magma3: A coordination point for global African builders

magma3 brought in 25 founders & builders, who locked themselves in for two weeks to collectively figure out what it takes to build a truly open economy for the African market and beyond. Joined by 15 supporters from across Africa and all over the world, magma3 was ground zero for coordination and tapping into each other’s knowledge & experiences, visions, stories, and tools that each one is building.

With this third cohort, the entire magma community now has 75 founders, developers, and researchers, driving 45+ startups. They cover financial services (payments, stablecoins, credit, savings, insurance), identity & reputation, RWA tokenizations, internet connectivity, validator and node operating infrastructures, wallets, social, education, media, and research labs. The payment companies collectively processed over 4% of the recorded 2024 stablecoin transactions in Africa. As of today, these magma startups have over 350,000 retail and business users, growing at an increasingly fast pace.

Why coordinate?

magma exists to serve as a platform for better coordination amongst founders and builders, to facilitate interoperability and increase the shared infrastructures for those at the front lines, while also expanding builders’ access into key global centers of gravity.

Let’s face it: building the financial, trust, and economic tools that the 1.5 Billion (soon to be 2.8 Billion) Africans actually need, in the context of a highly fragmented continent, is extremely complex, in fact it is almost impossible. We can solve complex problems by breaking them down into pieces, literally.

Building with Web3 tools affords us the ability to create the ‘lego pieces’ of stand alone applications and protocols that can be interoperable. Instead of having to build the whole stack of tools one needs and solving for every problem internally, they can leverage what others have already built. Successful ecosystems are built this way. Open source infrastructure allows builders to use tried and tested tools, instead of having a very high price of entry. That is why we are seeing young entrepreneurs building core banking functions in their bedrooms, then scaling it to billions of dollars of transactions in a few years, where banks have become their customers. This is only possible by using tools others have previously built, it is interoperability in practice.

However, building Africa’s finance, trust, and economic infrastructures is not just a technical challenge. It mostly comes down to the ‘off-chain coordination’ challenge, which includes building a user centric product and having people actually use it, integrating it with old systems, accessing liquidity and reducing liquidity fragmentation, regulation and licensing, dealing with fraud, timing the launch of a product with market needs, organization building and scaling, fundraising, BD and partnerships, hiring teams, and a long list of other important things founders have to do.

Founders in Africa have already gravitated towards building collectively, leveraging each other, and leveraging open source tools because they can tap into a lot more resources than they would otherwise, and therefore ship their products faster, which promotes a thriving growth. magma allows the highest potential founders to lean more into that, and tap into a collective hivemind and now a stack of products they can integrate with to drive their mission.

Africa is the most interesting place to do this because the concept of an ‘open financial system’ is not just conceptual - it is as practical as it is a matter of surviving and thriving, collectively. Africa is ground zero for building user centric applications that serve the non-crypto market, at a scale that is not possible elsewhere, that leverages decentralized tools to increase security and reduce the cost of execution. Builders are not working to displace banks, traditional institutions, and offer users a slightly better alternative; builders are creating what these institutions have not been able to, serving the users they are not set up to serve, and creating opportunities they are not able to create.

The Crucible

Out of 180+ applicants, the selected 25 founders & builders rated the overall residency experience 4/5 and 5/5. For two weeks, the residency program featured:

• 113 office hours for focused mentorship from thematic experts

• 18 builder-led discussions on collective cohort topics

• 15 product demos with candid feedback sessions & peer support

• 7 homegroups of aligned people, creating a homebase of accountability

• 6 technical and informative workshops targeted for specific builder’s needs

• 2 fireside chats with experienced leaders & world leading founders

• 1 story circle for openness and collective vulnerability

Meet the founders & builders

magma3 is made up of different stage founders & builders focusing on DApps, stablecoins, agritech, internet connectivity, social tools, and those building research labs.

