Developers are the future of Africa’s Web3 ecosystem.

In Brief

• Base East Africa a growing community featuring startups like Swypt and HakiChain to address local challenges via decentralized legal, financial, and daily-use dApps.

• Platforms like Swypt (stablecoin rails), HakiChain (legal bounties), ElementPay (everyday payments), and Ndovu (robo-advisory) showcase Base’s practical impact.

• Developer support—including grants, tooling, and community events—fuels a thriving local ecosystem, positioning East Africa as a Web3 innovation hub.

To ensure true adoption, we shouldn’t rely on solutions from outside; instead, we should build our own, for we are the ones who truly understand what we need.

Base East Africa is one such initiative highlighting how East Africa has the potential to develop dApps on the Ethereum Layer 2 solution.

Base by Coinbase provides developers with the resources, infrastructure, and tools innovators need to build solutions tailored to the market’s needs.

This article highlights the various platforms built on Base, with a keen focus on East Africa, showcasing who they are, what they do, and, most importantly, why Base?

The Foundation: Why Base Resonates in East Africa

East Africa is home to a vibrant, young, tech-savvy population that is largely tired of the traditional 9-to-5 jobs.

An entire generation of innovators has formed a strong community within East Africa, with regions such as Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda dominating the digital space.

It’s not just about using the internet to look for alternative income, but building solutions that actually help, actually provide true change.

Quite frankly, for the first time, East Africa has an entire Generation with a unified goal in mind: to get rich and place Africa at the top of the food chain.

Enter Base, a layer 2 solution built by Coinbase with a similar goal to its host, Ethereum, provides a platform for innovation, growth, and creativity.

CHECK OUT:Coinbase Crypto Services: Powering Africa’s Financial Inclusion Revolution

How to build on Base blockchain is a key highlight for most African developers diving into the same.

Quite frankly, why shouldn’t they? Base mainnet exemplifies Web3 through its low transaction costs, making blockchain applications economically viable for everyday use.

The layer-2 blockchain solution also lives up to its name, solving the issue of scalability and making it an ideal option for anyone trying to achieve this.

Typically, the Base Layer 2 solution offers security, advanced tools, and even grants to African startups daring to change the narrative within the space.

A platform for creativity, an ecosystem that highlights how much change East Africans can make if given the resources and equipment. Base inherently provides us with the base we need to thrive.

Base East Africa understands a simple fact: if WE WANT TO DOMINATE, it is up TO us to BUILD THE SOLUTIONS TO FOSTER GROWTH.

Spotlight on Innovation: Startups Building on Base

The true impact of Base is evident through the lens of startups actively deploying solutions across various sectors.

Finance aside, the platform urges the diverse use of Web3 across various industries.

Swypt: Seamlessly Bridging the Digital and Traditional Economy

Finances are the heart of any economy, and various solutions have risen over the past few decades, highlighting how blockchain is a better alternative.

However, Swypt takes it a step further and highlights that obscuring the complexity of digital assets is the way to achieve true adoption.

The organisation is a decentralised platform that has developed solutions for enterprises and retail, with a particular focus on stablecoins.

The platform is Kenyan-based, with a main focus on enabling merchants and businesses across East Africa to access the versatility, global reach, and convenience of stablecoins.

Swypt takes adoption to the next level and plans to set up Cashpoint throughout Nairobi, Kenya, while also establishing rails and APIs.

This allows companies to manage stablecoin treasuries for fiat and stablecoin transactions. The platform resides on Base, primarily for its preferred integration capabilities, as well as its ecosystem support.

The organization offers USDT and USDC.

The primary focus of Swypt is to serve as a lifeline for gig workers, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and traders who reach out to mobile money platforms like M-Pesa Africa and Airtel.

HakiChain: Bringing Transparency to the Legal Sector

HakiChain is a prime example of blockchain beyond finance.

The Kenyan-based blockchain platform utilizes Base to bring on-chain solutions to the legal space.

The firm utilizes decentralization to provide immutable contract management and verifiable legal records.

Typically, the platform focuses on making justice accessible through blockchain, offering products such as Bounties.

CHECK OUT:Onchain Africa: How OnboardGlobal Fintech Integrates the Continent

HakiChain has developed a community of NGOs and users who create bounties for legal cases, thereby creating job opportunities for lawyers throughout East Africa.

To gain access to these bounties, law practitioners must sign up, undergo a verification process and incorporate crypto wallets within their systems.

The platform also incorporates AI, ensuring that each verified lawyer gets linked to the appropriate case, and each step of the legal process it functions in is stored on Base.

ElementPay: Making Crypto Spendable in Daily Life

Facts are facts: in Africa, only a few transactions exceed the $1000 mark, and the majority of stablecoin transactions are often below $100.

This speaks volumes about African currencies, yet it also offers an opportunity for growth. ElemetPay is one solution; the platform is a low-cost blockchain solution with a focus on enabling transactions for everyday essentials.

The Kenyan-based platform zooms in on making cryptocurrency and stablecoins accessible to the common “Mama Mboga”, offering low transaction costs for older generations in Africa.

This practical utility is crucial as it erodes the gap between digital assets and tangible daily needs. Furthermore, the platform crypto-fiat conversion is one of its highlights, offering payment even in Ethereum.

The startup is still in its nascent stage, but its practicability could have rippling effects across Africa.

Ndovu: Democratizing Wealth Creation

Ndovu, a startup on Base, has a keen focus on redefining wealth creation in Africa.

The platform opens doors for users and business owners to invest in global and local markets with as little as $50.

The platform has made headlines in Kenya’s financial sector after receiving the green light from regulatory bodies like the Capital Markets Authority to roll out robo-advisory solutions, following the completion of its test in the CMA regulatory sandbox.

Ndovu leverages the Base Layer 2 solution to record each transaction, providing full transparency and accuracy within global investments.

The firm has publicly announced its ambitious goal to onboard over 1 million users in the next three years, attesting to its determination to dominate the East African Market.

Building a Decentralized Future, One Transaction at a Time

Base East Africa is more than just offering an ecosystem to developers. It’s curating East Africa’s blockchain community.

Firms like ElementPay and Swypt tackle the adoption barrier by offering crypto-fiat conversion in a way that even local food vendors can access.

Ndovu takes a tangent into global investment while HakiChain tries to provide easy access to justice; these platforms are but a drop in East Africa’s potential.

For developers wondering how to build on Base blockchain, the flourishing local examples provide compelling blueprints.

The diverse array of startups on Base demonstrates that to truly adopt Web3, we must be willing to utilise its functionalities beyond cryptocurrency.