Binance Pay Brings Crypto Payments to 650,000 Merchants Across South Africa

The collaboration allows consumers to use over 100 cryptocurrencies to pay for goods and services via QR codes, marking one of the most expansive real-world crypto payment rollouts in Africa to date.

Under the integration, customers can scan a merchant’s QR code using the Binance app, select their preferred cryptocurrency, and complete the transaction instantly with no gas fees. The payment settles through Scan To Pay’s existing infrastructure, allowing merchants to continue operating within familiar systems while offering crypto as an additional payment option. The aim is to remove friction at both the consumer and merchant level by embedding crypto payments into flows that South Africans already use daily.

The merchant network spans a wide range of everyday use cases, from fuel purchases at participating Engen service stations to retail and healthcare transactions at outlets such as Clicks. The Scan To Pay ecosystem also supports mobile top-ups through Vodacom and bill payments via EasyPay, meaning crypto can now be used for utilities and recurring expenses rather than just discretionary spending.

For Binance the move represents a strategic push to reposition digital assets as a practical payment tool rather than a speculative investment vehicle. While crypto adoption in South Africa has been relatively high compared to other African markets, usage has historically skewed toward trading and long-term holding. Payments, by contrast, have remained a tougher sell, constrained by volatility concerns, education gaps, and limited merchant acceptance.

By partnering with a local payment network that already has deep penetration among merchants, Binance is effectively sidestepping one of the largest barriers to adoption: onboarding businesses individually. Instead, crypto becomes another payment method layered onto existing QR-based systems, a model that mirrors successful rollouts in parts of Asia and Latin America where consumers are already accustomed to scanning codes for everyday purchases.

The user experience is designed to keep blockchain largely invisible. From the consumer’s perspective, the process resembles a standard mobile wallet transaction, while the crypto settlement happens in the background. For merchants, Scan To Pay continues to handle settlement and reconciliation, reducing operational complexity and minimizing disruption to existing workflows. Binance has emphasized that this approach is critical to achieving real-world scale rather than niche adoption.

Although the announcement highlights support for more than 100 cryptocurrencies, stablecoins are widely seen as the foundation for most practical payment use cases. Assets pegged to fiat currencies offer the price stability needed for everyday commerce, particularly for small-value transactions such as groceries, fuel, or mobile airtime. In practice, stablecoins function as a bridge between digital assets and real-world spending, underpinning a significant share of blockchain-based payment activity.

Binance’s own payments ecosystem has increasingly leaned on stablecoins such as USDT and USDC for merchant transactions, citing lower volatility risk and simpler accounting for both users and businesses. This aligns with a broader industry trend in which stablecoins are emerging as the primary medium for blockchain-based payments, even as regulators continue to debate their classification and oversight.

Despite the scale of the rollout, challenges remain. South Africa’s regulatory environment for crypto is still evolving, with authorities balancing innovation against consumer protection and financial integrity concerns. Critics have warned that broader crypto payment adoption must be accompanied by education initiatives to ensure users understand the risks associated with digital assets, even when used in routine transactions.

There is also the question of trust. For crypto payments to move beyond early adopters, they must demonstrate reliability on par with traditional banking systems. Any outages, settlement delays, or high-profile failures could slow adoption, particularly among users who rely on mobile payments for essential expenses rather than discretionary spending.

Even so, the Binance Pay and Scan To Pay partnership represents one of the clearest attempts yet to normalize crypto as a day-to-day payment method in a major African economy. If adoption gains traction, it could strengthen the case for blockchain-based payments as a tool for financial inclusion, especially in markets where traditional banking access remains uneven.

This initiative’s ability to serve as a blueprint for wider crypto payment adoption will hinge on how seamlessly it integrates into daily life. South Africa has emerged as a live testing ground for the idea that crypto’s future may be found not on trading screens, but at the checkout counter.