The "last mile" problem of cryptocurrency payments

Author: Lisk; Translator: Eric, Foresight News

Stablecoin channels have indeed significantly improved cross-border segments of international payments. But the consistently problematic part is the final step—delivering funds to local accounts and wallets.

The value of stablecoins in cross-border payments has been widely recognized and has been largely validated at the wholesale level. Transferring value from one country to another using USDC or USDT is faster than traditional correspondent banking chains, cheaper than most traditional wire transfers, and available around the clock. For the “middle segment” of cross-border payments—that is, crossing borders—stablecoins represent a real infrastructure advancement.

The unresolved issue is the last mile. Reliably and at scale converting settled stablecoin balances into local fiat currencies according to local regulatory requirements, and sending them to the correct bank accounts or mobile money wallets—that’s where most friction, costs, and failures in cross-border crypto payments truly concentrate. Stablecoin channels shorten the distance between countries, but the last mile is the distance between stablecoins and the people who actually need the money. It remains the most challenging part of the entire tech stack to build.

What exactly is the last mile?

The last mile of cross-border crypto payments involves four steps, of which the first three are essentially solved.

• Stablecoins are transferred to the service provider’s wallet after cross-border settlement—this step is fast and inexpensive.

• The provider needs to convert these stablecoins into local fiat, usually through local foreign exchange partners or internal reserves—this step incurs costs and spreads, but is manageable in most channels.

• Then, the fiat needs to be sent to the local payment channel: real-time gross settlement systems (RTGS), Automated Clearing House (ACH), instant payment networks, or mobile money platforms—this is where reliability issues begin to surface.

• Finally, payments require reconciliation, reporting, and in many jurisdictions are considered regulated cross-border or foreign exchange inflows—this step adds compliance overhead, with significant variation across markets.

Friction does not accumulate evenly across these steps. In places where offshore exchange providers establish stable relationships with local banks and forex partners, conversion and liquidity are manageable. The real reliability issues emerge at the local payment channel integration: each country has multiple banks, various mobile money operators, different API standards, different cutoff times, and error handling mechanisms. A provider serving ten markets must maintain and monitor dozens of independent integrations, each potentially failing independently. Compliance and data requirements add another layer of complexity: KYC (Know Your Customer) and KYB (Know Your Business) data collected upstream must be transformed into local reporting fields, thresholds, and documentation, which vary greatly across jurisdictions. Reconciliation—the process of matching stablecoin settlement records with local disbursement confirmations—is theoretically simple but practically very challenging, especially when local payment confirmations are delayed or arrive in incompatible formats.

Stablecoins solve the “distance” problem; the last mile addresses the “delivery” problem. These are two different issues requiring different infrastructure.

The Fragmentation of Payouts

The last mile relies on local payout providers—companies that convert stablecoins into local fiat and send them to local banks and mobile money channels. In most emerging markets, this space is highly fragmented, of uneven quality, and susceptible to shocks.

In Africa, Yellow Card has built a pan-African stablecoin channel covering over twenty markets, integrating banking and mobile money infrastructure, positioning itself as an offshore exchange provider for global platforms like Coinbase, Block, and PayPal. Kotani Pay takes a complementary approach: providing APIs for blockchain-to-mobile payments in East and West Africa, using USSD instead of internet connectivity, enabling feature phone users to receive stablecoin-supported payments without smartphones or bank accounts. These are meaningful infrastructures, but they are not all-encompassing—coverage gaps still exist in certain countries, with specific banks and mobile operators.

In Latin America, Bitso’s unified payment architecture executes collection and disbursement functions across the region’s main local payment channels (including Pix in Brazil, SPEI in Mexico, ACH, etc.) through a single API, with embedded forex and stablecoin settlement. This architecture is effective because Bitso has invested heavily in building and maintaining local channel integrations, forex relationships, and compliance infrastructure in each market. Building similar capabilities from scratch takes years, not months.

Beyond major providers, many smaller payout operators serve specific channels, with significant differences in operating hours, liquidity depth, compliance capabilities, and operational terms. When smaller offshore exchange providers face disruptions—due to regulatory uncertainty, liquidity crises, or banking relationship changes—payments queue up, reconciliation backlog increases, and operators must manually route to secondary providers, each with different formats, KYC standards, and fees. This is not just a theoretical risk; it’s the operational reality when infrastructure reliability is not standardized.

Cost data clearly shows the contribution of the last mile to total payment costs. World Bank remittance data for Q1 2025 indicates an average global remittance cost of 6.49%. In Sub-Saharan Africa, costs are higher—around 8% on average in early 2025. The cost of stablecoin transfer itself may be well below 1%. But once you add forex conversion, local payment fees, mobile money charges, and compliance costs, the end-to-end cost in many African channels rises back to 7-8%. The savings brought by stablecoin channels are real, but a large part is offset by the last mile.

