For VarsityScape, and for anyone moving value across borders, stablecoins aren’t ideology. They’re infrastructure.
Sometime around December last year, I started making a serious push for stablecoins on VarsityScape. Not because I’m a crypto maximalist. But because we had a problem that traditional finance was making almost impossible to solve.
VarsityScape is an Academy Operating System. We help educators and institutions launch and run academies, and we want learners and instructors from everywhere. That means a student in Rwanda might pay for a programme run by someone in Nigeria. A mentor in Kenya might get paid by an academy in Ghana.
Today, doing that with fiat means going into every single country, registering a business, opening bank relationships, and navigating local payment rails. The complexity is enormous. The delays are real. And we’d be cutting off huge parts of the world if we only accepted card payments or a handful of local methods. We could say “everyone pays in US dollars”, but that still excludes people who don’t have easy access to dollars or who get killed by conversion fees and delays.
So we needed something that behaved like a global, stable unit of account, settled quickly, and didn’t require us to be licensed in every jurisdiction. Stablecoins turned out to be that thing.
What We’re Actually Solving For
The goal was never “decentralisation” for its own sake. It was value at scale. We need to move value across borders, transparently and fast, without waiting for the traditional banking system to catch up. Stablecoins, especially US dollar–denominated ones like USDC, give you the utility of fiat (stable value, familiar unit) without the regulatory bottleneck of having to integrate with every country’s payment system before you can accept or send money.
So for us, the bet is simple: stablecoins will become a standard way to settle value in global platforms. We’re building for that world now.
We chose to work with Circle and USDC. Circle is the largest regulated U.S. dollar stablecoin issuer. They’re under regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and are building with compliance in mind. We want to be regulated too. We’re not trying to fly under the radar. We’re trying to give our users a better experience while staying within the bounds of the law. So we went with the most regulated, transparent option we could find.
That doesn’t mean every country is ready. Some jurisdictions don’t accept or recognise stablecoins yet. We have to navigate that carefully, and we will. But the direction of travel is clear: more regulation, more clarity, and more adoption for stablecoins as a legitimate way to move value.
How It Works on Our Platform
We give users non-custodial wallets. That means the money isn’t sitting in our bank account. It’s on the chain. Whatever balance you see in your account is the same as what’s on the blockchain. You can verify it yourself. Transactions are transparent. No one has to trust us to hold their funds, they only trust the protocol and the issuer.
Not everyone is familiar with crypto yet. So part of our job is to provide on-ramp and off-ramp solutions. Users need to get money into their stablecoin wallet (on-ramp) and out of it into their local currency when they want to withdraw (off-ramp). We’re building and partnering to make that as smooth as possible.
Once the money is in the wallet, every other transaction on the platform, paying for a programme, sending to an instructor, splitting revenue, happens in stablecoins. Settlement is instant. The value is clear: if I send you $20 USDC, you receive $20. No hidden FX spread, no “we’ll credit you in local currency at our rate” until you choose to withdraw. Transparency and speed in one go.
Why This Will Matter More, Not Less
Cross-border payments are still slow and expensive for most of the world. Stablecoins don’t fix every problem, regulation, volatility of other crypto assets, and user education still matter. But for moving value across borders in a stable unit, they’re already better than the legacy rails in many cases.
We’re betting that adoption will keep growing: more wallets, more on-ramps, more merchants and platforms accepting stablecoins.
We might one day add another token or mechanism to solve for things stablecoins alone can’t (e.g. incentives, governance, or other use cases). But the core of our payments strategy is stablecoins. Not because they’re cool. Because they’re useful.
So when people ask why I’m betting on stablecoins, the answer isn’t “because crypto.” It’s because we’re building a global platform for education, and we need a way to move value globally. Stablecoins are the best tool we have for that today.
We’ll stay regulated. We’ll stay transparent. And we’ll keep making it easier for everyone, whether they’re in Lagos, Kigali, or Nairobi, to pay, get paid, and learn without the system getting in the way.