Flutterwave Secures Circle Investment For Stablecoins

Flutterwave has received an investment from Circle Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Circle Internet Group, a financial technology company listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CRCL, to expand stablecoin-powered payments and settlement infrastructure across Africa.

The investment is centred on USDC, which stands for USD Coin, a stablecoin issued by Circle. Under this arrangement, merchants using Flutterwave can collect payments locally in their own currency and settle in USDC, with transactions clearing almost instantly and at significantly lower cost than traditional bank transfers, which have historically cost businesses upwards of eight percent in fees and taken several days to process.

Flutterwave’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, spoke to what the company is building toward.

“This support from Circle Ventures is about backing the rails that will power the next era of global money movement from Africa. Stablecoins like USDC are no longer an experiment; they are becoming core financial infrastructure. By embedding USDC settlement into our current payments infrastructure, we are building a system that lets businesses move money at the speed of the internet. This fundamentally changes how payments from Africa connect to the world and it positions Flutterwave as the default stablecoin gateway for the continent.”

This investment follows a series of moves Flutterwave has made over the past year to embed stablecoins into its payments offering. In 2025, the company joined the Circle Payments Network and began testing stablecoin payments on Polygon, one of the world’s leading blockchain networks, with a select group of merchants. It also integrated stablecoin wallet infrastructure into its existing platform, enabling merchants to hold and transact in both USDC and USDT.  a dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Tether, directly within Flutterwave’s dashboard, without needing a separate crypto wallet, and with settlement fees kept below one percent.

The timing reflects a market that is moving quickly. Global stablecoin circulation has crossed $300 billion. USDC reached $75.3 billion in circulation by the end of 2025 — a 72 percent year-on-year increase, while the total value of USDC transactions surged 247 per cent over the same period to $11.9 trillion. Africa’s share of that growth is significant. Sub-Saharan Africa received over $205 billion in on-chain transaction value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52 percent jump from the previous year, placing the continent among the fastest-growing stablecoin markets globally.

Flutterwave has also drawn attention from other major players in the space. In June 2026, Ripple -the American technology company behind the XRP digital currency and the RLUSD stablecoin, took a stake in Flutterwave at a $3.2 billion Series E valuation, with plans to embed RLUSD and the XRP Ledger, Ripple’s own blockchain network, into Flutterwave’s payment rails across 34 African markets. The company has maintained that it is stablecoin-agnostic, supporting multiple digital currencies on its platform rather than committing to one. Whether that position holds as the financial weight behind individual stablecoins continues to grow remains to be seen.

Flutterwave has processed over one billion transactions worth more than $50 billion across the continent. Its platform already supports a wide range of payment channels, local debit and credit cards, bank transfers, mobile money, USSD, and now stablecoins, meaning a business in Lagos can receive a payment from a customer in Nairobi through whichever method works best for them, without switching platforms. The real test now is whether adding stablecoin settlement on top of that infrastructure delivers on the promise of faster, cheaper cross-border commerce, or whether the expanding stack of options creates more complexity than it solves for the average merchant trying to get paid.