What is L2 Africa?

Why L2 Africa?

Vitalik Buterin, Aya Miyaguchi (ED of the Ethereum Foundation), and a number of Ethereum community members did a month-long learning trip across Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana and Zambia earlier in 2023. The purpose was to connect, learn, and understand the needs of local communities. We met several grassroots communities, developers, founders, policy makers, and students.

The main takeaways: there are values alignments between what the Ethereum community stands for and the problems African builders are working to address with Web3. Yet the global Ethereum communities and African ecosystems are very disconnected.

While Ethereum offers the most secure L1 network for builders and users, Ethereum mainnet is just too expensive for African markets. That's where L2s come in.

L2s make Ethereum scalable and usable to African users and builders, without compromising on security and decentralization. Learn more about L2s.

L2 Africa is a series of events and meetups that follow Vitalik's trip. We are curating groups of L2 founders and leaders to meet African founders, builders and users where they are. Our goal is to create the context for African founders and builders to have direct access to those building Ethereum's infrastructures, and also have L2s understand their pain points and the long-term opportunities on the continent.

About the visit

During L2 Africa visits, we are curating a number of events and meetups to facilitate high context relationships between L2s and African ecosystems.

The events include open meetups to discuss scaling Ethereum, L2s, Zero Knowledge Proofs, and answer questions. We are also hosting founder roundtables / fireside chats to get deeper context on the needs of African entrepreneurs building on Ethereum. There are developer workshops to dive deeper on ZKPs, deploying on L2s, and the types of ongoing engagements that will be most meaningful to the ecosystems.

These events are specifically designed to establish relationships for ongoing collaborations. They are not marketing, promotional or sales exercises.

The first L2 Africa events are happening with leaders from Arbitrum and Scroll, L2s that are built on Ethereum. We also have the ETHGlobal team joining to deepen relationships with local builder communities.

For this year, we are focused on Nairobi and Lagos, as they are key centers of gravity for Web3 projects and also developer communities. Our goal is to keep expanding beyond in the near future.