HostCap Joins the Circle Alliance Program as Stablecoin Demand Accelerates Across Africa

The company has processed more than $300 million USD in transactions, built over 250,000 wallets, and serves more than 40 clients.

Sending $200 across borders costs an average of 6.65% of the transaction value, according to World Bank data from the second quarter of 2024. An international wire transfer can consume up to $50 in fees before a single dollar reaches its destination. These are not surprising figures. But in a year when stablecoin-based B2B payments grew 30-fold in just two years, growing from under $100 million in early 2023 to more than $3 billion by 2025, according to BCG, they are increasingly the argument for why the payment infrastructure conversation has shifted.

This is the backdrop against which HostCap has joined the Circle Alliance Program.

HostCap is a Nigeria-based financial infrastructure company that provides the building blocks for fintechs, startups, and enterprises to launch wallets, issue virtual and physical cards, run cross-border settlements, and handle on-ramp and off-ramp operations across 25+ currencies. The company has processed more than $300 million USD in transactions, built over 250,000 wallets for customers and businesses, and serves more than 40 clients across Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Its product suite includes a Wallet-as-a-Service offering, a global settlement layer, virtual and physical card issuing via Visa, Mastercard, Verve, and Afrigo, and Host+ Pay.

Joining the Circle Alliance Program, therefore, places HostCap formally within the global ecosystem built around Circle's stablecoin infrastructure.

What Is the Circle Alliance Program?

Circle Internet Financial is the company behind USDC, the dollar-denominated stablecoin with $77.8 billion currently in circulation. The Circle Alliance Program is Circle's partner network, a curated directory of more than 1,279 companies that have built live solutions on Circle's platform, support USDC or EURC, or provide services to the broader stablecoin ecosystem. Membership is not open to companies still in the planning phase. A qualifying member must already have a functioning product. This baseline requirement is what makes the Alliance a working network rather than a marketing list.

Members are organised across four categories: payments, currency access, trading services, and professional services. The Alliance directory functions as a marketplace where financial institutions and enterprises searching for stablecoin-capable infrastructure partners can find vetted options. For members, it offers visibility alongside access to a global peer community of operators building on the same underlying rails.

The programme has a stated purpose that goes beyond business development. Circle describes the Alliance as a network working to “innovate and expand financial inclusion for billions of people around the world.” The mechanics that support that purpose are practical: a compliance-oriented ecosystem of financial institutions and fintechs using USDC as a settlement layer for cross-border transactions that would otherwise rely on legacy correspondent banking infrastructure.

Why HostCap Joined

For HostCap, the decision reflects where the demand is already going. In Nigeria, USDC transaction volume grew 412% year-on-year in 2025 and now exceeds $3 billion per month, according to BCG's Global Payments Report published in September 2025. That kind of adoption does not emerge in a vacuum. It is driven by real use cases: dollar-denominated savings for businesses navigating currency volatility, cross-border payroll for remote teams, and B2B trade settlements where naira-to-naira rails fall short.

Given that a large percentage of HostCap’s clientele are building within the African ecosystem, joining the Circle Alliance Programme formalises an alignment that was already present at the product level and adds the network, the directory visibility, and the institutional signal that comes with membership.

Alliance membership also positions HostCap for deeper integration with the Circle Payments Network (CPN), Circle's institutional settlement protocol that connects Originating Financial Institutions and Beneficiary Financial Institutions for USDC-based cross-border transactions. CPN is designed specifically to reduce the cost and complexity of correspondent banking, replacing multi-day settlement windows with near-instant finality on public blockchain networks. For a fintech API platform serving cross-border payment flows across multiple corridors, being embedded within that settlement ecosystem matters in no little way, commercially.

What This Means for HostCap's Clients

For the fintechs and startups building on HostCap's API, the practical significance is infrastructure depth. Products built on HostCap now sit within a network directly connected to USDC's core rails. A payroll product, a cross-border settlement tool, or a wallet designed for markets with limited banking access can operate with greater confidence in the settlement layer underneath.

Africa is the region where this kind of infrastructure depth carries the most immediate value. Real-time account-to-account payment volumes on the continent grew 56% year-on-year in 2024, the highest of any region globally, according to BCG. Transaction-related payment revenues in the Middle East and Africa are projected to grow at roughly 9% annually through 2029. The market is moving fast. The question for companies in this space is whether their infrastructure can keep up.

HostCap's B2B platform and HostFi, its direct-to-consumer product, are both better positioned within that environment as Circle Alliance members. When a potential client is comparing infrastructure providers, the Alliance listing signals technical and compliance alignment with a regulated stablecoin issuer that enterprise teams already recognise.

The Broader Context

“Compliance will become a competitive advantage” – Joseph Oloyede, Data Analyst, TC Insights

Regulatory frameworks like the European Union's MiCA regulation and the United States' GENIUS Act are providing clearer rules for how stablecoins operate, which is accelerating institutional confidence in building on them. In Africa, TechCabal Insights' January 2026 analysis of the continent's tech ecosystem argued that compliance is becoming a competitive advantage for fintechs, with the companies winning institutional capital and banking partnerships being those that treat regulatory alignment as a design requirement from the start.HostCap joining the Circle Alliance Program is a move in that direction. The cross-border payments market is on a trajectory from $194 trillion in 2024 to a projected $320 trillion by 2032. The companies that end up carrying a meaningful share of that volume will be those that built the right infrastructure relationships early. HostCap has now made its position clear.