Postcard from Africa 🌍
Three Things #165: April 13, 2025
My work in blockchain has taken me all over the world these past eight years. I’ve visited five continents to attend conferences, spend time with teammates, and meet the community. But Africa has always been a blank spot on the map for me.
It’s not that there aren’t plenty of events in Africa. It’s not that those events aren’t good, or aren’t worth attending, or that there aren’t lots of amazing builders on the continent. To be honest, it’s hard to put a finger on precisely why it took me so long to connect with builders in Africa, but it may have something to do with familiarity. When I buy a ticket to Tokyo or Lisbon or Dubai, I do so without thinking very hard. I’ve visited these places so many times, I know what to expect. The same is not true for Africa. Visiting Africa is a commitment, and planning a trip there requires a lot more work and a much greater mental burden.
I visited Africa once before, 12 years ago, on a business school trip. We visited several areas in Kenya, including a safari, which was incredible. But that wasn’t a work trip. I didn’t meet builders, and I was strictly in tourist mode.
This time was different. This month, I visited Kenya again as part of the Magma Residency run by Borderless Africa to meet, and to live and learn alongside several dozen of the continent’s most promising Web3 builders and founders.
One final note: I’ve only been to Africa twice, and both times I only visited Kenya. I haven’t spent much time there, and I’m very far from an expert; I’m just sharing things as I see them today. I realize that Africa is a big place with 53 other countries I haven’t visited yet, but grant me the poetic license to use the term “Africa” to refer to the things I’ve experienced firsthand in Kenya, as well as to secondhand knowledge about other parts of the continent.
Thing #1: Beauty 🦓
When people ask me my impression of Africa, I always tell them the same thing: beauty. Africa is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. I’ve been many beautiful places, but Africa stands on its own in several ways.
First and foremost there’s the natural beauty. I don’t think anything on earth can compare to the sunrise over the savannah, to seeing the largest, most beautiful animals on earth proudly thriving in their natural habitat. That powerful image from the Lion King of the sunrise over the savannah with acacia trees and animals silhouetted against it—that’s actually what it looks like in person.
We didn’t get to do a safari on this trip, but the last time I visited I had the opportunity to ride a hot air balloon over the Maasai Mara at sunrise. The memory of that experience has always stuck with me. The area we stayed this time around Kilifi, which is just north of Mombasa, is also incredibly beautiful. I’ll miss watching the sunrise over the Indian Ocean at breakfast.
Secondly, there’s the vibrant aesthetic beauty. Africans have the most beautiful fashion sense on the planet. I’m obviously generalizing a bit, but the fabrics, patterns, and outfits I’ve seen in Kenya are absolutely stunning. Africans have a penchant for decorating every open surface: clothing, yes, but also walls, the sides of buildings, even the sails on a sailboat with the most beautiful patterns. Several African countries have a tradition of dressing up on Fridays, and I was very impressed by the special Friday outfits worn by my African friends from all over the continent. We received a number of gifts from the Magma team and from our fellow participants, including a beautiful wristband and a jacket, that I’ll cherish for a long time to come.
Finally, there’s the abstract beauty of life in Africa. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what’s different about it, but it’s meaningfully different than life I’ve experienced elsewhere. Africans live closer to the earth, and closer to one another, than people in other places. It feels like an older, safer, wiser way of living, as if Africans have access to some social memory that’s been lost elsewhere, in places more distant from where humanity began. I find all of this beautiful in an abstract sense.
This more traditional way of living can be uncomfortable if you’re not used to it. Kenya is equatorial, which means it’s very hot all year round. People there mostly don’t use air conditioning, and even when they do, it barely works by Western standards, so you’re closer to the natural state of things in this respect, too. It’s annoying for the first few days, then you sort of get used to it, as you do to so many things. You get used to standing beneath the shade of a massive Baobab tree, and to identifying the patterns of the ocean breezes, natural forms of air conditioning that people have been using since the beginning of time.
I noticed that Africans rely on one another to a greater extent than those of us in the “civilized” west. Family and tribe are at the center of everything. Society is much less fragmented and individualistic than it is where I come from. Actually, as I wrote previously, they’ve got it right and we’ve got it wrong. We can and should learn a lot from Africa in this regard.
Thing #2: Challenge 🧗🏻
Spending time in Africa puts everything in perspective. Things that seem impossibly hard become routine over time. It’s a bit of a shock to the system when you first arrive, but after a few days Africa starts to change you.
