The Longevity of Kenya’s Blockchain Startups: Surviving past the hype
Startups are hard. You could have all the money, all the tech, literally all the support you can conceive and still end up with nothing but an expensive LinkedIn post. A blockchain startup? But a blockchain startup? A blockchain startup in Kenya? Things get brutal. You can almost find a correlation that the cooler an idea sounds, the less likely it is to succeed.
Yet among the ashes, a few ideas refused to die. They didn’t just scrape by — they found ways to adapt, pivot, and carve out relevance. Let’s put on our Startup Soko gloves and take a closer look.
Who Actually Lasted
AZA Finance (formerly BitPesa)
Launched in 2013 in Nairobi as one of Africa’s earliest crypto-to-FX plays, BitPesa was built on a bold premise: Bitcoin would power African remittances. Spoiler — it didn’t. But BitPesa did the smart thing and grew up. It pivoted into institutional FX, treasury, and cross-border payments, rebranding as AZA Finance. Today it’s a regulated fintech with regional scale — a rare African example of a crypto startup that didn’t die young but matured into adulthood. [Financial Afrik]
Kotani Pay
If AZA grew into a fintech, Kotani Pay dug into infrastructure. Headquartered in Nairobi, it builds the on-ramps, off-ramps, and stablecoin rails needed to actually settle Web3 payments across African currencies. Think of it as the plumbing nobody sees but everyone needs. As of 2025, Kotani is quietly expanding across the continent. The business may not win pitch-deck beauty contests, but it wins on survival.
Pesabase
Remittances are the blockchain industry’s favorite story, and Pesabase has been grinding at it for years. Positioned as a blockchain-powered cross-border payments platform, Pesabase uses tokenization to make remittances faster and cheaper. It’s not strictly a “Kenya-only” play, but it’s active in the region and continues to update its products. Not flashy, but still breathing. [Yahoo Finance]
Sarafu-Credit / Grassroots Economics
Now for something completely different: community money. Sarafu is a complementary currency network that took root in Kenyan informal settlements. It later digitized, hooked into Celo, and kept going. Sarafu won’t be listed on NASDAQ anytime soon, but it has delivered real, measurable local impact for communities often ignored by traditional finance.
BitHub Africa
Not a product company but a hub, accelerator, and training ground. BitHub Africa has been a steady presence in Nairobi’s blockchain scene, running events, capacity building, and seeding ideas. It won’t mint unicorns by itself, but it represents a kind of institutional memory that Kenya’s startup scene desperately needs.
Why Most Didn’t Scale
So why didn’t Kenya produce a wave of blockchain unicorns?
1. M-Pesa’s dominance. Safaricom solved domestic payments long before blockchain got trendy. If everyone is already on M-Pesa, you’re not “disrupting” much.
2. Business model mismatch. Many early blockchain startups were solving “first-world problems” in a market with more immediate needs like food and transport.
3.Funding and talent. VC checks in Silicon Valley flow faster than Nairobi’s internet. Scaling capital just wasn’t there.
4.Regulatory uncertainty. For years, crypto lived in a gray zone. Banks avoided it. Regulators frowned at it. And only in 2025 did Kenya table the Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) Bill, which set formal licensing and AML/KYC rules. [Treasury | bowmanslaw.com]
5.Pivot pressure. Most survivors had to shed their “crypto startup” skins and morph into fintechs, infrastructure providers, or community experiments.
The 2025 Turning Point — Regulation
The VASP Bill is a big deal. For the first time, Kenya has drawn a bright line: if you’re handling crypto or digital assets, you need a license, AML compliance, and regulatory muscle. That raises the cost of entry, but it also clears the fog. Startups with resources (think AZA) can now scale without wondering if tomorrow brings a ban. For scrappy founders, it’s a higher hurdle.
The Durable Wins — Infrastructure and Community
Forget moonshots. Kenya’s blockchain legacy so far is in two areas:
Infrastructure rails like Kotani Pay that make digital payments practical.
Community money like Sarafu that quietly improve lives where banks don’t bother to go.
These aren’t the flashy unicorn exits investors dream about, but they’re real, durable wins.
What Founders Should Do Next
If you’re building in this space, a few takeaways:
1.Build rails others can use.
2.Prioritize regulated B2B revenue streams (finance, treasury, FX).
3.Partner with telcos instead of fighting them.
4.Use blockchain where it actually reduces costs or adds trust — not just where it makes a pitch deck sound cooler.
5. Partner with those who are already there.
Conclusion
Kenya’s blockchain scene didn’t produce the unicorn herd some promised, but it produced something arguably more valuable: a handful of durable, resilient companies that learned to survive in one of the toughest markets around. Watch AZA’s partnerships, Kotani’s expansions, and Sarafu’s adoption numbers. The hype cycle may be gone, but the quiet survivors are still standing — and that’s saying something.
Out there, right now, new Kenyan startups are being built — Project Mocha, Investafarm, Base Pay… fresh solutions tackling real problems. Whether they’ll stand the test of time is still an open question. If you’re building, put your whole mind into it. The environment is getting better, the rails are clearer, and the lessons from those who survived are right in front of us. The odds won’t ever be easy, but then again — they never were.
