Aptos Labs and Yellow Card Partner to Bring Instant, Zero-Fee Stablecoin Transfers Across Africa
Palo Alto, United States, July 2nd, 2025, Chainwire
Aptos Labs and Yellow Card Partner to Bring Instant, Zero-Fee Stablecoin Transfers Across Africa
Aptos integration enables seamless, low-cost USDT and USDC trading for Yellow Card customers in 20 African countries
Aptos Labs and Yellow Card have launched instant, gas-sponsored stablecoin transfers across 20 African countries, giving millions of customers faster, more affordable access to USDT and other stablecoins supported by Yellow Card. During this campaign, all transfers on the Aptos network will settle instantly with sponsored gas fees, enabling frictionless payments for everything from cross-border transfers to daily purchases.
Stablecoin adoption is accelerating across Africa, fueled by practical, everyday use cases like small business payments, treasury management, and cross-border transfers. Today, Sub-Saharan Africa now leads globally in stablecoin usage, with over 54 million digital asset customers across the continent, according to Yellow Card research, a clear signal that users are seeking faster, cheaper, and more stable alternatives to traditional financial systems.
With this integration, Yellow Card customers can move stablecoins instantly, without high fees or long delays. Whether it’s a small-to-medium sized business managing cross-border payroll, a financial institution facilitating high-volume transfers, or a family receiving support from relatives overseas, customers can access sub-second transaction finality and zero gas fees. Built for mobile-first, high-volume markets, Aptos delivers the speed, scale, and affordability needed to power the next generation of real-world payments across Africa.
“We’re excited to support Yellow Card in bringing millions of users seamless access to USDT and USDC across 20 countries,” said Alex Heuer, Head of Payments at Aptos Labs. “Africa is leading the way in stablecoin adoption for practical use cases, and our zero-fee, instant settlement capabilities are perfectly suited to meet this demand.”
This initiative builds on Aptos’ integration of the largest stablecoins by market capitalization, Tether’s USDT, Circle’s USDC and USDe, expanding the network’s role in global payments infrastructure. In 2024, global stablecoin transfer volume reached $27.6 trillion, surpassing the combined annual volume of Visa and Mastercard.
“We’re thrilled to partner with Aptos Labs to bring instant, zero‑fee stablecoin transfers across 20 African countries,” said Gillian Darko, Chief of Staff and Director of Strategy of Yellow Card.
“As demand for stablecoins continues to grow across the continent, cost‑effective and frictionless transactions are critical – and that’s exactly what this partnership delivers. By eliminating gas fees and enabling instant settlement on the robust, next‑generation Layer 1 Aptos network, we’re empowering millions to access faster, more affordable USDT and other stablecoins for everything from cross‑border transfers to everyday purchases. This is a major step forward in advancing financial inclusion and stability across Africa”.
Aptos’ architecture is purpose-built to support real-time, high-volume stablecoin transactions. With sub-second finality, extremely low fees, and throughput consistently above 11,000 TPS in production, it offers the performance needed to move stablecoins from niche use cases into everyday payments, especially in high-demand regions like Africa. As stablecoins evolve into critical payment infrastructure, Aptos’ scalable design, developer tooling, and support for advanced features like parallel execution and account abstraction make it one of the few blockchains capable of powering instant, cost-effective transactions at scale.
To get started, users can visit Yellow Card or learn more at Aptos.
About Aptos
Aptos is a next-generation Layer 1 blockchain. Aptos’ breakthrough technology, scalable infrastructure and user safeguards are designed to power the next generation of financial systems by offering unparalleled high throughput and low latency that can scale to billions of users.
About Aptos Labs
Aptos Labs is dedicated to creating network tooling and seamless usability for users of the Aptos network, a next-generation high-performance public Layer 1 blockchain. Aptos is backed by top-flight investors including a16z, Katie Haun, Apollo Global Management Dragonfly, PayPal Ventures, and Franklin Templeton Investments, among others.
About Yellow card
Yellow Card is the largest and first licensed Pan-Africa stablecoin-based infrastructure provider, operating in 20 countries across the continent and in the emerging markets. Their mission is to empower the African continent by making it easy for individuals and businesses of all sizes to make international payments, protect their financial assets, manage their treasury function, and access hard currency liquidity. Leveraging the power of stablecoins pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar (e.g. USDC, USDT, and PYUSD), they deliver their innovative solutions through their commercial trading function, their B2B products (i.e. their payments API and “widget”), and their retail and small business platform.