The year is drawing to a close and its time to recap the top projects in various categories in 2018. In today’s article, we look at the 5 biggest Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) by startups based in Africa.

The cryptocurrency and blockchain industry continues to grow on the continent notwithstanding problems with regulation and little or no financial knowledge of consumers. In 2018 ICOs have accelerated that growth by giving African startups the opportunity to raise money that will allow them to solve various problems on the continent.

According to data by Coindesk’s ICO Tracker, funding for ICOs have generally improvide from the average ICO size of $15.98 million USD in 2017 to $25.72 million USD in 2018. Collectively a total of $22.50 billion USD has been collected through ICOs since 2014.

Currently, per our own calculations based on data provided by the same source, African ICOs have contributed less than 2% to the global ICO size. Despite this, the 5 projects listed in this list achieved great success regardless of the status quo.

1. Golix - Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe-based cryptocurrency exchange platform, Golix, battled regulation issues during its ICO to be on top of this list. A company founded back in 2014, Golix launched an ICO in 2018 to fund the proper establishment of its cryptocurrency exchange and expansion to other African countries.

Golix faced problems with local regulation during their ICO when the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) issued a directive to ban cryptocurrency, causing them to suspend their token sale. The issue was then challenged by the cryptocurrency startup based on three charges including the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) having no legal authority to ban cryptocurrencies, unfairness based on the legal principle of administrative justice and the constitutionality of the ban.

The ban was later overturned by the Harare High Court. Golix then relaunched their ICO and managed to raise $23 million USD. Golix settled on running an ICO after they had struggled to raise venture capital even though they had raised Seed Funding of $30,000 in 2015 as well as an undisclosed round of Venture capital from an Angel Investor in December 2016.

2. Kora Network - Nigeria

Kora, led by Nigerian CEO Dickson Nsofor, got its first Seed investment in July last year and moved on to run an ICO in May 2018. Kora is a financial platform with the aim of enabling individuals and businesses in Africa to send and receive payments from anywhere in the world.

Kora uses Tendermint DPoS as a consensus algorithm, allowing for scalability while maintaining decentralization. The Kora blockchain is secured by the Kora Network Token (KNT).

Though headquartered in New York, Kora launched in Nigeria in March ahead of its token sale. Kora raised $12 million USD which was the soft cap of its ICO campaign, making it one of the most successful African ICOs.

3. Wala - South Africa

Wala, is a zero-fee financial services app for emerging markets, that makes use of the DALA token for transactions and peer-to-peer transfers. Wala is based in Cape Town, South Africa, and is currently available in South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.

According to the project’s website, their flagship application has over 100 thousand active users. The startup had raised an undisclosed Seed round in 2016. This was followed by an undisclosed investment round raised in 2017 by a South African-based Venture Capital firm.

Wala raised $1.2 million, a long shot away from its target of raising $3O million USD.

4. DreamBlock - South Africa

ProsperiProp now DreamBlock is a startup based in Johannesburg that provides distributed real estate asset management on the blockchain. DreamBlock uses blockchain technology, utility tokens, cloud computing, and mobile technology to make it possible for real estate asset managers to create their own fractional investment products.

The startup started its ICO in September last year. Though this didn’t receive a confident performance as it failed to take off and only amassed around $200 thousand USD from the selling a little over 600 000 PROPX tokens.

5. Mazzuma - Ghana

Mazzuma is the third highest ranked mobile money payments system based on transaction volume in Ghana that seeks to utilize blockchain technology through the creation of the MAZ cryptocurrency to enable instant seamless payments globally.

The MAZ Token was distributed to the public through an Initial Coin Offering in August 2018 with a token selling at $0.75 USD each. The ICO did not have very impressive results, with an estimated ICO size of a little above $100 thousand USD.

Africa continues to grow in the cryptocurrency space, we hope to see more development in 2019.