Nigeria already moves more stablecoin volume than almost any country outside Asia. Now it’s getting an institutional backer to match the population’s crypto enthusiasm. Ripple has taken a stake in Flutterwave $3.2 billion Series E round, with plans to wire RLUSD and the XRP Ledger directly into the continent’s largest payments network.
Ripple has made a strategic investment in Flutterwave as part of the African payments company’s Series E funding round. The round values Flutterwave at $3.2 billion, according to the company. At the same time, Bloomberg reported the figure as high as $3.3 billion, citing comments from Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola. Neither company disclosed the size of Ripple’s investment or its resulting ownership stake.
The deal pairs the capital injection with a product integration. Flutterwave will embed Ripple’s USD-denominated stablecoin, RLUSD, into its payment rails and Send App remittance corridors as a settlement asset for high-volume channels. The companies will use the XRP Ledger (XRPL) for transaction clearing. A unified API is planned to connect Flutterwave’s domestic payment network with Ripple Payments, Ripple’s cross-border payments network.
Flutterwave processes payments across 35 African countries. The company says it has handled more than one billion transactions worth over $50 billion since launch and has raised over $500 million in funding to date.
“Flutterwave has built one of the most advanced payments networks in Africa, and as its infrastructure evolves, stablecoins are becoming central to that story,” said Reece Merrick, Managing Director, MEA at Ripple. “Our investment will establish RLUSD within that infrastructure, with Flutterwave driving stablecoin flows over the XRPL and deepening its role as a settlement layer for real-world payments across the continent. Together we also plan to bring Ripple Payments’ speed and efficiency to cross-border transactions in the region, opening up faster, lower-cost financial services to businesses and consumers at scale.”
“This investment marks a pivotal moment in our journey, enabling us to significantly scale our infrastructure and expand our stablecoin-enabled payments roadmap,” commented on the funding round Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, Founder and CEO of Flutterwave. “By unlocking faster settlement and lower-cost cross-border payments, we are building a payment superhighway that connects African commerce directly to the global economy. This partnership is a catalyst for Nigerian and African sovereignty in the digital financial age, ensuring our markets are primary participants in the global digital asset revolution.”
The investment is not Flutterwave’s first stablecoin move. In October 2025, the company partnered with Polygon Labs to launch stablecoin payments for businesses. Flutterwave has also acquired API startup Mono to consolidate fragmented banking data and rails under its platform. This January, the fintech company rolled out stablecoin wallets for merchants across Africa. Those are integrated into Flutterwave’s existing merchant dashboard, removing the need for external crypto wallets or separate blockchain integrations. Merchants can manage balances, receive payments, and move funds using stablecoins such as USDC and USDT, while continuing to access Flutterwave’s core payment and settlement tools.
Why institutional stablecoin rails are landing in Africa, not just Western markets
Stablecoin infrastructure has so far been associated mostly with regulated markets in North America and Europe, where issuers like Circle and now Ripple operate under frameworks such as the United States’ GENIUS Act and the European Union’s MiCA. The Flutterwave deal extends that institutional layer into a region where stablecoins are already in heavy grassroots use.
Nigeria ranked second worldwide on Chainalysis’s 2024 Global Crypto Adoption Index, behind India, and remained in sixth place, among the top crypto adopters globally, a year after. Sub-Saharan Africa placed four countries in the index’s top 20 for 2025 (up from two in 2024), with the firm citing a 180% surge in stablecoin adoption in Ethiopia. Chainalysis’s separate Geography of Cryptocurrency Report found that Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain value over the year measured, up 52% year-over-year, with Nigeria alone accounting for $92.1 billion of that.
Stablecoins specifically have become the dominant instrument within that activity. According to a 2025 report by stablecoin infrastructure provider Yellow Card, stablecoins made up 43% of total crypto transaction volume in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Nigeria processed close to $22 billion in stablecoin transactions between July 2023 and June 2024 — the largest stablecoin market on the continent. A separate Nigeria Web3 Landscape Report, published in April 2026, found that stablecoin deposits in the country grew by more than 9,000% between 2018 and 2025, and that finance products linked to stablecoins drew roughly 89% of all Nigerian Web3 funding in 2025. Industry estimates from crypto exchange Breet put the number of Nigerians actively using digital assets at around 22 million in 2025, projected to reach 27 to 30 million in 2026.