As mentioned above, one of these things is the general lack of air conditioning in an impossibly hot, humid, tropical country. Taxi drivers don’t like to use air conditioning, and if you insist that they turn it on, it barely makes a difference. There was air conditioning in my hotel room, but despite running it at top speed and minimum temperature, the room refused to go below about 80 degrees F. There isn’t even air conditioning at Mombasa Airport, and there was a real shock when I stepped onto the departing plane and felt real air conditioning for the first time in several days.
Africans and anyone from a warm climate will probably laugh seeing me harp on about the heat and lack of air conditioning, but it really was a shock to me. I come from a relatively cool climate, and when I’ve been in tropical places like Singapore, I was in strong air conditioning almost the entire time.
Then there’s the roads, which are universally awful. Almost all roads are one lane highways, jammed with trucks moving at a snail’s pace, which means that everyone is constantly passing one another, driving at high speeds in the wrong lane. There are massive pot holes everywhere. In places, the road is completely broken or closed, and cars are forced to instead move gingerly over temporary, rutted dirt roads running beside the highway. Even new, paved highways have no road signs, no exit indicators, etc. A trip that would take 30 minutes back home on a modern American freeway can easily take two or three hours.
I can keep going. The power constantly goes out, dozens of times per day, sometimes a dozen times in rapid succession. (Kenya actually has relatively reliable power, compared to places like Nigeria where the problem is far worse.) And, of course, you can’t drink the tap water. You need to rely on bottled water, which isn’t without risk. You have to be on the lookout for fake bottled water, which is scary and dangerous. Even in our tourist resort, we occasionally got dirty water from the tap, which means that even using it to shower or brush your teeth can be questionable. Bottled water isn’t expensive and it’s plentiful, but needing to constantly keep track of how much water you has on hand, and where the next water will come from, especially in a very hot climate, creates a constant cognitive burden. It’s just another example of how life is a bit harder, more complex, less convenient and less productive in Africa.
Of course, these petty tourist issues pale in comparison to the challenge faced by my friends who grew up and live in Africa. I can’t possibly do justice to all of the issues faced by Africa in the space I have here, and I’m not going to attempt to discuss macro issues like bad governance, infrastructure, or economic malaise, but I can at least capture the flavor of some of the stories I heard on this trip alone.
School costs money, and many of the builders I met had issues affording education, and periods of time when they had to drop out of school for lack of tuition. Even when they’re lucky enough to receive a scholarship to attend a school outside of Africa, they often can’t afford the airplane ticket to get there, or the cost of living in an expensive country. Life is precarious, and even families that are relatively well off can see their fates suddenly reverse if something goes wrong, such as an unexpected medical bill or a deal gone wrong. Unlike back home, there’s no social safety net, other than one’s friends, family, and community. Poverty is a thing everywhere and always: there are so many people and so few jobs. Everyone is forced to constantly hustle to stand out from the crowd and make ends meet, especially in crowded countries like Nigeria. Many Africans have trouble communicating with the world, explaining what they’re doing and why it matters, due to reasons including language barriers, cultural differences, racism, and poor infrastructure.
In short, Africans are forced to make the most of the limited resources they have at their disposal. The upside is that it leads to an amazing resilience and resourcefulness, the likes of which I haven’t seen anywhere else. On this trip I saw multiple fiercely talented builders who are totally self taught, using hardware that’s woefully out of date, on dodgy, slow Internet connections without even reliable power, producing some of the best work I’ve seen anywhere in the world. That really, deeply moved me. They do so much with so little, and it makes me realize how wasteful we are, as a society and as an industry. The resources we’re consuming would go so much further in Africa.
Something else I realized on this trip is that the world largely tends to ignore Africa, and to write it off. I’m guilty of this as well—after all, it took me twelve years to make it back to Africa after my last trip, and in the interim I traveled all over the world. And it took me eight years working in the industry before I attended a work-related event on the continent, despite having many opportunities and invitations over the years. That lack of attention hurts Africa and it hurts African builders, because it means they’re starved for attention and resources and have fewer opportunities (more on this in a moment).
To me, part of the vision of blockchain and cryptocurrency has always been to level the playing field, ensuring equal access of opportunity regardless of where you happen to have been born. It’s about permissionless innovation, allowing ordinary people everywhere to access resources, build, and share what they’ve built with the world in a borderless fashion, regardless of who they are or where they are. And it’s about opening up networks of value creation and distribution to ordinary people everywhere. I saw all of that and more at work in Africa on this trip, and I won’t soon forget it. It reminded me why I started, but lots of work remains to fully realize this potential.
