Kora launches One Rail stablecoin payments for African cross-border merchants

Dubai-headquartered Kora has added a stablecoin layer to its payments infrastructure with One Rail, a product aimed at merchants moving money across African borders. The pitch is familiar, but the mechanics matter: faster settlement, lower FX costs, and a way to handle digital dollars inside the same stack that already does bank transfers, mobile money, and cards.

1. One Rail lets businesses receive, store, exchange and settle digital currency alongside fiat transactions through Kora’s existing platform. The initial supported assets are USDT and USDC, with more dollar-pegged stablecoins planned as customer demand grows and regulatory and operational conditions allow.
2. The rollout is aimed at problems African businesses already know too well: lengthy settlement times, high foreign exchange costs, limited access to dollar liquidity, and fragmented payment infrastructure across markets. Kora says stablecoins and their underlying settlement networks should reduce both the time and cost of moving funds between countries.
3. The product is built for merchants that do not have in-house blockchain expertise. Access comes through Kora’s existing APIs and developer tools, so the stablecoin rail plugs into the current payment stack rather than forcing a separate workflow.
4. Through the Kora Dashboard, merchants can create dedicated wallets, track transactions in real time, and use automated reconciliation. They can hold balances in digital dollars or convert them into supported local currencies, with payouts then sent into domestic bank accounts through Kora’s existing payout network.
5. The initial focus is merchant collections, payouts and treasury functions, including wallet creation, payment confirmation and manual settlement. Kora, previously known as Korapay, was founded in 2018 and says its platform now connects African businesses with the global digital economy across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Egypt and GiMAC.

Kora CEO and founder Dickson Nsofor said cross-border commerce in Africa is hindered by remittance costs averaging 8–8.8% compared with the 6.49% global average, while stablecoin ownership in Africa is now at 78%. For PSPs and merchants, that is the commercial case in one sentence: expensive fiat rails are being asked to compete with digital-dollar settlement networks that are already embedded in the operating model.