Africans are using crypto at scale, but almost none of the technology underneath it appears to be run on the continent. Chainalysis estimates that Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain crypto value between July 2024 and June 2025, up about 52% on the year, with Nigeria alone receiving $92.1 billion. That figure measures value that moved through the region, not the size of a market or what people hold, and it is the number behind most “Africa’s crypto boom” headlines. The harder question is who controls the layers a transfer passes through: the blockchain, the servers that connect an app to it, the cloud that hosts the app and the company that issues the token. The honest answer, after checking the main datasets, is that the continent is strong at the last step, turning dollars into naira and shillings, and thin or unmeasured at most of the rest.
Start with demand. In a June 16 report on Nigeria, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Nigeria receives about 60% of the stablecoin inflows into Sub-Saharan Africa, and that the country took in about $59 billion of crypto-asset inflows between July 2023 and June 2024. The $59 billion covers all crypto assets, not stablecoins alone, and covers an earlier year than Chainalysis’s $92.1 billion, so the two numbers describe different periods and should not be compared directly. The fund tied the demand to the naira’s sharp fall, high inflation and limited access to foreign exchange in 2023 and 2024. It also warned that heavy use of dollar stablecoins can resemble digital dollarisation, which could reduce demand for the naira and weaken the way central bank policy reaches the economy. Its advice was to protect macroeconomic stability and a credible currency, improve visibility into stablecoin transactions and give issuers clearer rules, since banning use would likely be only partly effective.
Now the machines. Ethernodes, a public tracker, lists about 8,000 Ethereum execution-layer nodes worldwide, and Africa accounts for roughly 28 to 29 of them, around 0.3%. When this newsroom checked the tracker, South Africa showed 12 nodes, Mauritius 10, Nigeria four, and Mali, Algeria and Ghana one each, while Kenya and Egypt did not appear. The article that prompted this post reported slightly different numbers (South Africa 13, Mauritius nine, no Ghana), which shows how much the live count moves from day to day. For comparison, the tracker shows the United States with about 2,400 and Germany with about 1,100. On the consensus layer, the nodes that agree which blocks are added, only South Africa (30) and Mauritius (about 10) appear, out of roughly 5,700. A low node count does not mean Africans cannot use Ethereum, because a wallet can connect to a node anywhere in the world. The tracker can also miss nodes, and cloud hosting can hide where one really sits, so the figures show where nodes appear to run, not who controls the network.
The more relevant dependence sits one layer up. Most apps do not run their own nodes; Ethereum’s documentation says developers often rent access from providers such as Alchemy, Infura, QuickNode or Blockdaemon, and that switching providers is usually a one-line code change. We found no public information on which providers African crypto firms use, so that question remains open. The token itself is also issued abroad. Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC are the main dollar stablecoins, and both are moving into Africa through partners. Tether announced a strategic investment in Kenya-based Kotani Pay in October 2025, without disclosing the amount, and said in September 2026 that it would work with Shiga Digital, which offers foreign exchange, treasury and over-the-counter services to African businesses, on a self-custodial wallet called ENTA and an institutional platform called Pulse, both built on Tether’s open-source Wallet Development Kit. No bank or fintech has been named as a Pulse customer, no launch date or countries have been given for ENTA, and Shiga’s Nigerian digital asset licence was reported to be in final approval and not yet held. Some outlets describe Shiga as Abu Dhabi-based; we could not confirm that. Circle and Onafriq, the payments network that links banks, mobile-money operators and merchants across more than 40 African markets, announced a USDC settlement pilot in April 2025, and Circle now says Onafriq settles in USDC through its network. The original announcement described a strategic partnership, with no financial terms disclosed.
African companies do hold the part users actually touch. An on-ramp turns local money into stablecoins, an off-ramp turns it back, and firms such as Onafriq, Kotani Pay, Yellow Card and Quidax do much of that work. That is real value and real regulatory exposure, but it sits on top of infrastructure and an issuer that African firms do not control. If a stablecoin issuer froze addresses, changed terms or lost a banking partner, the on- and off-ramps would feel it first.
The newest and most contested piece is the building layer. A mapping by the UK consultancy Data Landscapers, version two dated June 10, 2026, traced 306 data centres in 46 Sub-Saharan countries to their ultimate controlling owners. It classed 213, or 70%, as African-controlled, 39 (13%) as US-controlled, mostly in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, and found a global cloud provider present in 112 of the 213 African-controlled sites, or 53%. Treat the 70% with care. The authors call it a working analysis, collected and checked with AI tools using their own classification rubric. An April version covering the whole continent had reached the opposite conclusion, that foreign owners dominated. The June version removed 71 North African facilities and corrected errors, such as treating African groups held through offshore companies as foreign. The June version also defines control in the legal sense, and the authors say ownership is not the same as sovereignty: tenants, lenders and equipment suppliers have influence too. Huawei or ZTE equipment, construction or financing appears in 170 of the 306 facilities, or 56%. Nigeria’s concentration is separate: Intelpoint, Techpoint Africa’s research arm, counted 25 data centres in the country in February 2026, with 21 in Lagos, which makes one city a single point of failure for much of the country’s hosting.
What does this mean for people who build or regulate? The data shows African control at the edges, in the ramps and in a majority of buildings by one disputed count, and foreign control of the issuers and most of the network layer. It does not show that African firms are trapped, because the evidence on switching is thin. Changing a node provider is a one-line code change, but whether a company can change its cloud contract or find stablecoin liquidity as easily has not been documented. Regulators weighing the IMF’s warning could ask for something concrete: a register of which node, cloud and issuer dependencies licensed crypto firms rely on, and a plan for what happens if one is cut. Until someone publishes that, any claim that Africa’s crypto rails are either “sovereign” or “dependent” rests on partial numbers.
Sources: TheCable on the IMF Nigeria report; Channels Television on the IMF report; Tech.Africa on Chainalysis’s $205 billion figure; Ethernodes; Data Landscapers, v2 (June 2026); Data Landscapers, April 2026 version; Intelpoint on Africa’s data centres; crypto.news on Tether and Shiga; Daba Finance on Tether and Kotani Pay; Onafriq and Circle announcement; Technext, “Who controls the infrastructure behind Africa’s $205bn crypto market?”.
