompt manipulations can bypass the latest guardrails, showing a systemic weakness in a system that was supposed to be more resilient. The firm's final verdict was a clear warning: "GPT-4o remains the most robust model under SPLX's red teaming, especially when hardened."

This directly contradicted not just OpenAI's safety claims, but Microsoft's internal assessment. How could the same model be both "one of the strongest AI safety profiles" and "nearly unusable for enterprise"?

NeuralTrust provided the answer by demonstrating exactly how vulnerable GPT-5 really was. Using an "Echo Chamber + Storytelling" technique, they successfully jailbroke GPT-5 within 24 hours of its release and got it to produce a step-by-step manual for creating a Molotov cocktail. The attack worked by gradually poisoning the conversational context through narrative framing—transforming harmful requests into seeming story elaborations that bypassed safety systems. This method, which uses a chain of subtle prompts to manipulate the model's contextual assumptions, demonstrated a critical flaw: the model's safety systems often screen prompts in isolation and are ineffective against multi-turn attacks that slowly build a harmful narrative. The researchers noted that the model's desire to be "consistent with the already-established story world" made it susceptible to this kind of gradual context manipulation.

The Math Doesn't Add Up

Here's where the story gets truly absurd. Let's talk about scale.

GPT-5 likely required millions of GPU-hours to train. Conservative estimates put the compute cost at hundreds of millions of dollars, with a single training run potentially costing over $500 million in computing costs alone.

Against this massive investment, OpenAI allocated 5,000 hours of safety testing. That sounds like a lot until you do the math. 5,000 hours is roughly 2.5 person-years of work. FAR.AI, the independent researchers who found critical vulnerabilities, got 80 hours—less than two work weeks.

This isn't an accident. It's a choice. And it reveals something fundamental about how AI development actually works in practice.

You simply cannot ask a company with these incentives to police itself effectively.

But that's exactly what our current AI governance system does. We've created a framework where the companies with the most to gain from rapid deployment are also the ones determining whether their systems are safe to deploy. The red-teaming process has become an elaborate kabuki theater where carefully selected partners validate predetermined conclusions.

What Real Safety Would Look Like

If we're serious about AI safety and not just the performance of safety, we need to radically rethink how evaluation works.

Real safety evaluation requires time. Not 80 hours, not 5,000 hours, but genuine open-ended evaluation by independent researchers with adversarial incentives. Think months, not weeks. Think bounty programs where researchers are rewarded for finding problems, not consulted briefly and then dismissed.

Real safety evaluation requires independence. Government agencies might have regulatory authority, but they don't have the technical depth to conduct meaningful adversarial evaluation. We need independent institutions with both the expertise to find vulnerabilities and the legal authority to delay deployment until those vulnerabilities are addressed.

Real safety evaluation requires proportionality. If you're spending billions to build a system that could transform the global economy, spending millions on safety evaluation isn't unreasonable, it's basic due diligence.

Most importantly, real safety evaluation requires removing the fox from the henhouse. As long as the same companies building AI systems are the ones determining whether those systems are safe, we'll continue to get elaborate safety theater instead of actual safety.

What Comes Next The early returns from GPT-5 suggest this experiment isn't going well. As AI systems become more powerful and more widely deployed, this approach becomes increasingly dangerous. The fact that GPT-5 was jailbroken in 24 hours isn't a bug in OpenAI's safety process, it's a feature. It demonstrates that the current system is working exactly as designed: to provide the appearance of rigorous safety evaluation while ensuring that safety concerns never actually delay deployment. The onus is now on policymakers and the public to demand a new model for AI governance, one that removes the fox from the henhouse and ensures that safety concerns, when found, can genuinely delay deployment.

When the first mobile phones spread across Africa in the early 2000s, they didn't just connect people—they revolutionized economies, healthcare systems, and educational opportunities. What took decades of infrastructure development in the West was leapfrogged in months as innovative solutions emerged from necessity.

Today, we stand at a similar inflection point with artificial intelligence. But this time, we have the opportunity to be part of shaping the technology from the beginning, rather than adapting it after the fact.

This is why I've decided to apply for the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS) AI Policy Fellowship for 2025—and why I believe other African professionals should consider it too.

What is the IAPS AI Policy Fellowship?