Ripple itself has named Nigeria, alongside Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, as a priority market for RLUSD’s international expansion, according to industry reporting on the company’s strategy.
Cross-border payment costs help explain the appeal of dollar-backed digital rails in the region. The World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide database put the average cost of sending $200 to Sub-Saharan Africa at 8.78% in the first quarter of 2025, against a global average of 6.49% and a G20 target of 3% — making the region the most expensive in the world to receive remittances. In several smaller African economies, including The Gambia, Comoros, Lesotho and Cape Verde, remittances exceed 20% of GDP. Nigeria alone received an estimated $19.5 billion in diaspora remittances in 2023, accounting for about 35% of all remittance inflows to Sub-Saharan Africa that year, according to World Bank data.
Continent-wide payment infrastructure is only partly built out. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), designed to let African currencies settle directly with each other instead of routing through US dollar correspondent accounts, currently covers 19 of the continent’s 54 countries. Where PAPSS or local mobile-money rails are not available, cross-border transfers and business payments still frequently rely on correspondent banking chains that add cost and multi-day delays — the friction point stablecoin advocates point to most often.
International institutions have flagged a separate concern alongside this growth. The IMF has warned that the spread of dollar-pegged stablecoins in developing economies can undercut local monetary policy and domestic currency demand by creating parallel, dollarized payment channels outside central bank oversight. The head of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Pablo Hernandez de Cos, also warned that financial institutions and central banks should not forget that stablecoins act more like risk-bearing financial instruments, threatening to bring financial instability and facilitate illicit finance.
Ripple’s role: capital, a stablecoin, and a settlement network
Ripple’s involvement in the deal extends beyond providing funding. The company is contributing three distinct pieces of infrastructure to Flutterwave’s network.
The first is RLUSD itself. Launched in December 2024, RLUSD is a dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Standard Custody & Trust Company, a Ripple subsidiary operating under a limited-purpose trust charter from the New York State Department of Financial Services. Its reserves are held with BNY Mellon as custodian. RLUSD’s market capitalization has grown from roughly $130 million in mid-2025 to around $1.6/1.8 billion by mid-2026, and the token now accounts for the large majority of stablecoin liquidity on the XRP Ledger.
The second is the XRP Ledger, the blockchain network Ripple is built around. In the Flutterwave deal, XRPL is positioned specifically as a clearing layer — the infrastructure that settles and finalizes RLUSD transfers quickly and at low cost, rather than as a venue where Flutterwave or its users would hold or trade the XRP token directly. That mirrors Ripple’s broader pattern: company executives have said that across Ripple’s recent enterprise deals, RLUSD handles settlement value while XRP’s role is largely confined to paying the ledger’s transaction fees, which are fractions of a cent.
The third piece is Ripple Payments, Ripple’s enterprise cross-border payments network (formerly marketed as On-Demand Liquidity), which processed roughly $1.3 billion in cross-border volume in the second quarter of 2025 alone and has moved more than $95 billion cumulatively as of January 2026. The unified API planned under the Flutterwave partnership is meant to connect this network to Flutterwave’s existing domestic rails, i.e. its card processing, mobile wallet, and bank transfer connections across its 35-country footprint, so that a transaction can move between a local payment method and Ripple’s cross-border network without separate integrations.
For Flutterwave, the arrangement builds on stablecoin infrastructure work already under way through its Polygon Labs partnership and Mono acquisition, rather than introducing the concept for the first time. For Ripple, the deal follows a pattern of recent moves to distribute RLUSD and XRPL into regional payment networks, including a separate partnership with Mexican exchange Bitso to bring a peso-backed stablecoin onto XRPL, and an integration with Mastercard’s Agent Pay initiative for machine-to-machine payments.
