Africa is blockchain’s most mispriced market

Last year Kredete, a start-up founded by Nigerian entrepreneur Adeola Adedewe that lets Africans in the diaspora build credit profiles through their remittances, raised a $22m Series A – the largest disclosed blockchain deal on the continent in 2025, according to the Africa Blockchain Report. It was one of 28 such transactions completed across Africa during the year. 

Together they tell a different story about the continent’s blockchain sector than the funding totals suggest.

Africa’s share of global blockchain deals climbed to a record 2.8% in 2025. Its share of global funding, though, almost halved, to 0.58%. The continent is producing the deal flow but not capturing the larger cheques being written elsewhere. That gap is the mispricing.

The report, published by CV VC and sponsored by Absa, found that global blockchain venture capital rose 28.8% in 2025 to $15.4bn, while deal activity fell by almost a third. Investors wrote larger cheques, more selectively. Africa went the other way: funding declined 26.6%, but deal activity dropped by only two transactions year on year.

Blockchain also occupies a larger place in African venture activity than it does globally. In 2025 it accounted for 5.3% of all venture funding on the continent and 6.9% of transactions, compared with 3% and 3.6% worldwide. The technology is more deeply embedded in African venture markets than the global numbers imply.

A market that can support innovation

That reflects the problems entrepreneurs are solving. Innovation in Africa is born of necessity: start-ups use blockchain to confront longstanding constraints, not to showcase new technology. Investor appetite has followed. 

Much of the 2025 cohort was concentrated in cross-border payments, stablecoin-backed lending, digital-asset payment rails, trade and supply-chain finance, exchange infrastructure, and tokenised real-world assets. For a technology once associated almost exclusively with cryptocurrency, most of the activity in Africa today involves ordinary economic functions.

The opportunity is not matched by depth of capital. The median blockchain deal in Africa was $1.9m in 2025, against an average of $3.2m, and seed rounds made up nearly half of total funding and almost half of all transactions. The market can support experimentation and early growth; the larger commitments needed to scale a successful business are harder to attract. Early-stage investors tolerate uncertainty. Larger pools of capital want clearer rules and stronger oversight.

Here the continent is moving in the right direction. Over the past two years Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Morocco, Zambia and Ethiopia have all taken steps towards regulatory frameworks for digital assets and stablecoins, alongside licensing regimes for service providers. Fifteen African countries now have a statutory or regulator-issued framework for virtual assets, or a licensing regime in force, the report says, even where implementing regulations are still being adopted.

A continent with the world’s youngest population and a proven record of leapfrogging in financial technology accounts for 0.58% of global blockchain funding. That is the number capital allocators should sit with – and it is unlikely to stay that low for long.

Rob Downes is head of digital assets at Absa Corporate and Investment Banking.

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_{Top image collage: Rawpixel; Currency.}