Tether has announced a new strategic collaboration with Kenyan fintech HoneyCoin, aimed at pushing USDT-powered payments deeper into everyday commerce across Africa.
In an official update on its site, Tether says the partnership will:
- Launch a cashless point-of-sale (POS) platform where merchants can accept USD₮ (USDT) directly at checkout in physical shops.
- Integrate USDT across HoneyCoin’s existing payment stack, so businesses can handle online and in-person payments in stablecoins.
- Add real-time FX conversion, starting with Kenyan shillings (KES) to USDT, to help merchants and consumers move between local currency and dollar-pegged balances.
The initial focus is Sub-Saharan Africa, with in-store stablecoin payments highlighted first in Kenya before rolling out more broadly as HoneyCoin scales.
Who HoneyCoin is and why it matters
HoneyCoin is a Nairobi-founded payment orchestration platform that bridges traditional finance and stablecoin rails for businesses and developers.
Recent funding coverage notes that HoneyCoin:
- Processes over 150 million dollars per month in stablecoin-powered payments across dozens of markets.
- Serves hundreds of enterprise customers and a growing consumer base via its apps and APIs.
- Raised about 4.9 million dollars in seed funding led by Flourish Ventures, with support from Visa Ventures, TLcom, Stellar Development Foundation and others.
In practice, HoneyCoin already powers:
- Multi-currency wallets and payments.
- FX and treasury tools for businesses.
- On/off-ramp APIs that let companies integrate stablecoin settlement into their own products.
That makes it a natural partner for Tether’s push to move USDT from purely crypto-native contexts into day-to-day merchant payments.
How the USDT POS and merchant stack is meant to work
The partnership is built around two key product pillars:
1. USDT-enabled POS terminals and QR payments
HoneyCoin will roll out a cashless POS network that allows merchants to:
- Accept USDT at physical checkout, either via dedicated terminals or QR-based payment flows.
- Price goods in local currency while settling in USDT, with instant FX conversion on the backend.
- See USDT receipts appear in merchant dashboards, alongside other payment methods.
For shoppers, the experience is designed to feel similar to existing mobile money and QR-based payments, but with the option to pay in a dollar-pegged stablecoin instead of volatile local currency.
2. Integrated online + offline stablecoin payments
Beyond the terminal itself, USDT will be stitched into HoneyCoin’s broader stack so merchants can:
- Accept USDT in e-commerce checkouts and web or app-based flows.
- Use HoneyCoin’s API layer to plug stablecoin settlement into their own platforms.
- Access real-time FX quotes (for example KES/USDT, NGN/USDT) and manage multi-currency balances inside HoneyCoin’s treasury tools.
From the merchant perspective, the pitch is lower fees, faster settlement and a way to hold part of their working capital in a dollar-linked asset rather than fully in local currency.
Why stablecoin rails are resonating in Sub-Saharan Africa
Tether’s announcement frames the HoneyCoin deal very explicitly as a financial inclusion and currency risk story.
Key realities the press release points to:
- Many African consumers and small businesses face high inflation, FX volatility and limited access to banking.
- Stablecoins like USDT can offer a way to store value in dollars, while still sending and receiving funds quickly on mobile.
- Between mid-2024 and mid-2025, Sub-Saharan Africa received over 200 billion dollars in on-chain value, making it one of the fastest-growing crypto regions globally, with stablecoins accounting for a large share of that activity.
In this context, a USDT-based POS and payments network is not just about crypto adoption for its own sake. It is a direct attempt to:
- Reduce cross-border payment costs and settlement times.
- Give merchants and freelancers an option to invoice in dollars and convert into local currency only when needed.
- Provide an alternative rails layer in places where mobile money and banks do not always offer cheap, interoperable FX.
Where this fits in Tether’s wider Africa strategy
This is not Tether’s first move on the continent. In recent months the company has:
- Invested in Kotani Pay, a Kenyan on/off-ramp provider building stablecoin-powered cross-border infrastructure.
- Signed memoranda of understanding with regional authorities (such as Zanzibar’s eGovernment Authority) to support digital asset education and blockchain adoption.
- Backed on-chain infrastructure firms like Shiga Digital that focus on African financial rails.
The HoneyCoin collaboration fits into that pattern as a front-end merchant and consumer layer for USDT in Africa:
- Kotani Pay and similar partners work on rail-level connectivity between banks, mobile money and blockchains.
- HoneyCoin focuses on merchant acceptance, POS and APIs, making those rails usable at checkout and inside business workflows.
Taken together, the strategy is about making USDT not just a trading pair on exchanges, but a payment medium inside local economies.
Competitive and regulatory considerations
The deal also lands in a competitive landscape where:
- USDT already dominates African stablecoin usage, but faces competition from USDC and regional currency-backed tokens.
- Mobile money incumbents like M-Pesa still control a huge share of everyday digital transactions.
- Regulators are grappling with how to classify and supervise stablecoin-based payments, especially when they intersect with FX controls and anti-money-laundering rules.
HoneyCoin’s positioning as a compliant payment orchestration platform, plus backing from Visa-linked investors, suggests that both sides expect to operate within, not outside, emerging policy frameworks.
At the same time, pushing USDT into POS environments will likely attract more scrutiny from:
- Central banks, concerned about dollarisation and capital flows.
- Payment regulators, who will want clear lines on KYC, travel rule compliance and consumer protection.
How those discussions evolve will matter for how quickly the HoneyCoin–Tether model can scale beyond early adopters.
What to watch next
For observers tracking this story, a few concrete signals will show how substantive the partnership becomes:
- Merchant adoption metrics: How many merchants in Kenya (and later other markets) start accepting USDT via HoneyCoin POS and online checkouts?
- Transaction volumes: Does HoneyCoin’s already sizeable stablecoin volume see a clear uplift attributed to USDT POS usage?
- User experience vs mobile money: Are consumers actually choosing USDT payments over established mobile wallets for everyday purchases, or is the feature used mainly for high‑value, cross-border transactions?
- Regulatory responses: Do Kenyan or regional regulators issue new guidance on stablecoin use in retail payments as deployments scale?
These datapoints will determine whether this is primarily a PR and pilot story or the start of a scaled USDT merchant network across Africa.
Conclusion
Tether’s partnership with HoneyCoin brings its USDT stablecoin a step closer to real-world checkouts in one of the most dynamic, yet financially constrained, regions in the world.
By combining HoneyCoin’s merchant and API infrastructure with USDT’s liquidity and brand recognition, the collaboration aims to cut payment costs, smooth FX pain and give African businesses access to dollar-denominated digital cash at the point of sale.
Whether this becomes a cornerstone of everyday commerce or remains a niche option will depend on merchant uptake, user behaviour and regulatory comfort. For now, it is an important marker of how quickly stablecoin rails are moving from crypto exchanges into physical shops and local economies.
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