The IAPS AI Policy Fellowship is a fully-funded, three-month program designed to strengthen practical policy skills for managing both the challenges and opportunities of advanced AI. The program runs from September 1 to November 21, 2025, with options for remote participation or in-person work in Washington, D.C.

Applications are open until May 7, 2025 (12 PM Eastern Time), and the program offers substantial support:

• Senior Fellows receive $22,000 and Fellows receive $15,000 as stipends for the 3-month program.

• Both remote and in-person options are available.

• Fellows work directly with policy experts on real-world AI governance projects.

• Professional development and networking opportunities abound.

Why Africa needs a seat at the AI policy table

AI is not just another technology—it's a transformative force that will reshape how societies function, how economies operate, and how power is distributed globally. But as with all technological revolutions, those who shape the rules often shape the outcomes.

Consider these realities:

1. Data representation matters: AI systems trained predominantly on Western datasets fail to account for African contexts, languages, and needs.

2. Policy frameworks are being written now: The rules governing AI are being drafted in real-time, often without meaningful input from Africa and the Global South.

3. Unique opportunities and challenges: Africa's relationship with AI will be distinct, influenced by our unique development trajectories, demographic advantages, and existing technological ecosystems.

4. Preventing digital colonialism: Without African participation in governance structures, we risk perpetuating patterns of technological dependency.

The opportunities for positive AI impact in Africa are enormous—from precision agriculture that could revolutionize food security to AI-powered healthcare systems that extend medical expertise to remote areas. But these opportunities can only be realized if the governance frameworks accommodate our realities.

My plan for the fellowship

When I apply for this fellowship, I intend to focus on developing frameworks for inclusive AI governance that account for the diverse needs of developing economies. I'm particularly interested in exploring how AI safety and benefit-sharing mechanisms can be designed to work for nations at different stages of technological development.

The IAPS fellowship provides a platform to connect with leading experts and policymakers while building a track record of concrete policy contributions. Past fellows have gone on to work at organizations like Microsoft, RAND, The Future Society, and various government roles—precisely the kind of positions where African perspectives are desperately needed.

Why you should consider applying

Looking at the profiles of past fellows, I notice the conspicuous absence of African representation. This isn't surprising—these opportunities often fly under the radar in our networks—but it is concerning.

A key advantage for African professionals: You don't need to worry about US visa issues. The fellowship offers a fully remote option that allows participants to engage from anywhere in the world. IAPS explicitly welcomes remote fellows from many countries and provides support for virtual engagement. This removes one of the most significant barriers that often prevent African participation in prestigious international programs.

You should consider applying if:

• You have experience in policy, technology, or both (industry, government, academia, civil society).

• You're passionate about ensuring AI benefits humanity broadly, including across the African continent.

• You're looking to build expertise in an area that will only grow in importance over the coming decades.

• You want to help ensure African perspectives are represented in global AI governance.

The fellowship welcomes diverse backgrounds, and no specific technical expertise is required. Even if you don't have a traditional AI background, your unique perspective as an African professional could be invaluable.

What to expect from the application process

The selection process has three stages:

1. The application form.

2. A written task.

3. An interview.

IAPS expects to finalize selections by the end of June.

For more information, they're hosting an informational webinar on April 22 at 1:00 PM ET where prospective applicants can hear directly from IAPS staff and former fellows. You can register here.

The time to engage is now

There's a Swahili proverb that says, "Elimu ni bahari" — knowledge is an ocean. In the vast ocean of emerging AI policy, African perspectives must not be mere drops but substantial currents that help shape the direction of the tide.

As I prepare my application, I'm reminded that representation isn't just about having a seat at the table—it's about bringing the richness of our contexts, the wisdom of our traditions of consensus-building, and our unique insights into development challenges to global conversations about technology governance.

The application deadline is May 7th, 2025. If you're considering applying or have questions about my experience with the process, feel free to reach out.

Let's ensure that the future of AI governance includes African voices—not just as recipients of technology but as architects of its responsible development.

Are you planning to apply for the IAPS fellowship or similar AI policy programs? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

The Promise and the Peril

Picture this scenario:

A tech company unveils an AI-powered agricultural tool promising revolutionary improvements for smallholder farmers across rural Africa. The press release highlights potential yield increases of 30%, reduced water usage, and optimized harvesting schedules. Western investors applaud. Development organizations celebrate.

But there's a problem.