Startups: cNGN | GainForest | Antugrow | Horus Labs | Azza | NexusPay | Payrit | Kora Insutech | Project Mocha | iExchange | Clixpesa Solutions | Yield Guru Investments | Crefy | SubLinear Labs | iNethi | HD Wallet | Grassroots Economics

Individual Builders: Alfred Ogiste | Alphonce Mutebi | Christine Okoth | Cynthia Kamau

The magma3 experience

In magma3, coordination looked like

• unpacking personal journeys,

• weaving our visions for Africa so we have a clearer North Star,

• having open discussions on where the market is broken and identifying the gaps to fill,

• founders and building giving demo’s and peers trying out each other’s products to give candid feedback,

• diving deep into relevant research that will impact our works and the overall market,

• trying out tools that can have a big impact in our work,

• getting hands on in the mechanics of building successful ventures and attracting the best teams & capital,

• spending time with experienced founders and researchers in the ecosystem,

• talking out loud about our challenges and the road ahead.

From the intensive time together, a high trust environment gets co-created by the builders.

This cohort was especially strongest in areas of technical research, and practically bridging Web3 with fields like distributed internet infrastructure, agriculture, mobility, insurance, and ecological restoration. The problems builders are solving for ranged from enabling hyper-localized solutions to powering intra-continental trade.

Collective Building

Combining curiosity with technical, industry and business knowledge, the founders & builders dove into a collection of a wide range of topics with the intention to learn, inform and ideate together:

• Understanding tradScience to rethink DeSci in the age of AI

• Fundraising: horror stories, success stories & tips to navigate the arena

• Building stablecoins beyond the dollar & running away from existing stablecoin giants

• Open Source: on tooling, licensing, negotiations & comms management

• How to bypass encryption with AI networking

• Building for languages beyond English

• How to make AI a part of our functional life

• Understanding the AI community network

• Consumer marketing: understanding behaviour and product specific marketing

• How to achieve a work-life balance

• AI & Crypto: how the two technologies complement each other

• A guide to building the dream team

• How to divorce your company, make it less personal

• Tokenisation Architecture: on DAOs and Best Practises

• Venture backed startup dynamics

• Playing the long term game

• Understanding Team, Talent & Culture

• What next after Quantum Computing?

• Your Projects vs Regulators/Regulator Management

• Stablecoins & Crypto, and how they are good

• Navigating Privacy & Piracy legitimately

Workshops & Fireside Chats

To offer insight and handson experience building and scaling for a global audience, the program featured two fireside chats.

In his fireside chat, Jesse Pollak (Base, Coinbase Wallet) acknowledged the tangible onchain energy of African builders, outlined the importance of curating a startup culture that is organic, practical and fully guided by a grander team vision.

Kay Kyeongsik Woo (Tada/MVL, ONiON) enthusiastically touched on the parallels between infrastructural needs in Asia and Africa, he shared valuable insights from MVL's journey navigating sustainability, and why blockchain is central to future mobility.

Workshops hosted by supporters focused indepth on technical topics to provide high level information & practical guides on navigating the respective topics:

• ENS with Thomas Clowes

• Governance & Tokenomics Design with James Waugh

• Security workshop with Isaac Patka

• Mechanism Design workshop with Andy Tudhope

• Thinking like a security researcher workshop with Samater Mohamed

• Unleashing the power of storytelling with Stephanie Arrowsmith and Kheireddine Kamal

We are grateful to the support offered to us by these phenomenal founders, mentors and individuals who took time out of their schedules to support the magma3 cohort builders and founders practically both during the residency and after. Whether physically present or virtually, the intentional commitment to supporting African builders at this high level was felt throughout the entire residency. Thank you to all of you, for continuing to show us where your priorities lie, and for making magma3 possible.

We would like to recognize the commitment made by these organizations to support the third cohort of magma, to help remove the barriers that may have been there for some of our founders. Your support allowed us to keep magma free for all builders & founders, so we fully focus on the goal of coordinating and building.

To our Anchor Partners: the Ethereum Ecosystem Support Program team, Base and ENS, thank you especially for the faith you continue to have in us.

The two week residency is the intensive deep dive for builders, yet much of the building continues and scales. magma is here to be a platform for exceptional founders and builders, to facilitate better coordination, stronger ties to global communities, and levelling up of the quality of products being built within Africa.

Express interest for magma4

magma4 applications have not yet opened. To be one of the first to receive official application updates, fill in the expression of interest form. We plan to have more cohorts with more rigorously stimulating programming, the dates of the next cohorts are yet to be announced.