Global Payments Folding: From Tokyo to Nigeria, What is Web3 Doing Outside the Mainstream Narrative?

The concept of “financial equality” can often only be truly understood through personal experience.

Recently, while in Japan, as a Chinese person who is used to using QR codes everywhere, I did feel that there was too much cash, card wear and tear, and the hassle of activating and topping up a Suica card (the pain of Android phones). But at least, there are always Alipay and Visa/Mastercard as a backup, so payments are never unsustainable.

But when we move the map a little further south to Africa, Southeast Asia, and many countries in Latin America, the situation changes completely. In many of those countries, payment is not just a tool, but a “survival skill.”

Bank card penetration is extremely low, and many people don’t even have an account. The fees for small interbank transfers are not low, the arrival of funds is unreliable, and some people don’t even have cross-border services from their usual banks. Even if they do, the fees for cross-border payments are often surprisingly high.

In these places, “payment itself” is no longer taken for granted as basic infrastructure like water and electricity, but has become a privilege.

I. The World is Folded: From Tokyo to Lagos

Living in East Asia (such as China and Japan) or Europe and America, we often perceive payments as “excessive”.

The smoothness of WeChat Pay, the omnipotence of Alipay, and even the instant payment of Suica in Japan make us feel that the flow of funds should be like this.

But the world is not flat, and different people’s financial experiences are also folded.

Just like the three physically separated spaces in the science fiction novel “Folding Beijing,” there are also insurmountable gaps in global finance. For example, people in the first space are already discussing where to enjoy DeFi annualized returns of up to double digits, while people in the third space are still worrying every day about how to safely bring their hard-earned money home.

Interestingly, it is precisely against this backdrop that a counterintuitive truth in the data is often overlooked—although Africa is generally stereotyped as “backward,” if you shift your focus to emerging markets like Nigeria, you’ll find that they aren’t averse to digital payments, but rather hampered by inadequate infrastructure:

According to the latest data from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Internet transfers account for a staggering 51.91% of the market share (by number of transactions), while POS transactions account for 28.53%, together exceeding 80%. In contrast, cash withdrawals (ATMs), which we believe should account for the largest share, only account for 2.21%.

This means that Nigerians are actually highly dependent on digital payments, especially direct bank transfers. Simply put, this is because physical payment infrastructure like bank branches is actually more expensive and harder to implement than seemingly advanced options like e-banking.

Therefore, in places like Nigeria, you don’t need to teach someone what an “e-wallet” is or how to use it. Due to practical reasons, they have long been accustomed to using their mobile phones to complete almost all transfers. This is similar to how Axie Infinity became popular in Southeast Asia as a base back then.

The only pain point lies in “connectivity.” After all, for a freelancer in Lagos, Nigeria, or a migrant worker overseas who needs to send money back home, the average waiting time of 15 minutes or even longer, along with the layers of exchange rate deductions, remains a huge black box.

They are highly dependent on digital payments, but they lack a stable, low-cost, globally connected payment infrastructure. It is against this backdrop that Web3 truly showed people a completely new path that does not rely on the banking system for the first time.

II. Web3 payments should adopt a “rural-to-urban” approach.

This is why I’ve always felt that the revolutionary significance and enormous potential of Web3 and stablecoins in marginal regions like Africa and Latin America, through the “rural-to-urban” approach, has been largely overlooked by the mainstream narrative for a long time.

The video of Xie Jiayin using stablecoins to make payments in Vietnam a while ago sparked a lot of discussion, and to be honest, it also shocked me quite a bit.

The key point is that the payment is completed directly through a क्रिप्टोcurrency wallet transfer, without the need for a U-card as an intermediary.

Although the act of transferring money by scanning a QR code is commonplace in China, it is ultimately based on highly mature and closed online payment channels such as Alipay and WeChat Pay— which are unique to China and the result of twenty years of internet development, making them difficult to replicate.

The model shown in the video is completely different: when scanning a VietQR QR code with Bitget Wallet in Vietnam, the front-end experience is very similar to Alipay, but behind the scenes, cryptocurrency transfers are completed through the Solana network, and then instantly converted into fiat currency and deposited into the merchant’s account through an intermediary protocol.

To put it simply, the difference lies in “replicability” —the Vietnamese model can theoretically be transferred to any country with a local instant payment system.

This is especially true in underdeveloped regions like Africa and Latin America, where smartphones and e-wallets have a certain level of popularity, but traditional financial infrastructure is insufficient.

This actually reveals a core demand: users don’t care what ERC-20 or Gas Fee are; they only care about “whether they can pay the money like scanning a QR code.”

