I love traveling. I am a remote worker so it is possible for me. I get to move around, see new places, work from different countries. It sounds free. And in many ways it is.
But there is a version of this story that nobody tells you.
The version where you are in a foreign country, you need money, and suddenly every payment becomes a problem. Not because you are broke. Because you are Malawian.
I have accounts with National Bank of Malawi, Standard Bank Malawi, and NBS Bank. In my experience, accessing money internationally has been extremely unreliable. Sometimes cards do not work online. Sometimes transactions fail abroad. Sometimes you are limited to very small allocations that disappear almost immediately. You have money. The money exists. But accessing it outside the country becomes its own battle.
And the allocations when you do get them? Mhu!!!! The most I have received at one point was around $300 to stretch across an entire trip: accommodation, food, transport, emergencies, everything. If you have ever traveled, you already know how quickly that disappears.
So eventually, like many travelers, freelancers, and remote workers across Africa, you start relying on informal crypto networks to access liquidity internationally. You send kwacha locally and receive USDT through trusted intermediaries. Sometimes it is instant. Sometimes you wait while liquidity is sourced. Sometimes the rates are painfully high. But when traditional systems fail you, you move toward whatever works.
That was me. And if I am being honest, that is still me whenever I travel.
Earlier this year I started thinking about this more seriously. Malawi is in a full forex crisis. Businesses cannot pay international suppliers. Import-dependent industries are under pressure. Companies are carrying obligations they cannot settle because access to forex itself has become the bottleneck.
And I started asking: what if stablecoins could help?
I got excited. I even started a hundred days of blockchain. I wrote articles, read deeply, tried to map the problem. But the more I pulled at the thread, the more complicated it became.
The first thing I ran into was this: to get USDT, there still needs to be a way to exchange kwacha for it. Right now, most of that access happens informally through a very small number of trusted networks. Stablecoins already exist in Malawi. The technology is not the missing piece. Access is the missing piece. And access is still expensive, fragmented, and heavily dependent on who you know.
Then I went deeper and found something even more uncomfortable. No financial instrument fixes a structural export problem. Malawi does not have a forex crisis because of bad payment infrastructure alone. It has a forex crisis because it spends far more foreign currency than it earns. The export base is narrowing. Tobacco is still carrying an enormous burden. Stablecoins do not change that.
There is also a distribution problem that I could not ignore. If stablecoins become accessible only to the educated, urban, connected few, they could unintentionally deepen inequality. The people with options would partially escape the pressure while everyone else remains exposed to inflation and currency instability. A private solution to a public problem rarely fixes the public problem. Sometimes it simply redistributes who carries the pain.
So I kept asking. Even as a partial tool, stablecoins face a hard challenge. For them to work at scale, you need liquidity. For liquidity to exist, you need adoption. For adoption to happen, you need liquidity first. In countries like Nigeria and Argentina, inflation pressure and desperate demand for dollar access created the conditions for crypto liquidity to grow organically. Informal infrastructure emerged because people needed alternatives badly enough to build them.
Malawi already has some of those conditions. Inflation is high. People are actively trying to preserve value. The informal networks already exist in small pockets. The question is not whether that loop can break. The question is what incentivizes the first trusted layers of infrastructure to show up.
And then traveling itself gave me the clearest answer I found through all of this.
Across several African countries, I have seen how much easier digital liquidity becomes once local payment systems connect to trusted P2P markets. Mobile money is accepted, sellers trust the rails, and conversion between digital dollars and local currency becomes relatively straightforward. Once you have access to stablecoins, geography matters a lot less.
Malawi still feels disconnected from that ecosystem. Not because stablecoins do not exist here. Because there is no widely trusted, accessible bridge between kwacha and global P2P liquidity. No verified on-ramp that ordinary people can use through systems they already have, like mobile money or local bank transfers.
That missing trust layer changes everything. If a Malawian could access stablecoins fairly and transparently using tools they already trust, then cross-border payments, travel, online subscriptions, remote work, and international commerce all become more accessible overnight.
Tomorrow I am attending KBCC 2026, the Kenya Blockchain and Crypto Conference in Nairobi. I am going with more questions than answers. Has anyone tried building liquidity infrastructure for underserved African currencies before? What stopped them? How did other countries create functioning P2P ecosystems around difficult currencies? What does compliance and regulation look like when the currency itself is the obstacle?
The technology already exists. The demand already exists. The pain already exists.
What does not exist yet is infrastructure that connects underserved currencies like the kwacha to global digital liquidity in a way that is accessible, transparent, and trustworthy. That is the gap I want to understand. And I think it is worth building something around.
I do not fully know what that looks like yet. But I am going to Nairobi to find out. And I am not just curious. I am building.
If you are working on any part of this problem, find me at KBCC or reach out directly. I would genuinely love to talk.
