Building Where It Matters: Arc as a Catalyst for Circle Grant Recipients in Africa and the Global South

There's a version of the stablecoin story that centers on Wall Street adoption. That version is real, but it's only part of the story.

The other part is playing out across Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Durban, Port of Spain, and Famagusta where there might be a Nigerian freelancer waiting three days for a wire transfer. Or maybe there's a Kenyan merchant who sources inventory from suppliers across three countries and loses margin on every cross-border payment due to conversion fees and FX spreads. Maybe there’s a local institution that wants to offer digital asset services but has no compliant infrastructure to build on.

These are the meaningful regional problems that building on Arc and Circle infrastructure can actually solve. Circle's Developer Grant program funds founders leveraging USDC to create practical solutions to meet needs like these and provides them funding alongside technical support, operational guidance, and co-marketing access.

The common thread

When the first cohort of grant recipients in 2026 came together, nearly half the teams building on Arc testnet had roots in Africa or the Global South, despite Circle not having a geographical focus when selecting grantees. That concentration happened because these builders had important problems to solve that now have the necessary infrastructure. This led to funding for multiple of these strategic initiatives that served these regions.

Stablecoin infrastructure is helping those teams develop solutions for critical regional use cases such as cross-border payments and remittances as well as SME finance and trade workflows. These are problems that particularly affect Africa and the Global South because existing infrastructure has left users in those regions dependent on costly and fragmented services.

Now, with Arc serving as a stablecoin-native settlement layer, builders are finding alternative ways to create a more cohesive and efficient system for regional money flows. Together, they’re addressing the problems they have in common around payments, FX, remittances, and even merchant pricing challenges.

The need is also reflected in Arc House's growing African developer community. Our Nigeria chapter now includes more than 1,000 members, with 100+ builders and community members participating in a recent regional discussion focused on stablecoin adoption. Conversations consistently centered on cross-border payments, remittances, dollar access, and merchant payments—the same challenges many of this grant cohort is building to solve.

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The builders

Here's who these builders are and what they're building:

Blockradar: Wallet-as-a-Service for fintechs

Africa · @BlockradarHQ

Blockradar is one of Arc’s Day One builders and the infrastructure layer that many of the other projects in this cohort have integrated. On Arc, there are teams building solutions for other builders as well as end users. These efforts help grow the ecosystem at large.

The core contribution of Blockradar’s technology is that it provides fintechs with a unified Wallet-as-a-Service and settlement infrastructure API that handles non-custodial wallet creation, gasless transactions, real-time AML screening, treasury auto-sweeping, payment orchestration, and multichain liquidity. Building secure, compliant, multichain wallet infrastructure in-house is complex, costly, and risky for most fintech teams and Blockradar abstracts all of that away.

The results speak for themselves. Within its first 12 months of production deployment, Blockradar's platform processed more than $600M in payment volume across 150,000 wallets and 700,000 transactions for fintechs across Africa and Latin America. Blockradar integrates USDC, EURC, and Circle Gateway and was a Day One partner at Gateway's mainnet launch. 

Hurupay: another step toward global financial access

Global South · @HurupayApp

The demand for USD accounts outside the US is enormous. The infrastructure to serve that demand is not. Hurupay is another Day One builder, working on building a stablecoin-native platform offering access to dollar-denominated financial services.  It gives non-US individuals and businesses a real USD account with a routing number, in their own name.

When USD lands in the account from Upwork, Gusto, Deel, PayPal, or a US bank, it's instantly converted to USDC and credited to the user's wallet. From there, users can withdraw to local currency, spend via virtual card, earn yield, or hold in stable form. On the business side, Hurupay lets companies run batch payroll to distributed global teams in minutes.

The service is live, connecting 50,000 active users across 50+ countries like Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Indonesia, Philippines, Argentina, and Brazil. Hurupay has processed $100M+ in its first 15 months.

Myaza: pan-African payments

Africa · @myazahq

Moving money across African borders is still cumbersome because banks don't interoperate, FX is unpredictable, and compliance requirements differ market by market. The result for SMEs, freelancers, and platform operators is a messy stack of multiple wallets, cash agents, and workarounds, all of which carry their own risk and cost.

Myaza is building a pan-African payment network that collapses that complexity into a single, reliable layer. Its app supports multi-currency wallets and instant transfers across 21 African currencies powered by FX and USDC and EURC cross-border settlement under local compliance frameworks. Users can also benefit from virtual USD cards, bill pay functionality, and savings accounts.

Myaza has 25,000+ registered users, is growing 23% month over month, has processed approximately $15 million in total transaction volume, and has secured infrastructure partnerships with Fincra, Yellow Card, and Bridge.

DAPL (Arrel Technology): frictionless merchant payments

Global South · @ArrelTechnology

Arrel brings eight years of institutional digital asset infrastructure experience, along with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certifications, to a new challenge: making USDC payments as frictionless for African merchants as Stripe is for Western ones.

Its new product, USDC Omni-Checkout & Treasury Router, built on Circle CCTP, lets merchants accept USDC or EURC on any CCTP-supported blockchain via a plug-and-play payment link or checkout button — no developer work required. Funds are burn-and-minted to the merchant's treasury wallet with real-time KYT screening, and merchants offramp directly to local currency through their own exchange account, bypassing costly OTC intermediaries entirely.

