Despite accounting for a record share of global blockchain deal activity, Africa continues to attract a disproportionately small share of global venture capital funding.
Source: Supplied. Rob Downes, Head: Digital Assets at Absa CIB.
According to the latest Africa Blockchain Report, sponsored by Absa, the continent's blockchain ecosystem is maturing through stronger regulation, practical innovation and growing adoption across sectors ranging from cross-border payments to digital identity.
Rob Downes, head of digital assets at Absa CIB, argues that Africa's combination of entrepreneurial innovation and regulatory progress presents one of the world's most compelling yet undervalued blockchain investment opportunities.
Funding gap persists
According to the report global blockchain venture capital rose 28.8% in 2025 to $15.4bn, 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.
Innovation drives adoption
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 address 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 can offer practical solutions 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 $1.9m in 2025, below an average of $3.2m, 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.
Regulation builds confidence
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.
