How Swypt turns M-PESA payments into stablecoins without changing how Kenyans pay
In September, I met the Swypt team at ETHSafari in Kenya, a week-long Ethereum conference organised by Lisk, a blockchain platform that builds and supports decentralised applications, particularly in emerging markets. The event brings together developers, startups, and investors working on blockchain infrastructure across Africa.
ETHSafari is usually loud with many product demos competing for attention from throngs of visitors. One of the booths by Swypt, a Kenyan fintech that connects merchants to stablecoin rails, was easy to miss because it did not have a lot of people around it. At the booth, co-founder and chief product officer, Stephen Gachanja, told me that Kenyan businesses were already using Swypt to sidestep shilling volatility by converting M-PESA payments into dollar-pegged stablecoins.
A few days earlier, just before we left Nairobi for Kilifi, where ETHSafari was held, I had already seen what he meant.
At Nairobi’s Westlands Mall, inside a small jewellery and fashion boutique, a customer made a payment that looked ordinary. The customer scanned an M-PESA paybill. On the phone, the transaction showed up in Kenyan shillings, but on the merchant’s end, though, the settlement arrived as USDT (Tether) in a self-custodial wallet.
Read more: https://techcabal.com/2025/12/16/swypt-the-backend/
