Kora Launches One Rail to Add Stablecoin Payments for African Merchants

Kora has launched One Rail, a payment rail that lets African merchants collect, hold, convert, and settle funds in stablecoins alongside fiat. For high-risk PSPs and cross-border merchants, the practical point is straightforward: it adds another settlement option where FX costs, slow transfers, and limited USD liquidity still shape the economics of getting paid.

1. Kora says One Rail expands its pan-African payment infrastructure to support stablecoins through the same Kora APIs and developer tools merchants already use. The product is aimed at teams without technical blockchain expertise, so stablecoin acceptance sits inside the existing payments stack rather than as a separate project.
2. The initial stablecoin support includes USDT and USDC, with additional major USD-backed stablecoins to be added based on demand and regulatory and operational readiness. In other words: Kora is starting with the obvious dollar proxies and leaving room for more, but only where the compliance and operations pieces are in place.
3. The integration includes dedicated wallet generation for receiving stablecoin payments, real-time tracking, and automated payment reconciliation through the Kora Dashboard. Merchants can hold digital dollar balances or convert them into supported local fiat currencies, then settle directly into local bank accounts via Kora’s payout rails.
4. Kora is positioning One Rail against a familiar set of frictions in African cross-border commerce: slow international settlement times, high foreign exchange conversion costs, limited access to USD liquidity, and fragmented infrastructure across markets. The company also cites remittance costs averaging 8–8.8% versus the 6.49% global average.
5. CEO and Founder Dickson Nsofor said stablecoin ownership in Africa is now at 78%. That is the sort of number PSPs pay attention to: if merchants already hold and move digital dollars, the question becomes less “should we support this?” and more “how do we route, convert, and settle it without creating a new operational mess?”