Rift is building the settlement layer stablecoins alone could not deliver for African cross-border payments.
A settlement network for African currencies is betting the industry has been solving the wrong problem. The real bottleneck is not speed. It is dollar liquidity, and it can be compressed by netting.
Rift, a settlement infrastructure company operating in African cross-border payments, is publicly outlining a claim its founders say the rest of the industry has spent a decade avoiding: the reason it remains expensive and slow to send money between two African countries is not a technology problem, and stablecoins on their own will not fix it.
The consumer experience of sending money across African borders has improved dramatically in the last decade. M-PESA, Airtel Money, and other mobile money operators now offer near-instant cross-border transfers to a phone in another country, and hundreds of millions of Africans use them daily. That layer works, and it works well. But it works for a specific slice of the problem: consumer-scale transfers, within an operator’s own network footprint, at amounts that fit inside daily limits. The moment payments move outside those parameters, to different networks, to business volumes, or across regulatory boundaries mobile money does not span, the underlying settlement problem returns in full.
For business payments, where the amounts are larger and mobile money limits do not apply, the wall is fully visible. A Kenyan importer paying a Tanzanian supplier at commercial volumes still routes through the United States dollar and correspondent banks abroad. The process takes three to five days, costs five to ten percent, and requires payment providers to keep hundreds of millions of dollars sitting idle in overseas pre-funded accounts. Cross-border business flow, where industrialization actually happens, remains stuck.
This dollar detour exists because there is no direct market between most African currencies. Nobody wants to hold currencies that step-devalue at scale, so every payment must convert through the dollar, whether the dollar is available or not.
A WALL ONRAMPS CANNOT CROSS
Onramps and offramps promised to solve this problem. According to Rift, they did not. They solved a different problem: they made it easier to get in and out of stablecoins. But the underlying wall, dollar scarcity and foreign exchange risk, remains. Africa does not produce enough dollars. Most African countries are net importers, so dollars leak out of the continent faster than they come in. Every cross-border payment must draw from this thin supply, and the scarcity is priced into every transaction as a premium.
This is why so many stablecoin-enabled payment platforms hit a ceiling. They can process small orders, but at scale they run into the same dollar liquidity wall as the correspondent banks they were supposed to replace. Speed alone does not solve the shortage. Regulatory barriers around the movement of foreign exchange add another layer of friction.
RIFT’S ANSWER: COMPRESS THE PROBLEM
Rift’s argument is that liquidity and FX risk cannot be deleted, but they can be compressed. On any given day, there are Kenyan businesses that need to pay Tanzania and Tanzanian businesses that need to pay Kenya. If both sides settle through a shared ledger, most of those payments cancel each other out. Only the small net difference at the end of the day, what Rift calls the residual, needs to actually settle in dollars.
The mechanism is called netting, and clearing houses have used it for over a century. What is new is applying it to African corridors on programmable infrastructure. Rift’s ledger records every obligation, matches offsetting flows continuously, and clears the residual through a shared settlement layer. Financial institutions plug into the network and share in a common settlement pool, rather than each pre-funding their own dollar reserves in New York or London.
| 3–5 | 5–10% | Up to 50% |
|---|---|---|
| DAYS TO SETTLE TODAY | COST OF A TYPICAL CORRIDOR | PRE-FUNDING RIFT AIMS TO ELIMINATE |
WHY NOW, AND WHY BLOCKCHAIN
The design is possible because of infrastructure that did not exist five years ago. Programmable settlement rails let a shared clearing utility record obligations and execute netted settlement in seconds, with multi-institution auditability that an off-chain clearing house could never match. And Kenya’s newly enacted Virtual Asset Service Providers Regulations 2026 create the compliance framework Rift has been building toward from the beginning.
The result is infrastructure that financial institutions, payment service providers, banks, and fintechs can integrate into their existing operations, offering their own users cross-border payment products with the settlement layer running underneath. Rift does not compete with banks. It gives them a shared clearing utility that materially reduces the capital they must keep idle across borders.
FIRST DESIGN PARTNER: BLOCKFINAX
Rift is working with BlockfinaX as its first design partner. BlockfinaX offers foreign exchange hedging solutions to businesses exposed to African currency volatility, a natural complement to Rift’s settlement layer. The two companies have signed a letter of intent, and BlockfinaX has been the first external partner to test Rift’s clearing infrastructure end to end.
“Onramps solved messaging. They did not solve liquidity, and they did not solve foreign exchange risk. We travelled Africa paying with USDC through ten different onramps and watched two thirds of orders fail. The wall is real. It is not a wall you code your way through. It is a wall you compress with netting, and that is exactly what we are building.”
— Amschel Kariuki, founder and CEO, Rift
WHAT COMES NEXT
Rift’s first netting corridor is Kenya–Tanzania, chosen because trade between the two countries is roughly balanced and the East African Community’s regulatory framework supports cross-border payments innovation. Uganda will follow, sharing the Kenya side of the network, so that flows can offset not only within a corridor but across the wider graph. Rift’s target for the next twelve months is three live corridors, measured netting efficiency above a defined threshold on each, and multiple financial institutions clearing through a single ledger under one published interoperability specification.
The company is engaging with Kenyan regulators under the country’s new virtual asset framework. Rift is currently raising a pre-seed round to fund the network’s expansion and the licensing pathway.
ABOUT RIFT
Rift is a settlement network for African currencies. The company provides infrastructure that lets financial institutions clear cross-border payments through a shared ledger, compressing dollar liquidity requirements through multilateral netting. Rift is a product of Sphere Ramp Ltd, incorporated in Kenya. Learn more at riftfi.com.
ABOUT BLOCKFINAX
BlockfinaX provides on-chain foreign exchange hedging solutions for businesses operating across African currency markets. The company is Rift’s first design partner. Learn more at blockfinax.com.
FURTHER READING
For deeper analysis of Rift’s compression thesis, corridor strategy, and product architecture, see the Rift blog: riftfi.com/blog.
Contact: Amschel Kariuki, Founder & CEO
Email: amschel@riftfi.com
Web: riftfi.com
Twitter/X: @tryrift · @amschelfi
