I'm pretty skeptical about that 1.8m number.

There are no exchananges operating in the country (at least none that the banks will work with), and there's hardly any BTC/ETB offers on the P2P platforms. So where are these 1.8m people finding bitcoin / crypto to acquire?

But there are "blockchain" organizations pushing hard in a number of countries in Africa, and I suspect Ethiopia sees the same. These include Binance (pushing BNB/BUSD) and smaller ones even like Celo (CELO/cUSD).

You'll see events and gatherings where they'll show a room with a hundred people in attendance, but the draw was that the event was held at or near a college campus, was giving away free t-shirts, free food, and the hundred attendees were students there for that. So that doesn't mean all that many then hold or trade stablecoins.

As far as whether or not stablecoins are the current main use case, I don't know. Someone receiving remittance payment, for example, is likely going to be converting it to cash (local first -- ETB), so there isn't all that much time that the recipient is exposed to exchange rate risk. And bitcoin is like the common denominator. Easy for the sender to acquire as essentially every exchange trades bitcoin, and easy for the recipient to use for cashing out to fiat, or to spend, etc.

But I simply am speculating.