Mobile Payments and the Last Mile

For hundreds of millions in Africa and parts of Asia, mobile payments are not optional channels—they are the primary financial accounts. GSMA’s “The State of the Industry Report 2026” shows 2.3 billion registered mobile money accounts globally, with 593 million monthly active users in 2025, and transaction volumes exceeding $2 trillion—doubling in just four years. Most active accounts are in Sub-Saharan Africa, where mobile money accounts are often the only practical financial account for large populations.

For enterprises conducting cross-border stablecoin payments into these markets, reaching payees usually means reaching their mobile money wallets, not bank accounts. This adds a series of specific technical and regulatory challenges on top of payout fragmentation.

Mobile money networks are closed systems. M-Pesa, MTN MoMo, Airtel Money, OPay, and Wave each have their own integration models, APIs, compliance rules, and operational characteristics. A provider aiming to deliver to mobile wallets in five African countries must manage fifteen to twenty independent integrations, each requiring direct commercial relationships with mobile network operators, ongoing technical maintenance, and real-time monitoring. When Kenya’s M-Pesa experiences outages, all payments through that channel are affected until service is restored. At that point, stablecoin settlement may have succeeded, but the final delivery step—payee receipt—is stalled.

Regulatory complexity further complicates matters. Transactions exceeding certain thresholds require KYC verification at the wallet level. In many jurisdictions, cross-border mobile money flows are considered foreign exchange inflows and trigger reporting requirements. In some markets, the regulatory boundaries for stablecoin-to-mobile delivery are still being defined, creating uncertainty about required compliance documents and responsible parties. Kotani Pay’s direct USSD integration with mobile operators (enabling payments without internet or bank accounts) demonstrates how innovative infrastructure can reach excluded populations; meanwhile, Chipper Cash’s partnership with Stable in December 2025 to build stablecoin payment channels in Africa shows that even mature players continue investing in solving the last mile, rather than considering it a completed task.

What Reliable Last Mile Infrastructure Requires

Companies capable of reliably executing large-scale cross-border stablecoin payments share common traits that distinguish them from smaller, less capable providers.

Single integration, multi-channel: Maintaining dozens of independent integrations is costly and difficult to scale. Abstracting this complexity into a single API provider—offering one integration point externally, internally parsing into multiple local channels—creates enormous operational leverage. Thunes, for example, supports stablecoin payments via SWIFT connecting to 11,500 banks, serving over 500 million stablecoin wallets across 140 countries—this is the application of this principle at a global scale: one connection point, underlying a vast network.

Deep local licenses and relationships: Technical integration is necessary but far from sufficient. Reliable last-mile delivery requires establishing commercial relationships with local banks and mobile operators, obtaining regulatory approvals in each market, and meeting local AML and foreign exchange compliance standards. These efforts take years and substantial capital to build. New entrants cannot quickly replicate this, which is why most reliable last-mile providers in any market are those that invested in regulatory infrastructure before transaction volumes arrived.

Enterprise-grade operations: The difference between solutions that work for small transactions and those that handle enterprise-level traffic lies mainly in operations, not technology. It requires multiple bank partners per channel for redundancy, real-time switching between payment channels when one fails, continuous monitoring of payment statuses across all integrations, and predictable contractual SLAs. Manual processes that handle hundreds of transactions daily will collapse at tens of thousands. The reconciliation layer—from stablecoin receipt, forex conversion, to local account confirmation—must be automated and auditable to support large-scale operations.

The last mile is not a problem with a single technical solution. It is an operational and regulatory challenge requiring ongoing, market-to-market investments in infrastructure, relationships, and compliance.

Why It Matters to Operators

For enterprises engaged in cross-border stablecoin payments, the last mile is not an abstract concept. It directly impacts which channels you can reliably serve, your actual end-to-end costs, and customer experience when payments fail to arrive on time.

The practical takeaway: channel selection is not just a business decision about where demand exists, but a foundational infrastructure decision about where reliable last-mile delivery exists. If a channel’s stablecoin settlement is fast and cheap but local offshore exchange is highly fragmented, capacity-limited, or heavily regulated, the payment experience becomes unpredictable. The stablecoin has done its job, but the last mile has not.

For companies building payment products rather than just using them, the last mile is even more fundamental. Decisions about which local channels to integrate, which offshore partners to rely on, how to handle mobile money delivery, and how to manage compliance at the payout stage are product decisions that determine which markets you can serve and how well. Those that have solved this—Yellow Card in Africa, Bitso in Latin America, Thunes globally—have achieved this through years of continuous investment in these decisions. Stablecoin channels are becoming commodities; the last mile infrastructure remains far from that.