Stablecon Salons Marrakech:
The Compliance Dividend
Getting to Marrakech required the kind of routing that makes you rethink your choices. Two flights, a layover, and a long drive through the Moroccan countryside before I even saw the venue. Somewhere on that road, with hills on either side and nothing much to do but think, I asked myself whether this one was worth it.
What struck me on the way in, was how much headroom exists. Getting cash on arrival was harder than expected; most of my cards weren’t accepted, and when I eventually sorted it with pounds, the commission was steep. It was a small moment, but a useful one. Morocco moves billions in remittances from Europe every year, the institutional foundations are genuinely deep and yet the everyday experience of moving money still carries real friction. That’s not a critique, it’s the gap that makes this market one of the most interesting places on the continent to be building right now. It sharpened my sense of why this conversation needed to be in Marrakech.
April 7th at GITEX Africa was the third edition of Stablecon Salons, following Nairobi in February and Kigali in March and the most institutionally diverse room the series has produced so far. We co-hosted with Al Mada Ventures, and the conversation that followed was the closest this series has come to putting all the relevant stakeholders in one place at the right time.
What made this room different was the range of people who chose to show up. Senior professionals from Morocco’s financial sector, attending in their personal capacity. Operators from PawaPay, Cauridor, MoneyGram, Revolut, Circle, TapTapSend. Capital from BrightEye VC, Partech, DFS Lab & AfricInvest. Infrastructure providers and exchange teams from Binance, Tether, Utila, and Checker. Founders and builders from across the African and MENA digital finance ecosystem.
The fact that senior professionals with real responsibilities in Morocco’s financial sector chose to spend their evening in this conversation on their own time, on their own terms is itself a data point. You don’t do that unless the topic is directly relevant to the decisions you are already making.
That combination is not accidental. It is the whole design of this series.
The theme was The Compliance Dividend: the argument that regulatory posture is not a compliance burden but a competitive asset, and that the operators doing the hard work of building within the rules today are positioning themselves to be the infrastructure of the next decade.
I opened alongside Rida Chaoud of Al Mada Ventures, and we framed it together: jurisdictions that get the rules right ahead of the curve don’t just reduce friction they become the default choice for where serious operators build.
Morocco is testing that proposition in real time. The rest of the day was the room pressure-testing whether it holds.
What You Actually Get Access To?
The macro case for Morocco circulates freely in this industry institutional depth, EU adjacency, remittance volumes in the billions, the Morocco 2030 mandate. What gets less attention is the texture underneath those numbers: what a builder here today actually has access to that isn’t available elsewhere in the region.
Badr Bellaj, CTO of Mchain, was the sharpest local voice in the room and gave that question the most honest answer. Speaking in his personal capacity, he has been in the crypto space since 2011 long enough to have watched the full arc of what happens when a market has real appetite but no regulatory framework to channel it.
The first thing he named was the people. Morocco has a smart, digitally native young population that has already adopted crypto at significant scale despite a formal ban in place since 2017. The country currently ranks in the top 20 globally on the Chainalysis Crypto Adoption Index, with approximately $12.7 billion in transaction flow. That isn’t a projection. It’s the market telling you what it wants to do the moment the conditions allow it.
The second was the banking sector. Moroccan banks have real roots in both Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. Building with a Moroccan institution as a partner gives you a bridge across both at once a structural advantage most markets in the region can’t offer.
The third was institutional track record and this is the one that consistently surprises people outside the market. Financial innovation in Morocco is not new. Bank Al-Maghrib has explored blockchain for RTGS settlement. Tanger Med, the largest port in Africa, used it for asset tokenization. BCP applied it to conditional payments. These are live deployments, often more sophisticated than what more frequently cited markets have actually put into production.
When asked what single change would most shift where his capital and energy go, his answer was immediate.
“If I have to choose one, it is regulatory clarity. This is the primary catalyst for the industry.”
He acknowledged the direction is positive Morocco now has a draft regulation bill, the Morocco Fintech Center exists, the political will is visible. But optimism and precision are different things, and Badr was being precise.
What Morocco needs from the infrastructure builders in the room isn’t more capability in theory. It’s infrastructure that fits how the country actually works. Two structural realities that cannot be designed around: the legal framework is still too opaque for operating at scale, and the Moroccan Dirham is non-convertible. That’s not a transitional condition it’s a fixed feature of the FX architecture, and any serious build has to start from there.
“We need solutions that work within current FX rules, integrate directly with local banks, and combine fiat and stablecoin rails rather than trying to replace one with the other. This is not a plug-and-play market where you arrive with an API and expect instant adoption. Build for the reality of Morocco, not an abstract version of an emerging market.”
On what unlocks it fastest:
“Clear, usable rules from Bank Al-Maghrib and AMMC regarding stablecoins, open banking, and FX specifically addressing the Dirham would unlock the market’s full potential almost overnight.”
The Next Phase of Adoption
Arnoud d’Yve de Bavay, who leads Africa Expansion for Tether, has been in this series since Kigali and his lens is useful precisely because he sits at the point where infrastructure capability and actual market adoption meet.
His position on institutional adoption: Tether has always operated with institutional-grade expectations around transparency, compliance, and risk management. What is changing is who is arriving at the table. Traditional fintechs and banks are now engaging with stablecoin infrastructure for the first time, and their expectations differ from the organic, operator-driven adoption that built the first wave. Service providers across the ecosystem need to adapt to meet them there.
