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LAVA · Africa & Global
The big bet
Web3needsAfrica.Solutionsresilienttoourchallengeswillscalenaturallytotherestoftheworld.

No central price source. Volatility. Risk management. We must solve these in Africa and, as we do, the whole world benefits.

Why now, why here

Africa is prime for new
financial and trust primitives.

01

Predatory legacy finance

8–10%fees on cross-border transactions, highest in the world
$5–10Bper year lost on SWIFT alone
10–27%monthly interest on SME credit
~42%of Sub-Saharan African adults remain unbanked
02

The cost of trust

~500MAfricans have no legal ID
40/54African countries don't print their own banknotes
10.74%average inflation rate across Africa's top 10 economies
14African countries use a currency instituted by France, 6 keep 50% of all FOREX reserves in the French treasury
03

A digital-first generation coming onchain

$1.4Tin mobile money transactions across Sub-Saharan Africa
74%of web traffic in Africa is via mobile phones
350M+middle-class Africans today, 735M by 2030
2×population doubling within a generation. Stablecoins are now eating into mobile money flow.

This isn't a story about Africa catching up. It's a story about Africa being the most fertile ground in the world for creating new financial tools , and exporting those primitives to other emerging economies.

Where we see opportunity

Financial products and services—payments, FX, savings, credit, stablecoins, neobanks, wallets—that meet the growing demand by African people, businesses, and institutions.

01
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Shared, verifiable systems—things like identity and credit data—that align incentives across many parties so trust does not depend on any single owner, operator, or institution.

02
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Frontier AI as a multiplier on under-priced African talent—tools that augment human reasoning, creativity, and connection rather than displace them, trained on data the rest of the world doesn't have.

03
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