Stablecoin Payments Are Becoming a Developer Problem

Stablecoins have spent years inside crypto trading. Their role in payments is becoming much more interesting.

Yellow Card recently raised $40 million to expand its stablecoin infrastructure across Africa. The company provides infrastructure for businesses that need to move money across markets, where traditional payment systems can be fragmented and expensive.

The funding itself is less interesting than the type of infrastructure being built around stablecoins.

A cross-border payment starts with a simple requirement: move a specific amount of value from one party to another.

The underlying system has to deal with several more problems.

Which stablecoin should be used? Which blockchain should carry the transaction? How does the recipient receive the funds? Where does the conversion into local currency happen?

These decisions become part of the software architecture.

A developer building a stablecoin payment system therefore has to think beyond the token contract.

The application needs to identify the network used for each transaction and monitor the blockchain for incoming transfers. It needs to distinguish a confirmed payment from a transaction that has only been broadcast.

The accounting layer has another job.

A merchant may price an order in local currency while the customer pays in USDT or USDC. The system needs to record the original amount, the asset, the network and the exchange rate used for settlement.

A payment can look simple from the user's perspective while several separate systems process it underneath.

The conversion step can create another dependency.

A merchant accepting stablecoins may eventually need local currency. That requires access to liquidity and an off-ramp capable of settling funds into the merchant's banking system.

This is where stablecoin infrastructure starts looking more like traditional fintech infrastructure.

Wallets and blockchains handle the movement of value. Payment processors handle transaction logic. Liquidity providers and exchanges connect digital assets with local currencies. Compliance systems monitor transactions and screen counterparties.

The developer has to connect these pieces without making the user understand how each one works.

Africa provides a particularly useful environment for testing this model because cross-border payments involve many currencies and financial systems.

A stablecoin can provide a common settlement asset across those markets. The application still has to solve the local part of the transaction.

That means stablecoins do not remove the need for payment infrastructure. They change where some of the infrastructure sits.

The blockchain handles settlement. The application handles routing, accounting, verification and the user experience.

This also changes how developers should evaluate blockchain networks.

Transaction fees matter. So do confirmation times, wallet support, liquidity and the availability of reliable APIs. A network with low fees can still create problems if exchanges, wallets or payment providers do not support it.

The same applies to stablecoins.

USDT and USDC may both represent a dollar value, but they can exist on different networks and have different liquidity depending on the market.

A payment application cannot treat the asset name as sufficient information.

It needs to know the asset, the network and the destination.

That sounds like a small implementation detail. At scale, it becomes part of the entire payment flow.

The $40 million raised by Yellow Card points toward a market where stablecoins are becoming infrastructure for moving money between financial systems.

For developers, the interesting part is what gets built around the stablecoin once the token itself becomes easy to move.

The next generation of crypto payment products may depend less on creating new assets and more on making existing digital dollars work smoothly across wallets, blockchains, exchanges and local financial systems.