Thing #3: Opportunity 💎
Challenge and opportunity of course go hand in hand, a fact that becomes quite clear in Africa. While Africa faces enormous challenges, there’s also enormous opportunity both for the people of Africa, and for those of us working closely with the continent.
Let’s start with employment which, as mentioned above, is challenging in Africa. There are hundreds of millions of unemployed young people across the continent. Africa’s economies have failed to keep pace with the rate of population growth, and in many parts of the continent economic opportunity is scare due to an unfortunate combination of factors including poor governance, poor infrastructure, underinvestment, conflict, etc.
But the Internet and blockchain ecosystems give us an opportunity to improve things. They represent the opportunity for people around the world, regardless of geographic location, to participate permissionlessly in global networks of value creation and exchange. And it’s not just about overcoming geography. Increasingly, modern technology allows people everywhere to overcome disparities including language, access to education, access to capital, and even access to professional training. I met founders in Africa armed with modern AI tools, Internet-enabled devices, and a desire to work hard and improve themselves who for the first time feel that they’re able to compete on a more level global playing field.
I don’t mean to suggest that Internet or blockchain are a panacea or that they can address everything that’s wrong with Africa and I’m not suggesting the playing field has been completely leveled, not even close. But I do believe that these technologies in the right hands are an important step in that direction.
Opportunity flows in both directions. There’s clearly also enormous opportunity for non-African builders to work more closely with builders on the continent. I saw this on my recent trip as well. I found it interesting that the blockchain brands that are the most popular and well known in Africa are not the ones I expected, i.e., the ones that I’m used to hearing about at home and in the places I usually travel. I heard next to nothing about usual suspects like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. I get the impression that these projects are so big and successful that they don’t feel the need to invest in Africa specifically.
Instead, I constantly heard about projects like Celo and Starkware that have invested heavily in Africa. I was aware of this, but I was skeptical. The Celo team is based in San Francisco, which is quite far from Africa, and I’d heard their Africa strategy criticized many times before. Starkware is based in Tel Aviv, and as far as I know also doesn’t have an on the ground presence in Africa. But they do have an Africa-focused investment fund, and they decided to do a generous airdrop that included many African builders, which appears to have bought them a lot of goodwill. I met multiple builders contributing full time to the Starkware ecosystem, in spite of the fact that they’re not even being compensated for that work, and in spite of the fact that Starknet isn’t even in the top 150 blockchain ecosystems by market cap. When I asked why, they all mentioned the airdrop. In Africa, even an airdrop that’s relatively small by global standards can go a very long way and be a life-changing amount of money.
This is one of the biggest opportunities of working with Africa. Resources simply go much further there. For the cost of one overpaid developer in San Francisco or New York, you could easily hire 2-3 fantastically talented African devs like the ones I just met, maybe more. And the African builders have the benefit of having done hard things before, and having overcome diversity, which is more than most American developers can say. In my personal experience, teammates with experience overcoming diversity and solving hard problems tend to perform better overall.
What does all of this mean for me personally, for the NEAR Foundation, and for the broader NEAR ecosystem? One of my clear takeaways is that NEAR has underinvested in Africa, and I hope we can change that. When I showed African builders what they can do with NEAR infrastructure and gave them a few coins to play around with it, they were very excited. Everyone I met on this trip is excited about AI, but also concerned about the risks of centralized AI, so the “blockchain for AI” message resonated. We should be doing this on a much larger scale: hosting events, investing in builders on the continent, and sponsoring programs like Magma, to start.
Investing in Africa should be second nature for NEAR, which was originally founded to make it easier to pay people around the world to work on big projects like AI. NEAR is focused on many other things today, but we should also remain true to these roots. I’ll say the same thing of NEAR that I said of Ethereum a long time ago: in order to build infrastructure for the world, we have to meet people around the world where they’re at. We can’t do this exclusively from the comfort of our rich world homes.
For me the main takeaway is to stop writing off Africa and to pay much more attention to the people and projects on the continent. It will take more effort to do that, but the effort will be worthwhile and it’ll pay dividends. I feel grateful and inspired to have met and gotten to know so many incredible builders on this most recent trip. I look forward to continuing to support and learn alongside these builders, and I’m already planning my next visit.