TL;DR:
- HesabPay operates on stablecoin infrastructure and recorded over 1 million transactions in the MENA region, with a value of approximately $154 million.
- HesabPay launched up to 1 million Visa cards in Afghanistan and supported more than 625,000 refugees with assistance through its prepaid cards.
- Movement notes that MENA is no longer an aspirational market for crypto assets, but a region with real adoption of digital financial products.
The stablecoin ecosystem in the MENA region is moving beyond infrastructure promises to become a set of financial products with real and measurable use. That is the assessment put forward by Movement in an analysis recently published by Torab Torabi, where the company addresses HesabPay’s progress as concrete evidence that adoption is already happening on the ground.
The starting diagnosis is precise: cross-border money movement in MENA remains slow, fragmented and costly. Legacy payment chains involve delays, multiple manual steps and fees on flows that people use on a daily basis. Even where average remittance costs in the region compare favorably with other developing areas, unnecessary systemic complexity persists.
Stablecoins as a Platform for Real Services
HesabPay is the most documented case of that phenomenon. In July 2026 alone, the platform recorded more than 1 million transactions and processed more than AFN 10.1 billion, equivalent to approximately $154 million. Over the last 30 days, the transaction success rate exceeded 96%, with more than 52,000 unique senders and more than 38,000 unique recipients.
The institutional profile is key to those numbers. UNHCR used HesabPay’s prepaid cards to support more than 625,000 returnee refugees and 17,500 displaced individuals in Afghanistan, channeling more than $35 million in assistance. Since 2023, the partnership with the World Food Programme has helped 49,000 people open digital accounts, including 20,600 women through the World Bank-backed Mother and Child Programme.
MENA Needs More Than Promises
The launch of up to 1 million Visa cards for Afghan customers through Visa Pay, announced in parallel, extends the operational reach of that infrastructure into everyday-use services: mobile top-ups, utility payments, transfers and cash operations. The most recent activity is concentrated in Kabul and Herat, with signals also emerging in other Afghan markets and incipient cross-border flows.
Movement acts as the provider of the settlement infrastructure underpinning those products. The company argues that progress in regions like MENA will not come from generic promises about blockchain efficiency, but from building teams that already understand users, corridors and local constraints. HesabPay’s data, it concludes, is not speculative noise: it is repeated use, operational flow and concrete payment activity.
