Stablecoins were sold as a way to bypass the banks and brokers that have always sat between African businesses and the dollars they need. In practice, that hasn't happened. What's emerged instead is a new layer of wallet providers, liquidity firms, foreign exchange providers, and payment companies, stepping in to do the same job correspondent banks used to do: settling transactions, supplying liquidity, handling compliance, and connecting digital value to local payment systems. The intermediaries changed. The need for them didn't.
What's Actually Causing This
The root of the problem is simple: a blockchain can move a token instantly, but it cannot create naira, rand, or cedi liquidity, convert currencies, satisfy regulatory requirements, or plug into a country's domestic payment rails. Those functions still have to be performed by someone. As WeFi co-founder Maksym Sakharov put it to ITWeb Africa, stablecoins make settlement more direct, but liquidity, foreign exchange, compliance, and market access are separate problems that don't disappear just because the settlement layer changed. His expectation is that existing players will stretch to cover these gaps, and new specialists will emerge wherever there's value to capture. That's the middleman problem in a sentence: removing one bottleneck in the payment chain just creates demand for a new set of gatekeepers around the parts the blockchain can't solve on its own.
Decentralisation and the middleman
That expectation, new intermediaries filling the gaps banks leave behind, is itself proof of a popular misconception about what decentralisation was supposed to do. A lot of stablecoin enthusiasm rests on the idea that cutting banks out means handing unchecked power straight to the individual. But if that were true, Sakharov's prediction wouldn't make sense: there would be no gap for new specialists to fill, because no one would be managing liquidity, compliance, or access in the first place.
The fact that someone always steps in to perform those functions shows that every functioning blockchain system still needs a power control layer, whether through consensus mechanisms, governance structures, or the compliance and liquidity functions discussed above. Without that control, the ecosystem has no way to self-regulate, which means the new intermediaries stepping into this space don't hold unchecked power either; they operate within a system designed to keep them in check.
The real innovation decentralisation offers isn't the removal of power from banks, it's a redistribution of it. The goal was never to strip control from institutions and hand chaos to the individual. It was to properly manage that power so ordinary people and businesses could become active participants in the system, rather than passive recipients of whatever terms the banks dictated, while still empowering the broader economy in the process. That's the middleman problem in a sentence: removing one bottleneck in the payment chain just creates demand for a new, better-managed set of gatekeepers around the parts blockchain can't solve on its own.
Why This Is a Bigger Deal for Nigeria Than It Sounds
This isn't an abstract risk. The IMF reported in June 2026 that Nigeria alone accounts for roughly 60% of all stablecoin inflows into Sub-Saharan Africa, which means whoever builds the liquidity and compliance layer serving Nigerian users effectively controls the main gateway for stablecoin activity across the region.
At the same time, the Bank for International Settlements put the global stablecoin market at around $320 billion as of end-May 2026, most of it dollar-linked, showing just how much value is now flowing through infrastructure that sits almost entirely outside traditional banking oversight. Put together, this means a small number of intermediaries could end up holding the same chokehold power over Africa's digital dollar flows that correspondent banks once held over traditional cross-border payments, except with far less regulatory visibility into who they are and how they operate.
That's the gap SiBAN continues to push regulators and industry players to close: clear rules for who these new intermediaries are, what standards they're held to, and how accountability gets built into a layer of infrastructure that's already moving billions.
