WalletConnect Pay, a payment infrastructure for crypto and stablecoin transactions, is now available to merchants through Ezeebit, a crypto payment service provider serving African businesses. The integration starts in South Africa and enables merchants to accept cryptocurrency payments both in-store and online. Customers can pay using stablecoins such as USDC and USDT, while merchants can choose to settle in stablecoins or fiat currency.
The first deployment is with The Capital, a hotel and apartment company operating across South Africa. Guests will be able to pay at online and in-store checkouts from more than 700 wallets, with instant settlement in stablecoin or fiat. The rollout includes a 2% cashback programme, under which users receive 2% of the purchase value back as rewards in WCT, the WalletConnect token. In addition, according to Ezeebit, the launch covers The Capital’s 13 locations, and the company plans to extend the service to other businesses across Africa.
Onchain growth in Sub-Saharan Africa
The launch targets a region that has recorded strong growth in onchain activity. Citing Chainalysis data, WalletConnect states that Sub-Saharan Africa received more than USD 205 billion in onchain value between July 2024 and June 2025. This is a 52% increase on the previous year and makes the region the third fastest-growing globally, behind Asia Pacific and Latin America.
WalletConnect presents the Ezeebit integration as a foundation for a payment layer that can scale across the region’s markets. The company argues that this depends on removing the friction that has made crypto payments impractical at the point of sale.
Addressing point-of-sale friction
The integration runs on Ezeebit’s existing merchant infrastructure and targets several operational issues that have limited crypto payments in physical and ecommerce settings. In conventional onchain payments, customers enter payment amounts manually. This can lead to underpayments or overpayments, leaving merchants to reconcile transactions by hand. WalletConnect Pay embeds the exact amount in the transaction flow, so the customer confirms the correct figure before authorising the payment.
Network fees are another obstacle. Gas costs can be unpredictable, which confuses customers and slows down checkout. WalletConnect Pay is set to remove gas fees from the end-user experience, with the aim of making the process comparable to a card terminal transaction.
On the merchant side, accepting crypto from multiple wallets has typically required a separate integration for each provider, creating ongoing engineering costs. Through Ezeebit, merchants connect once and gain access to WalletConnect-compatible wallets, including Trust Wallet, MetaMask, Binance, and Fireblocks. According to WalletConnect, this network spans more than 900 million users and processed more than USD 400 billion in transaction volume in the past year. The protocol also standardises the checkout flow across wallets, so customers follow the same steps regardless of the wallet they use.
Implications for merchants and the market
The fiat settlement option allows merchants to accept stablecoin payments while receiving funds in fiat. Customers, meanwhile, can choose which stablecoin to pay with.
Jess Houlgrave, CEO at WalletConnect, described South Africa as having one of the continent’s more dynamic digital payments ecosystems. It was also said that the integration provides the infrastructure needed to bring crypto into everyday commerce. Daniel Katz, CEO, Ezeebit, said African businesses have been asking for a payments solution that reflects how their customers shop, which increasingly includes crypto. It was also added that the integration gives merchants access to hundreds of millions of crypto users without adding complexity to their operations.