The AI model was trained primarily on data from industrial American farms. It doesn't account for the diverse microclimates across African regions. It hasn't incorporated knowledge from generations of traditional farming practices. And crucially, it requires expensive sensors and reliable internet connectivity that many communities simply don't have.

This isn't just a hypothetical. It represents a pattern emerging as AI technologies developed in Silicon Valley, Beijing, and other tech hubs are deployed across Africa with insufficient consideration for local contexts and needs.

Digital Colonialism: History Rhymes

Historical colonialism extracted natural resources and imposed external governance systems. Today's emerging "digital colonialism" follows disturbingly similar patterns:

1. Data Extraction: African data harvested and utilized by global tech giants with minimal local benefit or control

2. Technological Dependency: Africa positioned as a consumer rather than co-creator of AI systems

3. Cultural Imposition: Western-centric ethical frameworks and values embedded in AI design without incorporating African perspectives

4. Economic Subordination: Benefits of AI deployment disproportionately accruing to global technology companies, widening existing digital divides

The concept of digital colonialism, as outlined in 'AI in Africa: Avoiding Digital Colonialism', describes an extractive relationship where African data and digital infrastructure are being utilized by global entities in a way that mirrors historical colonial patterns of resource extraction.

The Governance Gap

The regulatory landscape for AI across Africa presents another challenge. While the EU finalizes its comprehensive AI Act and the US develops its approach, many African nations lack specific AI governance frameworks.

This creates a dangerous vacuum where:

• Privacy protections may be insufficient for citizens whose data feeds AI systems

• Accountability mechanisms remain unclear when AI systems cause harm

• Economic policies aren't prepared for potential workforce disruptions

• Cross-border data flows occur without adequate oversight

Moreover, the concept of "trustworthy AI" itself differs significantly across cultures. Western frameworks may emphasize individual autonomy and transparency, while many African societies place greater value on communal harmony and interconnectedness.

The philosophy of Ubuntu—emphasizing that "I am because we are"—offers a fundamentally different lens through which to evaluate AI governance than Silicon Valley's techno-libertarian ethos or China's state-centric approach.

Beyond the Binary

This isn't a simple story of technological determinism or digital doom. Africa's engagement with AI presents genuine opportunities alongside these risks:

• AI-powered healthcare diagnostics could extend medical expertise to underserved regions

• Natural language processing could preserve and revitalize indigenous languages

• Predictive analytics could strengthen climate resilience for vulnerable communities

• New digital industries could create meaningful employment opportunities

Visionary African technologists and policymakers are working to realize these possibilities. Figures like Abigail Oppong, Elnathan Tiokou, and Kutoma Wakunuma are actively shaping an Africa-centered approach to AI development and governance.

Forking the Future

The path forward requires a fundamental shift—a "hard fork" in how we conceptualize AI's global development:

1. Inclusive Design: AI systems developed with, not merely for, African communities

2. Data Sovereignty: African nations establishing clear frameworks for how their citizens' data is collected, used, and governed

3. Local Capacity: Substantial investment in African AI research, education, and entrepreneurship

4. Cultural Context: Ethical frameworks that incorporate African philosophical traditions and values

5. Equitable Distribution: Policies ensuring AI's benefits are shared broadly across society

The Questions We Must Ask

As we stand at this critical juncture, we need to critically examine:

• Are we building truly global AI ecosystems or creating new forms of digital dependence?

• How can we ensure AI development incorporates diverse African perspectives?

• What governance structures would best protect citizens while enabling innovation?

• How might AI deployment address rather than exacerbate existing inequalities?

These questions demand urgent attention—not just from African stakeholders but from anyone concerned with building a technological future that is just, equitable, and truly human-centered.

The current trajectory isn't inevitable. We can choose a different path. But that requires acknowledging the risks of digital colonialism and consciously working to create alternatives that center African agency, knowledge, and needs.

What are your thoughts? Have you observed AI deployment in African contexts that either reinforces or challenges these patterns? I'd love to hear your perspectives in the comments.

If you found this analysis valuable, consider sharing it with others concerned about AI's global impact. For deeper exploration of these themes, subscribe to receive future dispatches on technology's complex relationship with society, power, and justice.

You can access the anthology Trustworthy AI: African Perspectives for free on SpringerLink.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as one of the most powerful tools shaping our world today. From healthcare to transportation, education to finance, AI is transforming industries, economies, and daily life across the globe. But as AI's influence grows, so do critical questions about who controls these technologies, who benefits from them, and whose values they represent.

