Flutterwave, Africa’s leading payments technology company, has taken a decisive step toward making stablecoins a mainstream part of the continent’s payments fabric by partnering with blockchain infrastructure provider Turnkey and global payments platform Nuvion. The collaboration will introduce stablecoin balances for merchants and users across Flutterwave’s suite of services, delivering an embedded wallet experience that the company says will be secure, flexible and verifiable.
The new infrastructure, built on Turnkey’s verifiable blockchain tools and Nuvion’s AI-powered global banking and payment platform, is designed to sit alongside Flutterwave’s existing fiat balances such as USD and NGN. Initially tested with a select group of merchants, the rollout will expand to make USDC and USDT balances available to all Flutterwave customers who complete KYC and onboarding requirements.
“To accelerate business growth in Africa, we must make it safe, easy, and affordable for businesses to accept all forms of regulated payment methods, including stablecoin, from a global customer base,” said Nkem Abuah, Lead, GEPP ROW, Remittances & Stablecoin Partnerships at Flutterwave. “By enabling stablecoin balances powered by Turnkey, we are ensuring that multinationals, African enterprises, and individuals using Flutterwave will have access to low-cost, faster, and always-on cross-border payments with stablecoins,” Nkem added.
Turnkey, which provides the verifiable infrastructure for embedded wallets, automation and provable security, welcomed the partnership as a logical expansion of its client base. “Flutterwave has shown the transformative potential of stablecoins in helping people start and grow businesses globally,” said Bryce Ferguson, CEO and co-founder of Turnkey. “We share Flutterwave’s belief that stablecoins offer an incredibly efficient way to accelerate payments and put more money directly into the hands of business owners rather than intermediaries. Through Turnkey’s embedded wallet infrastructure, we’re proud to power Flutterwave’s stablecoin payments and support their mission to empower the next generation of African innovators.”
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The collaboration places Flutterwave among a growing number of fintech, DeFi and trading platforms using Turnkey’s technology; the company counts clients such as Polymarket, Axiom, Alchemy, World and Moonshot among those leveraging its verifiable infrastructure. Over the past year, Turnkey has raised its profile in the industry: it was named one of CNBC World’s Top Fintech Companies for 2025, launched Turnkey Verifiable Cloud in private beta to extend provable security to sensitive workloads, introduced verifiable wallets, added fiat onramp support via MoonPay and Coinbase, and open-sourced QuorumOS, the operating system for its verifiable computing environment.
For merchants on Flutterwave, the embedded wallet capability promises smoother acceptance of stablecoins without forcing businesses to manage separate crypto infrastructure. For customers and remitters, stablecoin balances could mean lower fees, faster settlement and a payments rail that is always-on across borders, features that have long been attractive to businesses operating across Africa’s fragmented banking landscape.
The move signals Flutterwave’s broader vision of making stablecoins a foundational element of Africa’s financial ecosystem, one that can serve as a backbone for cross-border commerce, remittances and new financial products. If the pilot performs as expected, the partnership could accelerate the adoption of regulated stablecoins across a wide range of merchants and enterprises that already rely on Flutterwave’s payments infrastructure.
As testing continues with a controlled set of merchants, the industry will be watching to see whether Flutterwave’s stablecoin balances deliver on promises of speed, cost-efficiency and security, and whether this model becomes a template for other payments providers seeking to bridge fiat and crypto rails across emerging markets.
