In Amsterdam, the Netherlands—where the Money20/20 Europe 2026 event occurred, Flutterwave and Tempo secured a strategic partnership to expand stablecoin payments infrastructure across Flutterwave's consumer remittance product—which includes Flutterwave for Business (F4B) and Send App.
Being the largest payment company in Africa, Flutterwave will connect with Tempo as a settlement layer for stablecoin payments. Tempo is an independent payments-first Layer 1 blockchain that was jointly developed and incubated specifically for stablecoin transactions by Stripe and the US-based crypto venture firm Paradigm.
The payments-focused blockchain network that will give Flutterwave the ability to provide wallet-to-wallet transfers using dollar-backed stablecoins USDC and USDT once the integration is fully deployed. The complete integration will allows businesses and individuals to facilitate simplified money movement across borders using digital currencies.
This Flutterwave-Tempo partnership is similar to a previous multi-year partnership with Polygon Lab—a blockchain software company. Under the partnership, Flutterwave will adopt Polygon's blockchain to power instant, low-cost settlements stablecoin cross-border payments across more than 30 African markets.
However, Flutterwave has clarified that the Tempo's deployment will be used alongside Polygon's integration. The company said Polygon will continue to operate as one processing layer, while Tempo will be introduced as an alternative settlement rail. Using two settlement rails simultaneously will give Flutterwave alternative routing channels tailored to specific corridor guidelines or requirements, transactional volumes, and operational demands.
African payment providers and fintech firms are increasingly leveraging stablecoin-based payment infrastructure to overcome the severe structural inefficiencies of traditional cross-border finance on the continent, which is heavily fragmented by more than 40 national currencies and burdened by acute foreign exchange (FX) liquidity shortages.
In recent development, we've also seen Esca Finance, a Nigerian-founded B2B foreign exchange (FX) sourcing, currency hedging, and corporate treasury management platform, officially partnered with liquidity infrastructure provider MANSA to offer same-day payment processing across major African markets, including Nigeria, Ghana, and Francophone Africa.
These companies are bypassing the legacy correspondent banking system—which frequently routes intra-African transactions outside the continent through intermediate currencies like the US dollar or Euro, resulting in high transaction fees and multi-day settlement delays—using stablecoins (like Tether) to compress the payment flow into an on-chain architectural layer—as we've also seen in Tether-LemFi partnership.
The intervention of stablecoin infrastructure enables payment platforms to instantly convert local currencies into digital dollars (such as USDC or USDT), settle transactions globally in minutes via blockchain networks for a fraction of the cost, and seamlessly off-ramp into the recipient's local rails or mobile money wallets.
It also provides African businesses with a vital hedge against domestic currency depreciation, guarantees transaction finality and traceability, and unlocks critical global supply chains without depleting central bank foreign reserves.
However, many African companies have been building infrastructure for stablecoin payments. One of NIgeria's oldest fintech Paga had already partnered with US-based blockchain network Sui to build stablecoin infrastructure for payments and tokenised assets. In fact, Grey and Yellow Card are building the infrastructure for for businesses.
Tempo blockchain network was built in September 2025 and it's mainnet went live in March 20. The project is structurally led by Paradigm's co-founder and Stripe board member, Matt Huang. They position the project as an enterprise-grade infrastructure that is specifically optimized for stablecoin transactions rather than speculative crypto trading.
According to a document posted on the mainnet platform, Tempo unveiled that the platform is focused on supplier settlements, subscriptions, remittances, payments, and machine-to-machine (M2M) transactions—an automated economic exchanges that occur directly between autonomous hardware devices or software applications without human intervention.
