A meaningful source of non-dilutive capital for African blockchain builders has gone dark. Lisk, the Switzerland-based layer-1 blockchain project, is shutting down its network — and with it, a grants programme that had positioned itself as one of the more active institutional backers of Web3 startups on the continent, according to TechCabal.
Lisk had operated a builder grants scheme designed to attract developers and early-stage projects onto its ecosystem. African founders — particularly those building in markets where traditional venture capital remains sparse and Web3 infrastructure is still being laid — had tapped the programme as an entry point into structured blockchain funding. The shutdown now removes that option entirely.
The closure is notable because Lisk was not a marginal player. Launched in 2016 by Max Kordek and Oliver Beddows following a token sale that raised roughly $6 million at the time, the project spent years iterating on its developer tooling, migrating to an Ethereum layer-2 architecture built on Optimism's OP Stack as recently as 2024. That pivot was meant to reposition Lisk as a credible home for real-world asset projects in emerging markets — Africa explicitly among them. The African Web3 strategy was not incidental; it was part of the network's stated growth thesis.
That thesis has now been abandoned. According to Brand Spur, the wind-down ends what had become a structurally important, if under-discussed, funding pipeline for African Web3 builders — one of the few that came with both capital and a technical ecosystem to build within.
For African founders, the timing is painful. Web3 funding globally contracted sharply from its 2021-2022 peak, and Africa-focused blockchain ventures have felt that drawdown acutely. Continent-wide, crypto and Web3 startups compete for a narrow slice of already-limited venture allocations. Ecosystem grants from established blockchain networks — Lisk, but also others like Stellar Development Foundation and Algorand Foundation — have partially filled that gap, offering tranches of capital that don't require founders to give up equity at the earliest, most dilutive stages.
Lisk's exit therefore does not happen in isolation. It compounds a broader thinning of the grant landscape at the exact moment African Web3 founders need more on-ramps, not fewer. Builders who had oriented their technical stack around Lisk's infrastructure — or who had pending applications in its grants pipeline — now face the double disruption of finding both new funding sources and potentially migrating their projects to different chains.
The competitive question is who steps into the gap. Ethereum-aligned foundations, Solana's ecosystem fund, and regional initiatives like the Borderless Capital Africa fund have all shown varying degrees of interest in the continent, but none has yet replicated the explicit Africa-first positioning that Lisk adopted in its final chapter. The Optimism Collective, whose OP Stack underpinned Lisk's layer-2, runs its own retroactive public goods funding rounds — but access requires navigating a more complex governance process that disadvantages early-stage teams with limited bandwidth.
For investors and accelerators tracking African Web3, the Lisk closure is a signal worth acting on rather than simply noting. The structural need the network was trying to serve — patient, ecosystem-native capital for builders in markets where dollar-denominated VC is scarce — remains entirely unmet. Whoever moves decisively to fill it inherits both the founder pipeline and the goodwill that Lisk is leaving behind.
Why it matters: Every grant programme that exits the African Web3 space without a direct successor raises the effective cost of building on the continent — and, for founders already navigating thin capital markets, that cost is rarely trivial.