The wobbly table problem: can Stablecoins fix global payments?

WE'VE ALL been there. You're at a great restaurant, the food is exceptional, the company is sublime, but the table wobbles incessantly. Every time you reach for your drink, it rocks.

- ANDILE MASUKU

Every bite of food becomes an exercise in careful coordination.

The solution is simple—slide a matchbook under the short leg—but somehow no one ever does it.

Instead, we spend the entire evening managing around the dysfunction, accepting the irritation as part of the experience.

The global financial system suffers from the same wobbly table problem, only instead of disrupting dinner, it's costing African businesses billions and perpetuating economic exclusion on an industrial scale.

The matchbook solution might finally be at hand, in the form of stablecoins. But the questions surrounding this fix demand careful scrutiny.

$286 billion blind spot

The $286 billion (R5.1 trillion) trade corridor between Africa and China represents an enormous market served by infrastructure that treats African businesses as an afterthought.

Ola Oyetayo, Nigerian co-founder and CEO of Verto, revealed during a recent African Tech Roundup Podcast conversation that 96-97% of business cross-border payments still flow through traditional banks. It’s a statistic that exposes the profound resistance built into global finance.

“Traditional banks have no incentive to fix this,” Oyetayo observed. “The current system works perfectly well for developed markets. Why would they engineer solutions for markets they’ve systematically excluded?”

This exclusion isn't accidental; it’s architectural. Correspondent banking relationships, designed when emerging markets were peripheral to global trade, remain stubbornly unchanged despite those markets’ growing centrality to the future of global trade. Banks close on weekends. Settlement periods stretch interminably. Capital controls create regulatory mazes.