Opinion: Africa May Be Blockchain’s Most Mispriced Market

Last year, Kredete, a startup founded by Nigerian entrepreneur Adeola Adedewe that enables Africans in the diaspora to build credit profiles through their remittance activity, raised a US$22 million Series A funding round, the largest disclosed blockchain transaction recorded on the continent in 2025. It was one of 28 such transactions completed across Africa during the period, a cohort that, taken together, tells a rather different story about the state of the continent’s blockchain sector than funding totals alone might suggest.

A degree of ecosystem maturation is emerging across the continent, coinciding with the adoption of blockchain-native solutions and a growing emphasis on regulatory frameworks designed to strengthen market stability and consumer protection. In turn, this is producing a market that is evolving differently from many of its global peers and raising questions about whether capital allocation is keeping pace with developments on the ground.

According to the latest Africa Blockchain Report, published by CV VC and sponsored by Absa, global blockchain venture capital rose 28.8% in 2025 to US$15.4 billion, while deal activity fell by almost a third, meaning investors were writing larger cheques, but doing so more selectively. Africa, however, went in the opposite direction, with funding declining 26.6% and deal activity dropping by only two transactions year-on-year. The continent’s share of global blockchain deals climbed to its highest level on record, but its share of global funding almost halved, suggesting Africa is producing the deal flow, but not capturing the larger ticket sizes increasingly concentrated elsewhere. And that is unfortunate because blockchain occupies a larger place within African venture activity than it does globally, both in terms of funding and deal participation. In 2025, it accounted for 5.3% of all venture funding on the continent and 6.9% of transactions, compared to 3.0% and 3.6% globally. This points to a technology that, despite attracting a relatively small share of global capital, is already more deeply embedded within African venture markets than many might assume.

Perhaps this says something about the kinds of problems entrepreneurs are trying to solve.

Innovation in Africa is often born out of necessity, with startups finding new ways to confront longstanding constraints rather than introducing new technologies for their own sake. From agriculture and healthcare to mobility, climate solutions, property and digital identity, entrepreneurs are exploring where blockchain might offer a practical response to market frictions, lowering barriers to participation and broadening access along the way. Investor appetite has gravitated in much the same direction, with much of the 2025 transaction cohort concentrated around cross-border payments, stablecoin-backed

lending, digital-asset payment rails, crypto-enabled trade and supply-chain finance, exchange infrastructure and tokenised real-world assets. Even data and verification tools are finding applications in fraud detection and digital address validation. For a technology once associated almost exclusively with cryptocurrency, it is striking how much of the activity taking place in Africa today is focused on fairly ordinary economic functions.

There is no shortage of opportunity, but the depth of capital required to support it has yet to materialise.

The median blockchain deal size in Africa stood at US$1.9 million in 2025, below an average of US$3.2 million, while seed rounds accounted for nearly half of total funding and almost half of all transactions. The market appears capable of supporting experimentation and early growth, but attracting the larger commitments needed to scale successful businesses is considerably more difficult. Early-stage investors are often prepared to tolerate uncertainty, but larger pools of capital tend to look for clearer rules and stronger oversight in the environments in which they deploy capital. In this regard, the continent is moving in the right direction.

Over the past two years, Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Morocco, Zambia and Ethiopia have all taken meaningful steps towards establishing regulatory frameworks for digital assets and stablecoins, alongside licensing regimes for operators providing related services. Fifteen African countries now have a statutory or regulator-issued framework for virtual assets or a licensing regime in force, even where implementing regulations are still being adopted.

Considering all of this, it is difficult to understand how a continent with some of the world’s youngest demographics and a clear record of leapfrogging in financial technology still accounts for only 0.58% of global blockchain funding.

This imbalance represents one of the most compelling strategic propositions in global technology markets and ought to be a signal to capital allocators that investing in Africa is an opportunity that is too good to ignore.

Rob Downes is the Head of Digital Assets at Absa CIB

Teju Cole

Biggest Selling Title: Open City
Short Bio: A Nigerian-American writer and photographer, Cole’s works often blend fiction and non-fiction, exploring themes of identity, migration, and the urban experience.

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