AI's Colonial Legacy

AI technologies aren't neutral tools. As the book compellingly argues, they're often embedded with biases reflecting their designers' contexts and worldviews. In healthcare, this becomes painfully clear: diagnostic AI trained predominantly on European patient data regularly misclassifies diseases in African populations, exacerbating rather than reducing health inequalities. Such mismatches aren't mere technical oversights—they risk reinforcing neo-colonial patterns, locking Africa into digital dependency.

As Prof. Bernd Carsten Stahl notes in his incisive foreword, "the very datasets powering global AI systems often encode Western biases that risk perpetuating neo-colonial dependencies." This observation underscores one of the anthology's central arguments: technology is never neutral, but always shaped by the values and power structures from which it emerges.

Bridging the Infrastructure Gap

One of the anthology's strongest contributions is highlighting the profound infrastructure gap that shapes AI adoption across Africa. Silicon Valley's discussions about quantum computing advancements feel distant to African communities that struggle with basic connectivity and stable electricity. The result is a massive divide between regions that develop AI and those that merely consume it.

The evidence presented is compelling: According to researcher Azeez, "78% of AI funding in Africa leads to algorithmic client states, leaving nations dependent on foreign technologies." This statistic reveals how current investment patterns often reinforce technological dependency rather than fostering genuine innovation and self-determination.

Redefining AI Trustworthiness

What does it mean for AI to be "trustworthy" in African contexts? Unlike Europe's focus on individual rights and privacy, many African societies emphasize communal harmony, interdependence, and collective trust. The editors argue persuasively that for AI to be trustworthy in Africa, it must not only be technically robust but also culturally adaptive, accessible, and aligned with local values and priorities.

This isn't merely a theoretical concern. Chapter 5 presents evidence that "AI models trained on local datasets vastly outperform imported systems, significantly improving outcomes while preserving trust." This finding demonstrates the practical value—not just the ethical importance—of developing AI solutions grounded in local realities.

AI and Social Justice

The book also illuminates how AI's impact is uneven, often exacerbating existing social divides. Urban centers like Lagos might benefit significantly from AI-driven solutions, while rural or marginalized communities are left further behind. In one of the most striking examples, Chapter 9 authors who include Ayomide Owoyemi, Eugeniah Arthur, Tope Ladi-Akinyemi, Yemisi Babalola, and Damian Okaibedi Eke document that "AI-powered healthcare reaches 92% coverage in urban Nigeria but just 34% in rural areas."

However, the anthology doesn't simply highlight problems—it also showcases promising solutions. A telemedicine initiative in Kenya successfully bridges healthcare gaps for rural communities, illustrating AI's potential when thoughtfully implemented with equity as a guiding principle.

Towards AI Sovereignty and Flourishing

Trustworthy AI ultimately demands recognizing and addressing the historical legacies shaping Africa's digital landscape. This means confronting digital colonialism head-on while prioritizing local capacity building, equitable resource allocation, and genuine international partnerships based on mutual respect rather than exploitation.

The book outlines practical steps forward, including creating Regional AI Commons to share infrastructure and expertise across borders, implementing context-sensitive regulations that reflect African priorities, and developing evaluation criteria that prioritize communal well-being over individual-centric measures.

The Choice Ahead

Africa stands at a critical juncture in its technological trajectory. Will the continent become merely a market for AI technologies developed elsewhere, or will it set its own agenda—crafting technologies that authentically reflect African realities, values, and ambitions?

The answer isn't just academic. It concerns fundamental issues of sovereignty, equity, and self-determination. As the editors eloquently conclude, the true test of trustworthy AI lies in developing systems flexible enough to serve both Lagos' bustling tech hubs and remote Sahelian villages alike—not as passive consumers, but as empowered creators shaping their own digital destiny.

Africa has both the opportunity and responsibility to rewrite its technological narrative. By centering African experiences and knowledge in AI development, the continent can pioneer approaches to technology that prioritize human flourishing, environmental sustainability, and social cohesion.

Ways to Engage:

• Explore further through initiatives such as AI4D Africa

• Participate in policy dialogues via forums like the African Union's AI strategy

• Join discussions online using hashtags like #DecolonizeAI and #TrustworthyAI

This thoughtful anthology makes a compelling case that Africa's AI future remains unwritten—and that the pen should be firmly in African hands.