DFS Lab and Stellar launch a fund for revolutionary digital payments in Africa.

The DFS Lab Stellar Africa Fund I, which will support high-potential builders and teams in Africa looking to revolutionize the landscape of digital payments and beyond by building on the Stellar network, has been unveiled by DFS Lab.

Early-stage investor DFS Lab invests in founders that are generating possibilities for everyone while concentrating on Africa’s biggest economic engines.

The Stellar Development Foundation’s contribution has enabled it to establish its new fund. The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), a non-profit organization that aids in the creation and development of Stellar, is a decentralized, quick, scalable, and especially sustainable network for financial goods and services.

The fund combines the open-source Stellar network, which is optimized for payments and asset issuance, with DFS Lab’s years of helping Africa’s top digital commerce innovators. The mentors from the Stellar Development Foundation and the Stellar ecosystem companies will be available to portfolio founders chosen for investment by the fund, in addition to the staff and community at DFS Lab.

It will expand on prior blockchain bootcamp partnerships between DFS Lab and the Stellar Development Foundation, which helped entrepreneurs and developers in Africa build on the open-source Stellar network.

“We’ve seen developers create Stellar-based solutions for remittance services, digital identity solutions, wallet apps, and other local needs. According to Daniel Casanas, director of investments at the Stellar Development Foundation, “we’ve worked with developing teams across Africa, and we’re pleased to be expanding our collaboration with DFS Lab to support more African innovators.

“At DFS Lab, we have always approached decentralized finance in Africa with a practical mindset. In a continent where finance is frequently hampered by inefficiency, opacity, and a lack of interoperability, it is difficult to ignore the possibilities that decentralized solutions might bring, according to Joseph Benson, partner at DFS Lab.

The influx of expertise and money into this market has helped to hone the potential applications of blockchain and cryptocurrency in Africa. Obviously, some strategies will fail when hype is replaced by reality, but those that succeed and gain popularity may end up creating the basic systems that will support digital transactions across the continent in the future. We think that’s a chance that’s definitely worth investigating.

The new fund will support pre-seed and seed teams creating for Africa, according to Stephen Deng, a partner at DFS Lab.

“Although we are open to all use cases, we will be particularly interested in those that address fiat-crypto conversions and develop cross-continental payments. Both teams who are already familiar with the Stellar platform and those that wish to introduce Stellar into their product roadmaps for the first time will get funding from us. We anticipate making initial investments of up to $100,000, with potential for additional follow-on investments as teams expand, he added.

Applications are accepted here and are considered on a rolling basis for interested parties.