If we review the evolution of stablecoins in the Web3 payment dimension, we can roughly see that it has gone through three stages:

• Pure on-chain transfers: a geek’s toy, practically useless in real life except for buying एनएफटी and DeFi;
• The “U Card” era: While it was convenient to top up your Visa/Mastercard with cryptocurrency through card issuers, it had extremely high barriers to entry (cumbersome KYC process, expensive card opening fees, and high transaction fees), and essentially you were still working for traditional card organizations.
• Direct-to-Bank: This initiative attempts to connect on-chain accounts, stablecoin assets, and merchant payment terminals, bypassing the issuing banks and card organizations in the traditional payment chain. This is currently the most exciting exploration.

In this direction, payment giants have already begun to vote.

From Circle’s launch of Programmable Wallets and CCTP (Cross-Chain USDC Clearing) to global payment giant Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of stablecoin API service provider Bridge at the end of last year, all these efforts are toward the third stage.

The recent launch of Nigerian bank transfer functionality on Bitget Wallet, also powered by Aeon Pay, provides a “third option” beyond major banks and P2P platforms.

• Decentralization and no KYC: Unlike traditional exchanges that require cumbersome identity verification, it retains the censorship resistance of Web3 wallets;
• Lightning-fast experience: Compared to the 10-15 minutes in the P2P market, this direct transfer can be completed in 5-10 seconds;
• Low-risk channel: Funds no longer pass through unfamiliar individual acceptors (P2P Merchants), but instead enter the banking system directly through a compliant payment gateway, greatly reducing the risk of card freezing;

This also means that Web3 wallets are no longer just asset browsers, but are beginning to directly connect to the central bank payment systems of various countries (such as NIBSS Instant Payment in Nigeria) via APIs.

From this perspective, the U-card, which has been and still occupies a mainstream view, is destined to be replaced in the future. Traditional financial institutions will more proactively embed Web3 payment paths and usage scenarios, and on the basis of ensuring compliance, directly complete the full-link connection of user wallets, merchant payments, and asset deposits and withdrawals through bank accounts, payment channels, and clearing systems.

III. The Ultimate Form of PayFi: When Wallets Become “Invisible Banks”

This raises a very real practical issue: Web3 at this stage does not need to reinvent a physical payment network, but rather to allow wallets to “penetrate” existing payment networks.

I have always believed that the ultimate form of PayFi may be a pure on-chain payment network that completely breaks away from Visa/Mastercard and even no longer relies on SWIFT.

• Merchant side: Directly accept stablecoin payments, no longer requiring mandatory conversion to fiat currency;
• On the user side: Transactions are sent directly from non-custodial wallets, funds are self-custodied, and settlement is completed instantly on the blockchain;
• Backend: Supported by compliant stablecoin issuers and on-chain clearing and settlement networks, eliminating the need for Visa/Mastercard or SWIFT channels and completely removing the “tolls” of traditional card organizations;

But this is, after all, an ideal world. Before the payment system undergoes a complete transformation in the future, the most stable, realistic, and sustainable path is still to connect directly to the local banking network through a stablecoin payment gateway.

Ultimately, TradFi excels in compliance and regulation, account structure, and risk control systems, while Crypto has a natural advantage in asset openness, global liquidity, and trustless execution. Combining the two is the optimal solution for “compliance” and “flexibility” at present.

In fact, this trend is already happening.

As mentioned earlier regarding Bitget Wallet’s experience in Nigeria, if you strip away the “Crypto” technology, it’s essentially disguising itself as an “offshore banking app with global liquidity.”

Imagine that for an ordinary user in Lagos, when he opens Bitget Wallet, he gets not just an on-chain asset management tool, but a super Alipay that can store US dollars (stablecoins) and transfer money to the grocery store owner next door (local bank account) instantly.

This could very well be the prototype of PayFi’s killer application scenario in emerging markets.

Objectively speaking, only when Web3 wallets can seamlessly connect to the real-time payment systems of various countries (such as Nigeria’s NIBSS, Brazil’s PIX, and India’s UPI) through compliant channels can this system truly bypass the high cost and low efficiency bottlenecks of the traditional SWIFT system.

In the near future, products like Bitget Wallet may even surpass existing cross-border payment solutions such as Airwallex and Wise in terms of cost and user experience.

निष्कर्ष के तौर पर

Payment is the starting point for stablecoins, while “global payments” represent their larger future as they move towards becoming global financial infrastructure.

The integration of QR payments in Vietnam and the off-chain implementation of bank transfers in Nigeria demonstrate that stablecoins can play a greater role not so much in replacing banks, but in filling the gaps that the banking system cannot provide.

We also hope that more wallets and Web3 projects will be willing to continue experimenting and delving deeper into these complex local scenarios in the future.

Only in this way can “global payments” become not just a narrative, but a tangible reality.

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