Opera's MiniPay stablecoin wallet has launched a Visa debit card enabling its 16 million users to spend stablecoins at merchants across the globe. The card, powered by Gnosis Pay's infrastructure, allows users to pay directly from their MiniPay wallets while merchants receive local currency through Visa's existing network — eliminating friction on both sides of the transaction.
MiniPay announced the card launch on June 23, 2026. Eligible markets span Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and parts of Europe, reflecting the wallet's concentration in regions where dollar-backed stablecoins have demonstrated strong product-market fit as a store of value and payments tool against weak local currencies.
Scale of the MiniPay Network
MiniPay has grown to more than 16 million activated wallets across 65 countries since its 2023 launch. Built on the Celo blockchain and focused on payments, transfers, and savings using dollar-backed stablecoins, the wallet has seen its strongest adoption in Africa — particularly in markets where access to the US dollar is limited or where local currencies carry high inflation risk.
The Visa debit card integrates with Apple Pay and Google Pay. Eligible users in select markets will receive cashback rewards denominated in USDT, USDC, and Tether Gold — stablecoin-denominated rewards that reinforce the product loop of earning and spending in digital dollars.
Stablecoin Adoption in Emerging Markets
The launch coincides with measurable acceleration in stablecoin usage in MiniPay's key markets. A Bitso report found that dollar-backed stablecoins overtook Bitcoin as the most-purchased crypto asset among Latin American exchange users in 2025, with USDC and USDT combined accounting for 40% of purchases. Bitso also reported that stablecoin transaction volumes among institutional clients rose 81% year-on-year in the first half of 2026.
In Africa, Circle partnered with fintech Sasai in March 2026 to expand USDC-powered cross-border payments. Ripple has made parallel moves — investing in Africa's Flutterwave in June 2026 to bring RLUSD, Ripple Payments, and XRPL infrastructure to one of the continent's largest fintechs.
Total stablecoins in circulation globally reached approximately $315 billion per DefiLlama data, up from roughly $250 billion a year ago. The growth reflects genuine demand — primarily from users in emerging markets seeking dollar access, not speculation.
The Infrastructure Build Is the Story
What MiniPay's Visa card represents structurally is an on-ramp/off-ramp collapse: users hold stablecoins, spend stablecoins, earn stablecoins — and the Visa network handles merchant acceptance invisibly. The end user doesn't need to convert back to local currency to shop. The payment rail converts at the merchant end.
This model — stablecoin-native wallets bridging into legacy card networks — is the same architecture that Ripple, Circle, and a handful of other infrastructure plays are building toward, each on different rails. MiniPay's 16 million activated wallets make it one of the largest real-world deployments of this pattern today.
For context on how DLT payment rails are expanding across emerging markets, see our overview of Ripple's Flutterwave investment and Africa stablecoin strategy.