The Global South-focused service reports $180M in annual payment volume with 128% year-over-year growth.

Payrit: instant cross-border payments

Africa · @payritHQ

African consumers spend over $54 billion annually making cross-border payments and most of those payments are challenging. The experience of having money you can't easily spend is, as Payrit's founders put it, "all too common."

Payrit is a USDC-powered cross-border mobile wallet that addresses this problem entirely on the backend. Users interact only in their local currency while Payrit handles USDC conversion behind the scenes, tapping global crypto liquidity and aggregating order books across chains in a single transaction. The result is near instant settlement at live FX rates, without the need to hold multi-currency liquidity reserves or accept the risk of FX spread.

Having already processed over 12K total transactions, Payrit has onboarded Nigerian users sending and receiving across the UK, Canada, and Africa, with multi-wallet support across EVM, Stellar, and Solana.

ViFi Labs: near-zero slippage FX

Global South · @ViFi_Labs

The $7 trillion global FX market has almost no onchain representation for emerging market currencies. Most existing DeFi venues weren't designed for FX, which means they suffer from high slippage, fragmented liquidity, and execution quality that falls far short of what remittance companies, fintechs, and banks actually need. The consequence is a hard ceiling on stablecoin adoption in markets like Nigeria, Brazil, and Colombia where local stablecoins exist but lack the swap infrastructure and liquidity to function at scale.

ViFi Labs is building the exchange that changes this as a capital-efficient decentralized FX protocol optimized for stablecoin-to-stablecoin exchange across emerging market currencies. Its novel AMM architecture is designed specifically for correlated assets, delivering near-zero slippage for NGN, BRL, and COP pairs, which are currencies representing over $9 billion in combined daily FX spot volume.

ViFi is already deployed on Arc Testnet and working towards a mainnet launch. Arc serves as the primary liquidity and FX execution hub, with Circle Gateway handling crosschain USDC movement.

SFx Money: a stablecoin neobank

MENA · @usesfxmoneyapp

SFx Money (Sora Financial Technologies) started with a diaspora in Turkey and African students who needed to send money home cheaply and reliably. From that focus, it has grown into a full digital neobank, enabling users to send, receive, and save in USD using USDC, with free transfers between Turkey and 16+ African countries, the US, UK and the EU.

SFx is one of the cohort's repeat Circle grant recipients with a traction curve that went from ~300 users in December 2024 to 8,800+ users by July 2026. Since their local success in Turkey and the MENA region, SFx has integrated CCTP v2, launched a card product and multiple currency account products.

Flezpay: dynamic pricing for merchants

Africa · @flezpay

The problem Flezpay is solving isn't unique to crypto. It's a mainstream retail problem that happens to have a stablecoin answer. In African markets with volatile local currencies, merchants constantly struggle to update prices. Static price tags go stale during inflation spikes or FX shifts, creating margin loss, customer confusion, and operational chaos at the point of sale. At the same time, most customers still pay in cash because digital payment options are either unavailable, unreliable, or require cash conversion with added fees.

Flezpay's answer is a retail-first platform that uses AI-powered smart QR codes to dynamically adjust product prices in real time and bridges fiat and USDC payments at the checkout counter. Merchants list products, generate QR codes, and customers scan to see live prices and pay in local currencies or USDC. Payments settle through Circle Wallets with per-deposit wallet addresses that auto-sweep to the merchant's fiat balance.

With 1,613 retail stores onboarded, and $31K+ in monthly recurring revenue, Flezpay is building the AI-powered operating system for African retail.

What this cohort tells us

Looking across these projects, a few patterns stand out in terms of what Africa and the Global South needed to unlock solutions for regionally-relevant use cases like better remittance services, cross-border payments, FX, proper banking, and even dynamic pricing.

USDC is the plumbing. Every one of these teams uses USDC on Arc as settlement infrastructure. Their users simply see that money arrives in seconds and they're not losing 6% to FX spread. While the blockchain is invisible to them, the outcomes are very tangible.

The infrastructure gap is a “grow the pie” opportunity. Instead of competing with each other, projects have orthogonal purposes that add to the wider utility of the space. Projects like Blockradar and Arrel are building the rails that consumer-facing products like Hurupay, Myaza, and Payrit can run on. The stack is being assembled piece by piece, from wallet infrastructure and FX protocols to merchant checkout and retail POS. Arc provides the execution layer that ties them all together.

These founders have context no outsider can replicate. The projects that have received grants are not outsiders trying to “unlock emerging markets.” They’re locals with deep knowledge of how existing infrastructure worked pre-Arc and how it can be improved. The best solutions to hard financial access problems are coming from people who have lived inside those problems.

It’s still early for Circle developers

The Circle Developer Grant program continues to evolve, with increasing focus on Arc-native projects and teams building at the intersection of USDC infrastructure and real-world financial access. This cohort is one signal of what that looks like in practice.

Arc will continue to highlight innovations coming out of the program, especially as more use case trends become observable. Visit our Circle Grants page to learn more and participate with your own project.

If you're building on Arc or exploring what Circle's developer infrastructure makes possible, resources are available at Circle Docs and Arc Docs.