Is Africa Ready to Join the Blockchain Revolution?

Writing in Perspectivas: Journal of Political Science, Tlhokomelo Rethabile Monethi argues that the primary barrier to blockchain adoption in Africa is not technological capacity, but political economy.

In “The feasibility study: Is Africa ready to join the blockchain revolution?”, Monethi draws on development economics, governance literature, regulatory analysis, and empirical reporting to show that African governments recognize blockchain’s potential while remaining highly selective in how they adopt it.

The paper focuses specifically on blockchain-based financial systems including central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), digital payment infrastructure, and cryptocurrency exchanges. It finds that state interest in these technologies has not translated into systems that reduce institutional intermediation. Instead, governments have largely pursued tightly managed instruments such as regulatory sandboxes and CBDCs that preserve existing structures of control.

Monethi observes that governments rarely regulate blockchain technology itself. Rather, regulators focus on the products and services built on top of it, since existing legal frameworks were never designed for decentralized systems. Regulatory sandboxes therefore emerge as a compromise mechanism—allowing regulators to monitor innovation without significantly altering existing financial rules.

This institutional caution is particularly visible in the paper’s discussion of CBDCs. Through examples such as Nigeria’s eNaira and Ghana’s e-Zwich biometric payment systems, the study illustrates how state-led digital money projects are repeatedly framed as solutions to inefficiency, exclusion, and distrust, yet struggle with weak infrastructure, limited public communication, and poor adoption rates.

At the same time, the paper documents widespread cryptocurrency adoption across Africa despite regulatory hostility, infrastructure gaps, and shortages in technical skills. Importantly, this adoption did not emerge from policy endorsement or institutional readiness—it emerged from practical use.

High transaction costs, ineffective intermediaries, and distrust in formal systems created conditions in which decentralized alternatives addressed everyday economic realities. While the paper discusses cryptocurrency broadly, Bitcoin’s specific properties stand apart within this landscape.

Unlike CBDCs or sandbox-approved fintech systems, Bitcoin operates independently of state control through its decentralized architecture, fixed monetary policy, and permissionless access model. In doing so, it exposes the limits of state-led digital finance projects precisely because it functions without requiring institutional management.

The paper ultimately reframes the policy question itself. If centralized digital instruments consistently struggle to achieve adoption while decentralized alternatives continue to grow despite regulatory opposition, then the issue may no longer be how governments can control blockchain-based finance. Instead, the more productive inquiry may be how political and regulatory frameworks can accommodate already-functioning systems like Bitcoin without requiring state intervention to operate.