12th February, 2025
As recently as 2023, only around half of Africa’s population used banking services. At the same time, the continent is ripe for technologically facilitated reform as roughly three-fourths of African online traffic occurs via mobile phones. For burgeoning African businesses who leverage blockchain functionalities there are often opportunities to effect economic and social changes for the nation’s underserved.
Amid this challenging but promising backdrop, could Africa’s cryptocurrency-focused start-ups bring much-needed reform and drive financial inclusion? Seemingly anything is possible on the blockchain as a new crop of ambitious tech trailblazers tests real-world use cases for digital finance.
Moving Money on the Blockchain
Certainly, start-ups aren’t the only businesses moving the needle in Africa’s fast-changing digital-assets landscape. For example, Binance, a well-established cryptocurrency exchange, recently expanded its mobile money payment services into the African countries of Benin, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Togo, and Senegal.
Binance CEO Richard Teng discussed crypto’s role in financial inclusion recently during a dinner at the World Economic Forum in Davos, “The adoption of digital assets is being driven by necessity, not hype, in some of the world’s most economically strained regions.” Teng continued, “Furthermore, in the world’s most inflation-riddled nations, digital assets like Bitcoin and stablecoins – tokens designed to track the value of other assets such as the U.S. dollar – provide a stable store of value in the face of currency devaluation. For families reliant on remittances, crypto slashes fees and speeds up transfers. Meanwhile, decentralized finance (DeFi) tools are enabling loans and savings where traditional banking fails to reach.”
Thus, Binance and other well-known blockchain-enabled businesses provide a range of essential financial services across Africa. At the same time, there’s room for start-ups to offer unique products which, while not necessarily providing a full suite of banking services, still help to advance financial inclusion.
Take Ghana-based fintech business Mazzuma, for example. Mazzuma’s platform combines elements of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (AI) to enable efficient and affordable peer-to-peer (P2P) payments. Mazzuma’s stated objective, thus, is to provide the experience of a “financially inclusive payment system with a touch of AI and Blockchain.”
Mazzuma is just one among many promising blockchain firms serving Africa’s financially excluded individuals. Gideon Greaves, Managing Director at Crypto Valley Venture Capital Africa, envisions more start-ups entering into the fray and attracting large-scale investment capital, declaring, “More African companies are joining the global unicorn club, and we anticipate that many of those new unicorns will be blockchain unicorns.”
New Technologies, New Possibilities
Whether Africa can fully emerge as a “crypto continent” remains to be seen, but the story is unfolding quickly and start-ups are shaping the narrative. On the vanguard of this movement are bold, envelope-pushing firms that can deploy the blockchain, AI, and other technologies to empower Africa’s local economies.
Among the more intriguing tech-forward start-ups operating on the African continent and elsewhere is Lightchain AI. This fintech firm seeks to combine “blockchain’s transparency with AI’s computational power” to enable “decentralized applications (dApps) that handle real-world challenges in an inclusive, secure, and scalable manner.”
While Lightchain AI is on a quest to advance operations on the blockchain for the benefit of all participants, Jia also deploys blockchain technology but with a less esoteric angle. Established in 2022, Jia leverages the blockchain’s efficiency and transparency to provide affordable, collateral-free loans to Africa’s small and mid-sized business enterprises.
Jia’s collaboration with decentralized finance (DeFi) specialist Huma Finance yielded a platform that offers loans of as much as $5,000 to small businesses. This partnership could prove to be particularly impactful in advancing financial inclusion as traditional digital-based lenders often limit loans to $1,000.
Then there’s Pezesha, which has the makings of a transformative agent in Kenya’s lending market. Deploying blockchain tech and particularly smart contracts and tokenized assets, Pezesha connects borrowers with prospective crypto-friendly lenders, thereby facilitating cost-efficient loan transactions.
Pezesha raised $11 million in a 2022 investment funding round, with gender-focused investment fund Women’s World Banking Capital Partners II leading the funding round. Clearly, social initiatives and financial inclusion objectives can motivate funding within Africa’s start-up scene just as much as profit motives can.
Mixing Inclusion, Innovation, and Oversight
Whether they’re developing a better blockchain, utilizing AI to change how money is moved, or simply making small business loans more accessible and affordable, start-up firms are altering Africa’s financial landscape day by day. Hopefully, financial backers will see the continent’s potential for enhanced blockchain-focused growth, adoption, and inclusion through the remainder of the 2020s.
Of course, this won’t be feasible unless Africa’s regulators cooperate. Even as Africa’s grassroots cryptocurrency movement continues to gain momentum in 2025, local governments must maintain a fairly accommodative policy framework if the entrepreneurial spirit is to flourish on the blockchain.
This doesn’t need to be an us-versus-them scenario. Rather than promote an adversarial dynamic, Africa’s tech-forward start-ups and their financial supporters should welcome reasonable oversight and regulatory clarity.
In other words, blockchain start-ups can advance the cause of financial inclusion if, and only if, they know what the rules are and are able to comply with them. There’s room for improvement in this and other areas – but then, blockchain technology is still in its infancy, greater financial freedom for Africa’s populace remains a distinct possibility, and there are innumerable current and future start-ups yet to be discovered.
