Hassan Maishera
On Thursday, Aptos Labs announced via a blog post that HashKey MENA FZE has partnered with Aptos and Daya to lead a landmark initiative to explore regulated stablecoin-enabled settlement flows for cross-border commerce between the Middle East and Africa.
In a strategic move to address the inefficiencies of traditional finance, HashKey MENA has entered into a Corridor Pilot Agreement with the Aptos Foundation to roll out a pilot B2B stablecoin payment corridor.
Operating in partnership with Daya, a Pan-African stablecoin payments platform, this pilot enables corporates to explore regional trade settlement use cases on the Aptos Layer 1 blockchain.
Specifically, on- and off-ramps will be used across Nigerian Naira and additional African currencies, alongside traditional SWIFT and bank wire capabilities, virtual local-currency accounts, and payment APIs that businesses and fintechs can integrate directly.
As a leading Middle East OTC provider, HashKey MENA provides the essential, compliant AED/USD and multi-currency on- and off-ramps to stablecoins on a first-party transfer basis, supporting regional businesses in transitioning seamlessly between local fiat and digital assets.
On the African corridor, Daya is expected to serve as the local payment infrastructure partner, providing compliant on- and off-ramp connectivity through its proprietary smart routing engine to maximize liquidity across African markets.
Daya offers traditional SWIFT and bank wire capabilities, virtual local-currency accounts, and payment APIs that businesses and fintechs can integrate directly. Together, these partners empower HashKey MENA to facilitate a two-phase rollout.
Multinational corporates will fund local payments across borders by on-ramping local currency at one node and off-ramping at the other. The initial phase is intended to lay the foundation for a full-scale B2B trade settlement model where stablecoins may serve as the primary settlement asset across supported corridors.
Aptos is a scalable layer-1 blockchain based on the Move programming language. APT is the project's native token.
Aptos is a Layer 1 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain that employs a novel smart contract programming language called Move, a Rust-based programming language that was independently developed by Meta (formerly Facebook)’s Diem blockchain engineers.
Aptos’s vision is a blockchain that brings mainstream adoption to web3 and empowers an ecosystem of DApps to solve real-world user problems.
The PoS blockchain can achieve a theoretical transaction throughput of over 150,000 transactions per second (tps) through parallel execution.
In March 2022, Aptos raised $200 million in a seed round led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Other crypto heavyweights like Tiger Global and Multicoin Capital took part in the funding round.
Fast forward to July, the startup raised another $200 million in a Series A round with participation from Dragonfly, Apollo Global, Franklin Templeton, Animoca, Jump Crypto, and others.
APT is down 11.5%, trading at $0.6990 per coin. For a start, the Aptos team claims that its network can process over 150,000 tps. By comparison, Ethereum’s mainnet TPS is around 12 to 15.
This high transaction throughput is enabled by a parallel execution engine (Block-STM)—a Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) PoS consensus mechanism. For context, most blockchains execute transactions sequentially, which means that a single failed transaction or high demand on the network could hold up the entire chain.
