Africa’s blockchain industry has talent and growing use cases, but limited access to capital, fragmented markets and regulatory uncertainty continue to constrain its growth.
Africa Blockchain Festival CEO Olubunmi Fabanwo discusses what needs to change for African startups to scale, attract global investment and build technology for international markets.
1. What problem were you trying to solve when you founded the Africa Blockchain Festival?
Fragmentation.
Africa had the talent, the builders and the use cases, but everyone was working in isolation. Founders couldn't find capital, investors couldn't find vetted founders, and regulators were writing rules for an industry they had never sat across a table from. We were not trying to build another conference, we were trying to build the room where those 3 groups finally meet, because that's where an ecosystem gets made. The festival is just the most visible part of a much bigger idea.
2. Was there a particular moment when you realised Africa needed its own major platform?
Years of watching the global conversation happen everywhere except here. I spent time in traditional banking, then ran Binance's affiliate programme across Africa, and the pattern was always the same: the world treated Africa as a market to sell to, not a place where the future was being built. But the real innovation, stablecoins solving actual payment problems, blockchain moving money where banks couldn't reach, was happening on this continent first. The realisation was blunt, that if we don't build our own platform and define ourselves, someone else will define us, and they'll get us wrong.
3. What have been the biggest challenges in building a credible platform in Africa?
Blockchain has a hype problem, so earning the trust of regulators and investors meant proving we had substance, Kigali was the turning point.
Once policymakers saw we could convene a gathering that actually moved policy, the doubt faded. The other challenge is the one every ambitious African project knows, doing world-class work with the infrastructure and resource realities of the continent, and refusing to use that as an excuse to be anything less than excellent.
4. What do you ultimately want the Africa Blockchain Festival to become over the next five years?
The festival is the community-building engine, but not the destination, what we're really building is a venture studio and a think tank for government. The festival gathers the founders, the talent, and the ideas. ABF Labs is where we take the best of them and actually build, a residency that takes founders through months of real company-building, and a policy arm that helps African governments design the frameworks this economy needs. The festival proves the community exists, ABF Labs turns that community into companies and policy. This is the 5-year arc.
5. Do you see Africa Blockchain Festival primarily as a conference, or part of a larger ecosystem?
The conference is just the top of the funnel, underneath it sits a startup fellowship, a deal room where capital meets founders, a policy platform that works directly with regulators and bodies like the AfCFTA Secretariat, and ABF Labs as the venture studio that carries founders forward long after the 3 days end. If we were only a conference, we'd have built something that inspires people for 72 hours and then lets them go home with nowhere to take the momentum. The whole point is to give them somewhere to take it.
6. What opportunities do you see for African entrepreneurs to build for global markets rather than just adopting technology?
For decades, Africa has been handed technology built for someone else's problems. The shift happening now is that African founders are building solutions to African problems that turn out to be the world's problems too. Alternative tech works here, grassroots, frugal, built under real constraints, and that's exactly what makes it globally relevant. Stablecoin payments were born from currency volatility and brutal remittance costs on this continent, and now they matter everywhere. My advice to founders is always the same, don't build a local copy of a Valley product, build the thing the world will need next, because you're already living the problem it solves.
7. What needs to happen for more international investors to take African blockchain startups seriously?
Regulatory clarity, which is arriving fast across Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, and that de-risks the market. Visible wins, founders who raise, scale and return capital, so investors see a pattern instead of a one-off. And platforms that physically put investors in the same room as vetted founders, which is what our deal room and fellowship exist to do, and what ABF Labs will do year-round. Investors don't warm to Africa from a spreadsheet in London, they warm to it when they're in Nairobi, meeting the founders, seeing the traction, and realising they're early.
8. What misconceptions about Africa's tech ecosystem do you correct most often?
That Africa is one risky monolith. It is 54 countries, each its own market and opportunity. That African founders are somehow less sophisticated, when the truth is they build harder things with fewer resources than founders almost anywhere, which makes them exceptional operators. And the dangerous one, that investors have years to get in; they don't. The founders and the infrastructure are maturing right now, and the people who move early will own the next decade.
9. What does Tim Draper's involvement tell you about changing perceptions?
That the people who are famous for being early are showing up. Tim backed Hotmail, Skype, Tesla, and Bitcoin before any of it was obvious. When someone with that instinct turns his attention to Africa and gets genuinely excited, it is confirmation of something we've always known. The fundamentals here are real and the smart money is starting to see what we see.
10. What would you say to an investor who thinks Africa's ecosystem is too early or too risky?
That "too early" is the entire point, every outsized return in history went to someone who was early and right. The real risk is standing on the sidelines while other people build the relationships, back the founders and learn the markets that define the next decade. Come to Nairobi, spend 3 days here then try to tell me it's too early. The people who actually show up stop asking if it's too risky and start asking how they missed it for so long.
11. What role could digital assets and blockchain infrastructure play in attracting investment?
Blockchain lowers the two biggest barriers to investing in Africa: friction and trust.
Tokenisation lets global capital access African real-world assets, property, infrastructure, commodities, in ways that simply were not possible before. Stablecoins make cross-border capital flows fast and cheap, On-chain transparency speaks directly to the governance concerns that have kept some investors cautious. Digital assets are the rails that make investing in every other African sector easier. That's the bigger story people miss.
12. Twenty years from now, what would you like people to say ABF contributed to Africa?
That it was where Africa stopped asking permission to build the future and started building it. That a generation of founders found their capital here, that regulators and innovators learned to build with each other instead of against each other and that the companies and policies that reshaped this continent can be traced back to the platform we created and a studio we built. This is less about trying to run a great event, we are trying to build the institution that Africa's digital economy grows out of. If someone can look back in 20 years and point to a company, a law, or a founder's whole career and say "that started at ABF," then we did it.
