Africa Stablecoin Summit 2026: Cape Town, 12-13 November

The Africa Stablecoin Summit 2026 runs on 12 and 13 November 2026 in Cape Town, South Africa. It is the second edition of a meeting organised by Chasing Mavericks, a stablecoin research and convening institute with an office in the Nairobi area, and it is aimed at central bankers, regulators, banks and stablecoin issuers rather than retail traders. The organiser lists the Baxter Theatre as the venue. Tickets on Quicket start at R3,350.

The theme this year is “Stablecoins at Scale: Institutional Adoption & Financial Infrastructure”. The timing gives it a local hook. On 28 May 2026 the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) and the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) said that crypto assets used for domestic payments, stablecoins included, fall outside the country’s payment system law for now.

Programme: payments, custody and supervision

No session agenda had been published on the official summit site as of 19 October 2026. The Quicket listing describes a two-day format of keynotes, panels, closed-door roundtables, masterclasses and case studies.

Topics named there include cross-border payments, FX corridors, custody, reserve transparency, AML/CFT rules and regulatory supervision. The organiser frames its own objectives around institutional adoption, closer policy alignment on licensing and anti-money-laundering rules, treasury and remittance use cases, infrastructure and commercial deals. In its words, the summit targets “C-suite executives, regulators, central bankers”.

Confirmed speakers at the Africa Stablecoin Summit 2026

The summit site names eight speakers so far, without session titles or times:

• Gideon Greaves, Managing Director, Supercoin
• Greshen Naidoo, Head of Compliance, Supercoin
• Nick Philpott, Founder, Zodia Markets
• Freddie Omany, Group Executive Partnerships and Country Director Kenya, PawaPay
• Simon Dingle, Founder of Inves Capital and of the ZARP stablecoin
• Dale Russell CA(SA), Founder and Director, Moore Blockchain & Digital Assets JHB and TrustReserve Solutions
• Derrick Ochago, Regional Institutional Manager for stablecoin correspondent banking in Africa, Anchorage Digital
• Parag Monteiro, Global Head of Digital Assets Platform and Stablecoin Payments, Standard Chartered CIB

Supercoin is the title sponsor. Tether takes the stage sponsorship, PawaPay sits at diamond level and ZARP and Utila at gold level. ZARC is billed as the “Official Local Stablecoin Partner”. Ecosystem partners include Women in Blockchain, CryptoMondays Cape Town, the Ghana FinTech Payments Association, the Chamber of Digital Assets and the Africa Web3 Institute. Sponsorships are paid positions, so a logo on the bill says nothing about the quality of the company behind it.

Tickets: from R3,350 on Quicket

Quicket shows a starting price of R3,350 and opening hours from 08:00 on Thursday 12 November to 17:00 on Friday 13 November, South African time. That is all that is public. The listing gives no breakdown of ticket tiers, and neither Quicket nor the organiser says what the price covers.

Access is a second open point. Chasing Mavericks runs some of its events on invitation only, including its Abidjan Stablecoin Conference on 15 October 2026. The Cape Town summit, by contrast, is sold through a public ticketing page.

Venue: the Baxter Theatre in Rondebosch

According to the organiser, the summit is held at the Baxter Theatre. The Baxter Theatre Centre, owned by the University of Cape Town, sits on Main Road in Rondebosch. Quicket confirms Cape Town as the city but does not name a venue. Neither page gives parking or transport details.

South Africa keeps UTC+2 all year, so in November Cape Town is one hour ahead of Paris and Rome.

The 2025 edition: 300 leaders and a Binance headline sponsor

The first summit took place in November 2025 over two days. Citizen Digital reported on 13 November 2025 that more than 300 senior leaders attended, under the theme “Harnessing Stablecoins for Africa’s Economic Resilience”. Binance powered that edition, with support from Tether, Visa and Telcoin, and Kotani Pay co-hosted it.

Speakers included Binance’s head of legal for Africa, a Visa executive for the CEMEA region and Kenyan MP Kimani Kuria, who chairs the National Assembly’s finance and national planning committee. Government and central bank officials from Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia and South Africa took part, alongside delegates from the UN, the IMF and the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS). Discussions covered regulation, interoperability, the SARB’s Project Khokha and the US GENIUS Act. Binance does not appear on the 2026 sponsor list.

Stablecoin regulation in South Africa before the summit

South Africa has licensed crypto firms since 2023. On 19 October 2022 the FSCA declared crypto assets a financial product under the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services (FAIS) Act, and licensing of crypto asset service providers (CASPs) started on 1 June 2023. In its update of 15 April 2026, the FSCA said that by 31 March it had received 533 applications, approved 310 and declined 17, while 124 had been withdrawn by the applicants. It had also opened 81 investigations into unlicensed CASP businesses, 51 of them still running.

The newer text is the joint communication on crypto assets for domestic payment purposes of 28 May 2026, signed by the head of the SARB’s National Payment System Department and an FSCA deputy commissioner. It says crypto assets used for payments are not payments under the National Payment System Act of 1998 and currently fall outside it. They are neither money nor funds under that Act, and so not legal tender. The document covers payments inside South Africa only. Cross-border payments, the first topic on the summit’s list, are out of its scope.

Licensing still applies. A platform that stands between a customer and a merchant in a crypto payment provides an intermediary service and needs an FSCA licence under FAIS. That licence does not put the firm under payment-system oversight, which the SARB leaves to future policy work. A revised NPS Act would let the central bank declare and regulate payment instruments other than money, crypto assets included.

The communication also separates stablecoins by currency. The SARB writes that it is unlikely to accept stablecoins pegged to a foreign currency as payment instruments for domestic transactions, because of the risk of dollarisation. Rand-pegged coins get a warmer hearing: the Intergovernmental Fintech Working Group is studying their use cases, and the SARB says it is interested in testing domestic stablecoin payments in that group’s regulatory sandbox. ZARP, a rand stablecoin, is a gold sponsor in Cape Town.

Courts can read crypto differently under other laws. On 1 June 2026, in Mangundhla v SARB, the Gauteng High Court held that Bitcoin is both money and capital for the Exchange Control Regulations. Lawyers at Clyde & Co argue the two positions can coexist, since each turns on a different statute.

Why African stablecoin use matters here

Chainalysis figures relayed by Tech Africa put on-chain value received in sub-Saharan Africa above $205bn between July 2024 and June 2025, up about 52% on the year. That made it the third-fastest-growing region, after Asia-Pacific and Latin America. Nigeria led with more than $92.1bn, nearly three times South Africa in second place, followed by Ethiopia, Kenya and Ghana.

The stablecoin share for that period was not given in the coverage we could read. For the previous 12 months, to June 2024, Intelpoint put it at 43.2% of about $125bn, close to $54bn, based on Chainalysis data.

Several companies on the 2026 bill work on stablecoin payments in these markets. PawaPay sends its Kenya country director. ZARP is built on the rand, and Anchorage Digital sends the manager of its stablecoin correspondent banking work in Africa.

What it means for readers in Europe

The EU took the opposite route. Under MiCA, a stablecoin pegged to one official currency is an e-money token, with rules on the issuer and its reserves. South Africa, for now, leaves domestic stablecoin payments outside its payment law while licensing the intermediaries. For French and Italian readers who send money to Kenya, Ghana or Nigeria, the summit is where payment firms on those corridors meet regulators from the region. It has no power to set rules.

What is still unknown

As of 19 October 2026, the organiser has not published a session agenda, a list of ticket tiers, what the R3,350 ticket includes or an attendance forecast. It is also unclear whether every ticket holder can join the closed-door roundtables. The organiser’s site and Quicket are the places to watch for the programme.