When Onafriq announced a partnership with Privy on July 29, 2026, to build “regulated stablecoin infrastructure for B2Bs across Africa,” it was not the company’s first such announcement this
When Onafriq announced a partnership with Privy on July 29, 2026, to build “regulated stablecoin infrastructure for B2Bs across Africa,” it was not the company’s first such announcement this year.
Conduit arrived in February, framed around institutional cross-border settlement. VALR followed in April, publicly positioned as Onafriq, tapping into VALR’s infrastructure for local-currency funding. Yuno followed in June, positioned around merchant payment acceptance and orchestration for global merchants. Then came Privy in July.
Put to Onafriq directly, the pattern of repeated, similarly worded partnership announcements raised an obvious question: are these four deals overlapping, redundant, or actually distinct pieces of infrastructure? The company’s answer was specific enough to be checked against its own public record, and in at least one case, it corrects that record outright.
According to Onafriq, each partner occupies a different layer of the stack.
Conduit provides institutional cross-border settlement infrastructure, enabling businesses to move funds internationally using stablecoins with built-in fiat conversion.
Yuno strengthens merchant payment acceptance and orchestration, helping businesses accept and manage multiple payment methods, including future digital asset capabilities, a role that matches Yuno’s own June 9, 2026, announcement of the partnership, which described Onafriq’s network being integrated into Yuno’s orchestration platform for global merchants, live across Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, and Uganda from launch.
Privy focuses on embedded custodial and non-custodial wallet infrastructure, enabling businesses to build secure digital wallets into their customer experience without users ever having to manage seed phrases or set up wallets themselves.
Together, Onafriq says, this is meant to function as one interoperable ecosystem spanning wallet infrastructure, liquidity, settlement, and payment acceptance, giving the company flexibility to match a solution to a specific customer, market, and regulatory environment.
Dare Okoudjou, founder and CEO of OnafriqHow Onafriq says the 4 partnerships divide upThe VALR answer is where Onafriq’s account diverges most sharply from how that partnership was originally reported.
The April announcement was widely framed as Onafriq adopting VALR’s infrastructure for local-currency funding of African crypto users. Onafriq’s own description of the relationship reverses that framing entirely: “We will not be using their infrastructure. They will be using our infrastructure, as we will be facilitating on-ramp and off-ramp in the markets where regulation allows.”
Onafriq also confirmed VALR is the one live deployment among the four, telling this publication the partnership has “just gone live recently,” language it did not use for Conduit, Yuno, or Privy.
Asked specifically whether the Conduit partnership, the earliest of the four and the one announced with the most fanfare in February, has processed any live transactions or settled any real corridor since launch, Onafriq did not answer the question as asked.
Its response was: “We’re happy with the progress that the partnership is making.” No transaction volume, corridor, or timeline was offered, either for Conduit specifically or for any of the four partnerships beyond the VALR confirmation.
On Privy specifically, Onafriq was more precise about where things actually stand. “The partnership marks the start of a structured collaboration rather than an immediate commercial launch,” the company said, describing current work as technical integration, solution design, and pilot use cases, alongside engagement with regulatory stakeholders where required.
Onafriq described its broader approach as validating technology, regulatory frameworks, and customer experience through controlled pilots before any wider commercial deployment, with customer availability to be announced market by market as each becomes ready.
Read together, Onafriq’s own account of its stablecoin partnerships is more measured than the announcements themselves, though not uniformly so.
Yuno has been live in seven markets since its June 9 announcement, and VALR, by Onafriq’s account, has “just gone live recently.” That leaves Conduit and Privy, the two partnerships most explicitly branded around stablecoins specifically, as the ones still short of commercial launch by Onafriq’s own description, with Conduit’s actual progress since February left unspecified beyond a general statement of satisfaction.
That distinction matters. The two partnerships built around merchant acceptance and on/off-ramp infrastructure are operating today, while the two built around stablecoin settlement and embedded wallets, the parts of the stack most directly tied to the word “stablecoin” in each press release, remain either unquantified or explicitly pre-launch.
Building layered, interoperable infrastructure across wallets, settlement, liquidity, and acceptance ahead of regulatory clarity is a defensible strategy for a fast-moving and still largely unregulated corner of African fintech.
But it does mean the run of stablecoin-branded partnership announcements in 2026 has, so far, delivered live product mainly on the parts of the stack least dependent on stablecoins actually working, a distinction the press releases themselves, uniformly upbeat and largely identical in tone, did not make clear on their own.
