Tether partners with Shiga to launch self-custodial finance in Africa and GCC

Tether has made a strategic investment in Shiga Digital, an Abu Dhabi-headquartered fintech startup, to expand self-custodial digital asset products across Africa and the Gulf Cooperation Council region. The partnership will leverage Tether’s open-source Wallet Development Kit, or WDK, to build financial infrastructure that lets businesses and individuals in these markets hold and transact in USDT without relying on centralized custodians.

What Shiga actually does

Shiga Digital has been operating since 2016, offering a suite of financial services built for the specific headaches of pan-African commerce. Think virtual accounts, over-the-counter transactions, and treasury management tools designed around markets where a wire transfer can take days and cost a small fortune in fees.

The company’s flagship product is the Enta wallet, a self-custodial solution that ditches the traditional seed phrase model in favor of passkeys and biometric authentication. The wallet supports USDT, Bitcoin, and tokenized gold.

Shiga has processed over $350 million in transaction volumes since its founding. The company holds a DIFC Innovation License and works with licensed financial transmitters across multiple African and Gulf countries to maintain regulatory compliance. Its mobile apps, available on both Android and iOS, are designed to facilitate stablecoin payments and cross-border financial tools for users across the Africa-GCC corridor.

The infrastructure layer

Tether’s WDK, released as an open-source toolkit, provides a modular, multi-chain framework for developers to build secure wallets with native USDT integration. It supports various blockchain networks and is designed to lower the barrier for creating self-custodial products.

Why Africa and the GCC

African economies face a particular challenge: local currencies that can depreciate rapidly against the dollar, making it difficult for businesses to plan, price goods, or hold savings with any confidence. Nigeria’s naira, for instance, has experienced significant devaluation in recent years. Kenya, Ghana, and several other markets face similar dynamics. For businesses in these countries, holding USDT isn’t a speculative crypto play. It’s a hedge against watching their working capital shrink in real time.

The UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar are all competing aggressively to become regional hubs for digital finance. Abu Dhabi’s regulatory framework, including the DIFC where Shiga is licensed, has been specifically designed to attract fintech companies working with digital assets.

Cross-border payments between these two regions represent a use case where stablecoins have a genuine, measurable advantage over the legacy banking system. Transactions that might take three to five business days through correspondent banking networks can settle in minutes on-chain, at a fraction of the cost.

What this means for stablecoin adoption

Shiga’s approach of partnering with locally licensed financial transmitters in each market it enters suggests a strategy designed for longevity. The $350 million in transaction volume that Shiga has already processed suggests there’s real demand for the combination of Tether’s toolkit and Shiga’s local expertise.