“What is changing is not the standard, it is who is arriving at the table.”
On where stablecoin use cases are generating real commercial activity versus where they remain exploratory. The strongest traction today is in cross-border payments, remittances, and treasury flows areas of immediate economic need. Businesses are using stablecoins for settlement, liquidity management, and cash flow efficiency as an operational tool, not a speculative position. The use cases that have taken hold are the ones eliminating existing frictions rather than introducing entirely new behaviours.
“The use cases that have taken hold are eliminating existing frictions, not introducing entirely new behaviours.”
More advanced applications yield strategies, trade finance, complex treasury optimization are still developing, and markets that try to skip the payments-first phase tend to stall.
“Start with payments. Everything else follows.”
Closing the Institutional Gap
Two presentations, same argument but different entry points.
Francis from Utila said the quiet part out loud: the problem was never the technology. For the traditional fintechs and banks now showing up at the stablecoin table for the first time, the technology is the easy part. What slows them down is the unfamiliarity with the language, the risk framework, the questions their boards are going to ask. That learning curve doesn’t disappear just because the infrastructure is available. Utila’s job is to sit in that gap and help institutions build operations they can actually stand behind in front of their regulators, their auditors, and their leadership teams.
“The rails are there. The harder work right now is getting the institutions that need to run on them actually ready to do so.”
Larry from Binance made the same point with his biography and then went further. Having spent years inside the South African Reserve Bank before crossing to lead legal for Binance Africa, he has watched crypto arrive at the institutional door from the inside. He knows what it looks like when an organisation doesn't know what to do with it.
His argument was structural. Every country beginning its crypto policy journey needs to start with context not with rules, but with understanding. Decentralisation and democratisation are not features of crypto. They are the point of it. The process efficiencies, cost reduction, and financial inclusion that blockchain enables are not side effects they are the rare minerals of the modern financial system, and they are genuinely hard to find anywhere else.
“Decentralisation and democratisation are not features of crypto. They are the point of it. Process efficiency, cost reduction, and financial inclusion these are the rare minerals of the modern financial system. And they are genuinely hard to find anywhere else.”
The framework he offered was useful: if fiat is web 1 money and mobile and e-money are web 2, then crypto stablecoins, payments tokens, the whole stack is web 3 money. It is not a replacement for what came before. It is the next layer of maturity in how money works.
“Crypto is web 3 money. Not a replacement for what came before, but the next layer of maturity in how money works.”
Morocco's organic adoption happening at scale even under a formal ban is the market demonstrating that it already understands this. The question is whether the regulatory framework catches up in a way that protects users, closes the informal channels that create real risk, and turns what is currently a grey market into a system that works for everyone.
“Education builds trust. Trust is what makes this sustainable.”
Between Francis and Larry, the day ended with a clear diagnosis: the gap is not technical, It never was.
What This Edition Settled
Three cities in, the series has a shape. Nairobi showed me a market that had done the legislative work and was asking what comes next. Kigali showed me what deliberate government positioning looks like when it’s actually backed by action. Marrakech showed me something different a market with genuine institutional depth that is further along than the international narrative about it suggests, held back not by appetite or capability but by regulatory specificity that hasn’t quite caught up to where the private sector already is.
That gap will close.
The caliber of people who chose to spend their afternoon in that room on their own time, on their own terms tells you something about where this conversation is heading. The Compliance Dividend thesis holds: the operators and jurisdictions building within clear rules are the ones that compound. Morocco has the posture, implementation is what’s left.
Two days after the event, I celebrated my birthday in Marrakech. Not a bad city to do it in, and not a bad way to have spent the days before in a room full of people who are serious about the same problems I’ve spent the last six years working on.
That combination doesn’t get old.
Next stop: Johannesburg, June 2026.
And four more cities after that.
If the conversations in Marrakech left you wanting to go deeper, I recently published a white paper The Next Phase of Global Money Movement: An Operator’s 2026 Outlook on Liquidity, Control, and Infrastructure Through Africa that expands on a lot of what was discussed here.
Who Made This Possible
The Marrakech edition of Stablecon Salons was made possible by our ecosystem partners who are each building infrastructure at the heart of the stablecoin economy.
Binance
Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, with one of the most active Africa operations in the industry. From regulatory engagement to local market development, Binance has been a consistent presence across the continent’s digital asset ecosystem.
Tether
Tether: Pioneer in stablecoin technology and creator of USDT, the world’s largest and most liquid stablecoin. Tether is building accessible financial, AI, and energy infrastructure that bridges traditional finance and decentralized systems with a particular focus on empowering underserved communities across Africa and beyond.
Utila
Utila is a digital asset infrastructure platform built for fintechs and payment companies managing stablecoin flows at scale. Its modular approach letting companies assemble and switch between custody, compliance, liquidity, and yield providers rather than being locked into a single stack is designed for operators who have outgrown their first-generation setup.
Checker
Checker is a global network that enables financial institutions to access stablecoins and digital asset liquidity, cross-border payments, treasury, and credit via a single API. By streamlining integration and reducing operational complexity, Checker empowers teams to launch new financial products faster while unlocking new revenue streams.
Al Mada Ventures
Al Mada Ventures is a $110M Venture Capital fund investing capital in scalable, sustainable and innovative companies that have the power to reshape industries across the African continent. Born, bred and fuelled by a century-old African heritage & backed by 100% African capital, our ambition is to support visionary entrepreneurs to develop and scale transformative ideas for Africa and for the world.