Aptos powers a new stablecoin payment corridor between the Middle East and Africa

Sending money across borders for business has always been slow and expensive. Banks charge high fees, exchange rates take a cut, and transfers can take days.

The cost is heaviest in Africa, for context, sending money to Sub-Saharan Africa averages 7.9% in fees on a $200 transfer, the highest of any region, according to the World Bank.

A new partnership between Aptos Foundation, HashKey MENA, and African payments platform Daya aims to cut that down using stablecoins, digital tokens pegged to traditional currencies. The three are building a regulated payments corridor connecting the Middle East and Africa, with transactions settling on the Aptos blockchain.

How the new payment route works

The partners signed what they call a "Corridor Pilot Agreement," a test run of a new payment route between the two regions. A typical transaction goes like this:

• A company in the UAE converts local currency into stablecoins through HashKey MENA.
• Those stablecoins move across the Aptos blockchain.
• Daya converts them into local African currencies and delivers them to the recipient.

The aim is to make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, and easier to track while staying compliant with local rules. Each partner has a role: HashKey MENA, a Dubai-based virtual asset service provider regulated by the UAE's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), handles the conversion between stablecoins and fiat. Daya, a pan-African payments platform, moves money across the continent and settles in local currencies. Aptos Foundation supports the blockchain the corridor settles on.

Aptos at the center

Stablecoin activity on Aptos has grown fast. The value of stablecoins circulating on the network has surpassed $1.9 billion, an all-time high. Aptos said its stablecoin market cap grew from about $649 million to more than $1.2 billion in the first half of 2025, before climbing above $1.9 billion in 2026.

The corridor extends HashKey's Asia Connect network, which runs on Aptos. Since launching its first corridor between Hong Kong and the Philippines in June 2025, the network has added Vietnam through partnerships with CAEX and VPBank, and the UAE through HashKey MENA. Africa is the newest and furthest addition to date.

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Africa's stablecoin moment

Africa is one of the fastest-growing markets for stablecoins. Businesses and consumers increasingly use them to move money across borders, hedge against currency swings, and cut transaction costs.

The data shows how far that has gone. Stablecoins now make up roughly 43% of all crypto transaction volume in Sub-Saharan Africa, per Chainalysis, and the region took in more than $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, up about 52% year over year, the third-fastest growth of any region.

The savings can be dramatic: a Mercy Corps Ventures pilot paying Kenyan freelancers found that using stablecoins cut fees from 29% to 2%.

What has been missing, until now, is the regulated infrastructure to connect that demand to the rest of the world.

Paul Joe from Daya summed it up directly:

"Africa is already a front-runner in stablecoin adoption. What's been missing is the regulated infrastructure and scalable liquidity to connect that demand to the rest of the world. By joining HashKey's Asia Connect network as the African node, with settlement on Aptos, we're plugging into a network that already runs from Hong Kong to the Philippines to Vietnam to the UAE."

Where this fits in the stablecoin boom

The partnership arrives as stablecoins go mainstream. The market has grown past $300 billion, drawing in banks, payment firms, and regulators who increasingly view them as a faster, cheaper way to move money across borders.

A March 2026 IMF paper found that markets increasingly expect stablecoins to take on a larger role in payments, especially cross-border, where existing systems remain slow and costly.

The rollout will come in two phases. The first lets businesses fund local payments across borders, sending money in at one end of the corridor and receiving local currency at the other. If that works, the second phase aims to build a broader trade settlement network, letting businesses use stablecoins to settle international transactions across supported corridors. Both phases will run inside VARA's regulatory framework.