What global investors still don’t understand about African Web3

Yoseph Ayele spotted a pattern years before he raised a single dollar for LAVA, an early-stage Web3 fund backing African crypto startups with cheques ranging from $100,000 to $500,000.

The pattern emerged while he was building Borderless Africa, a platform he launched in 2021 to connect African founders and talent with global capital and infrastructure. Time and again, founders in Lagos, Nairobi, and Johannesburg were solving meaningful local problems, yet the investors and infrastructure providers best positioned to help them scale had little understanding of those markets.   

A month-long tour across four African countries with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin sharpened his conviction. Throughout the trip, he realised that many founders—despite spending months in the same online community—were meeting one another in person for the first time. 

For Ayele, the problem extended beyond access to capital or international attention. Africa’s early-stage crypto ecosystem lacked a coordination layer: a space where founders could exchange ideas, learn from one another, and build relationships, much like entrepreneurs do in Silicon Valley or Asia’s established crypto hubs.

Ayele launched magma, a biannual founder residency programme run through Borderless Africa, that connected early-stage builders and infrastructure providers. According to Ayele, the programme has supported more than 40 startups building financial infrastructure and decentralised trust solutions across the continent.

Following the end of the zero-interest-rate policy (ZIRP) era in 2022, early-stage capital became significantly harder to access. Founders repeatedly told Ayele that fundraising had become their biggest constraint.  

He sat with the problem for several years before launching LAVA in 2024 to back…