In Africa, moving money around is difficult, mostly because of infrastructure gaps, regulatory restrictions and fragmented financial systems across the continent’s 54 countries. Despite Africa’s vast population and diverse economies, intra-continent trade continues to struggle, stifled by the slow, costly and unsafe processes of moving money across local borders. According to data from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), as of 2021, intra-African trade stood at a measly 14.4%, making it the continent with the lowest percentage of intra-continental trade in the world. What this translates to is simple: Africa is losing money because it can not trade with itself. Recognising this problem, 44 African leaders came together in 2018 to create the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), an agreement that intends to create a single market where Africa’s 1.3 billion people can buy and purchase goods and services. But to millions of Africans, stablecoins are already solving that pain point.

Stablecoins are notably the darling of the continent because not only do they provide a way for Africans to move money across borders fast, cheaply and securely, but they also help citizens of countries with volatile currencies hedge against devaluation and bypass several foreign exchange restrictions which are prevalent in many African countries. It’s no wonder that many believe that stablecoins are a silver bullet for Africa’s cross-border payment hassles.

However, many people are still locked out of benefitting from stablecoin payment capabilities due to prevalent apprehensiveness based on the complex nature of crypto. But one company is changing that and scaling stablecoins, one user-friendly page at a time. Accrue was founded in 2021 as a product that non-crypto-savvy people use to send money across Africa within five minutes, allowing them to convert their native currency to crypto (on-ramp), convert their crypto to their native currency (off-ramp) and save in stablecoins. It wasn’t until recently that Accrue realized it could build a continent-wide stablecoin payment rails, now called Cashramp.

Building Cashramp: a continent-wide borderless payment rail

In an interview with NODO, Accrue’s co-founder and CEO Clinton Mbah recollects that he started mulling over the idea of Cashramp while working at Helicarrier, where he was working on Sendcash, another crypto-remittance product. The way he envisioned the product is that the idea will evolve into what he calls "Coinmule". Operations-wise, mules (merchants) would have online stalls, set exchange rates for different coins, receive orders, and help non-crypto-savvy people remit fiat for their coins. It wasn’t until after Cashramp had been built and had gained some traction that he recalled, with the help of a friend, that Cashramp was essentially a stablecoin-focused improvement on the Coinmule idea.

Looking back, Mbah admitted that Cashramp didn’t start as an ambitious project. It was built as a side feature to help their non-crypto-savvy Ghanaian user base deposit their local currency into Accrue. At the time, the company was struggling with penetrating the Ghanaian market because non-crypto-savvy people found it difficult to source their stablecoins on exchanges and deposit them on-chain (on the blockchain) into Accrue. So, the company enlisted the help of crypto-savvy agents, who in exchange for earnings, do the legwork, and sell stablecoins to Accrue’s less crypto-savvy user base. Soon, the network started gaining traction in Ghana and within a few months they opened up the network to Nigerians. “After seven months, Cashramp went from 4% of our revenue base to 60%, and people were "hacking" the product to do things we hadn't thought of—cross-border payments, receiving salaries and withdrawing naira, depositing crypto, liquidating and off-ramping it to their local currencies,” Mbah revealed. By this time, Cashramp’s potential to become a continent-wide borderless payment rail has become more than evident to the company.

Mbah explained that he was drawn to building Cashramp because compared to other regions globally, sending and receiving payments across Africa for individuals and businesses is tedious and expensive. “According to World Bank estimates, by reducing cross-border payment costs to 1.5%, we'll be putting back $5b+ into the pockets of Africans,” Mbah projected. But Mbah and his team could only solve this problem by dissecting it to the granular level, asking first-level questions about what makes cross-border payments on the continent a hassle in the first place.

He found out that owing to traditional fiat rails (and the middlemen therein), cross-border payments within Africa often take days to settle, and the process is fraught with exorbitant fees and unfavourable exchange rates. But there was a potential solution to that problem in the form of stablecoins, which, Mbah believes, are ten times better cross-border payment rails. They're programmable, settle instantly, and offer low fees, Mbah said. But it needs to be deployed at scale, so Accrue built Cashramp to settle cross-border payments on stablecoin rails in less than five minutes for no more than $2.

Scaling stablecoins with delightful use cases

Africans are not new to stablecoins but a high barrier to entry has kept many at bay. For example, they have to first learn how to get stablecoins from inscrutable exchanges, Mbah had observed. He also realized that crypto companies building for consumers were focusing more on the tech instead of on creating delightful use cases. “Most of the people using Accrue don't know that crypto powers their entire experience, and it's intentional. More crypto builders need to get the underlying tech out of the way and show the utility. Traction will follow. That's been our experience, anyway,” he explained.

But it’s not only customers that are excited about Cashramp, Mbah expressed excitement over the possibility of it breaking down Africa's (commerce) borders. “I'm excited about a future where I can travel around Africa with a single stablecoin balance,” he said. “A future where I can wake up in Cape Town and send money to a friend in Cairo in less than five minutes. A future where I can build a business that caters to all of Africa from day one.”

Bearing similarity to Binance’s Cashlink and Nestcoin's Onboard, Cashramp, at its core, is a P2P marketplace. But on top of that, it prides itself on its network, which it sees as payment infrastructure to unlock utility for everyday individuals and businesses. This can only be the case, Mbah pointed out, because of how quickly transactions are completed. “Our agents complete most transactions in less than 2 minutes, worst case, 15 minutes, he said, also noting that sometimes transactions can be nearly as fast as a Ghana’s MTN mobile money payment or a Nigeria instant bank transfer.

Image source: Accrue

This peculiar way of thinking of stablecoins-powered payment rails, he distinguished, can be seen in the products they've shipped. For example, Deposit Link allows anyone to receive any local currency (auto-converted to stablecoins). Cashramp's API helps businesses frictionlessly accept any local currency via over 20 payment methods from their customers. Accrue Store allows you to sell anything and get paid by anyone within Africa.

Recognizing that the most important thing for any startup is a massive and rapidly growing market, Cashramp has its eyes on the most lucrative market segment. Mbah told NODO, that Cashramp is building for the non-crypto-savvy people doing more than $67b in cross-border payments within Africa and over $47b in remittances to sub-Saharan Africa. “Crypto is still too early and clunky to successfully convince a large enough market to abandon the familiar and widespread fiat system,” Mbah remarked.

A year after launching, Cashramp has processed over $1.6 million and is available in 9 African countries: Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Cameroon, Zambia, Uganda, Tanzania, and Mali. Cashramp's API is live and used by several businesses, with more working on integrating it. Meanwhile, Accrue Store is live with SMEs & creators using it to get paid by anyone.