Start with what the premium actually is. Africa's average sovereign spread over US Treasuries sits around 3.7 percentage points, the tightest since 2018, but still wider than other EM regions at comparable ratings. The question is whether the fundamentals justify the gap. Increasingly, they don't.

This is where onchain infrastructure becomes more than a buzzword. Transparent, real-time settlement and verifiable reserves attack the information half of the problem directly, the part the GEMs data says is mispriced. Better data rails won't repeal country risk. They can compress the part of the premium that's just opacity. That's the layer ViFi works on.

The most popular take on stablecoins in emerging markets is also the most incomplete: "Dollar stablecoins bank the unbanked." They do move value. They also quietly export a problem most EM central banks haven't priced in. 🧵

There's another path that isn't "ban it" or "accept dollarization": build credible, reserve-backed local-currency rails on the same infrastructure. A Colombian Peso stablecoin that settles in seconds keeps the velocity and convenience without forcing the unit of account offshore. That's the gap ViFi is building for.

Every year, migrant workers send hundreds of billions of dollars home to their families. A significant portion of that money never arrives. It is captured in fees, spreads, and margins before it reaches the people it was sent for. This is not an accident. It is a feature.

Nigeria receives more than $20 billion in remittances every year. At 8 percent average transfer costs, roughly $1.6 billion of that is captured by financial intermediaries before it reaches a Nigerian household. That is not a rounding error. That is a structural wealth transfer away from the families who need it most.