Kenya Scroll Local Node Founder Program

Proposal Type: Growth

Website: www.web3clubs.xyz
X: @Web3Clubs
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Summary

This proposal requests a $30,000 (SCR 92401.51 as of 25/05/2025) grant from Scroll DAO to support the Kenya Scroll Node Founder Program, a 3-month, cohort-based initiative by Web3Clubs, East Africa’s leading Web3 incubator. The program aims to launch 5–10 Scroll-powered projects by integrating African builders, financial institutions, and regulators into the Scroll ecosystem.

Anchored in our Nairobi innovation lab and backed by a 5,000+ member community, the program will drive the adoption of scalable, compliant, and user-focused dApps and DeFi solutions across East Africa. To enrich the program’s offering and ensure a strong pipeline of talent and ideas, we are actively fostering collaborations with established local Web2 developer and founder communities notably Google Developer Groups Nairobi, Strathmore iLabAfrica, and Product Managers KE in founder scouting and local events.

To align with Scroll’s educational mission, the program will mobilise Founders and Builders in the region to join the Open Zero, Scroll’s flagship learning track, into its onboarding, offering founders a guided pathway from idea generation to real-world deployment. Through immersive training, participants will learn how to refine their ideas, build publicly, craft user-focused MVPs, design intuitive interfaces, communicate their value through compelling pitches, and develop sustainable growth strategies, all while preparing their projects for successful launch on the Scroll network.

Using a three-stage pipeline, Msingi, Daraja, and Vuka, participants move from ideation to launch, supported by mentorship, technical sprints, business modeling, and investor preparation.

Through a Founder Factory model, we are enabling Africa based builders to launch Scroll-powered MVPs.

• Position Scroll as the foundational infrastructure for onchain finance in Africa.
• Connect Scroll with TradFi institutions through active pilot projects.
• Provide mentorship, technical resources, and real-world user testing.
• PushLaunch successful cohort participants to openeconomy.xyz

Funding Request:

• Amount: $30,000
• Duration: 3 months
• Usage: Personnel, mentorship, bootcamps, product showcases, builder bounties, and essential tools

Stakeholders:

• Web3Clubs: Project lead, operational team, and host of the Nairobi Lab
• Scroll DAO: Strategic funder and ecosystem partner; Native Scroll founders
• African Web3 Builders/Founders: Project beneficiaries
• DeFi Partners: ViFi
• Regulatory Partners: Capital Markets Authority, Ministry of ICT, Konza City
• TradFi Partners: Nairobi Securities Exchange, Web2 payment service providers, and mobile money platforms
• Local Event Organisers, Community Partners and KOLs: Code Africa (June); Kenya Blockchain and Crypto Conference (July); Zanzalu; ETHSafari (September)
• Founder Mentors & Advisors: Industry leaders in Web3 Startups
• Existing Incubator Partners

Motivation

Deploying the future of African financial Infrastructure onchain

With its ever-growing youth population, Africa is projected to have the largest population of tech consumers. Its developer community is already one of the fastest-growing in the world. Yet, only 5.8% of global Web3 developers are African, and less than 5% of Web3 startups are based on the continent. This isn't a gap. It’s a chasm. And it’s exactly the kind of opportunity we exist to solve.

DeFi presents true transformative potential across the globe. However, this shift will be stunted unless we empower the founders and DeFi projects that can create tailored solutions for underserved regions, particularly in Africa. With a glaring gap in knowledge and access, this disparity will either enable or hinder the continent’s ability to leapfrog traditional finance and claim its place in the rapidly growing DeFi ecosystem. As of 2024, the DeFi market is valued at over $100 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL), with projections set to reach $250 billion by 2025 and $1 trillion by 2030, driven by the integration of DeFi with traditional finance, tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs), and global adoption. The path to this future depends on building the local infrastructure and empowering regional innovators to realize the potential of decentralized finance fully.

We believe the future of finance must be inclusive by design. That means building rails that enable borderless transfer of value and doing this by supporting builders who know what it means to be underbanked, who understand the informal economy, who live with the pain points of remittances, savings, trade, and credit access every day, and empowering them to build solutions that scale.

Just like Y Combinator was designed to help technical founders turn ideas into global companies, we’re building the infrastructure to help Africa’s next generation of builders become Web3-native founders, creating web3-native solutions that serve a billion people across cross-border payments, stablecoins integrations to mitigate dollar pressure, loans and credit, neo-banking savings, and investments, cooperative societies and community governance and well as newer use-cases like core DeFi products.

We're seeding an economic revolution that puts Africa on the map as a hub of innovation that defines the future of open finance and Web3 innovation.

What this means for Scroll DAO:

• Launching on an Existing incubator space: Our centralized physical base of operations in Nairobi, together with our network of stakeholders and active builders spread across Africa, forms a good base for this Founder program.
• Bridging the Gap between TradFi and DeFi: Despite Global counterparts of legacy financial institutions e.g BlackRock exploring DeFi and tokenization, most African giants have still not caught up. Our partnerships with traditional financial institutions (e.g., Nairobi Securities Exchange, Capital Markets Authority in Kenya & Rwanda, Digital Financial Services Association of Kenya, Konza Technopolis SEZ) all of whom collectively have over $1 billion in assets under management, provide fertile ground for Scroll-powered use cases that bridge the gap between DeFi and TradFi.
• Long-Term Market Growth: Through high-trust relationships in academia, government, and industry, Web3Clubs is building a scalable, regional pipeline of contributors, founders, and policy shapers intent on defining Africa’s DeFi future, with Scroll embedded at the core.
• Home-grown, trained, and Mentored Founders ready for openeconomy.xyz

Execution

Operational

Our mission is clear: to birth the next generation of African Web3 startups, and we’ve architected an end-to-end pipeline that takes talent from zero to launch, and beyond.

Over the 3-month project period, we shall operate through three focused phases, with aggressive milestones at each stage:

1. Msingi (Swahili word for foundation) - Founder Onboarding– Talent + Infrastructure + Partnerships
2. Daraja (Swahili word for Bridge) (Ecosystem Building Phase) – Business Modeling + MVP Validation + GTM
3. Vuka (Swahili word for Cross) Transition Phase – Product Scaling + Initial User Onboarding + Market Integration

Strategic Themes we can start with:

• Make DeFi more liquid, more frictionless, more scalable by:
  • Expanding DeFi Liquidity and Capital Efficiency - Focus on unlocking deeper liquidity and improving how capital is used across DeFi. This includes integrating with protocols like Morpho Blue, Aave V3, or Compound to deliver better yields while managing risk.
  • Improving User Experience and Onboarding - Make DeFi more accessible by simplifying interfaces, speeding up transactions, reducing gas costs, and streamlining the onboarding process for new users.
  • Exploring DeFi Consumer Apps for emerging markets
  • Enhancing Yield Through Innovative Strategies - Use advanced models like liquid staking, yield aggregation, and staking-as-a-service to boost returns. Prioritize strategies that protect capital while maximizing yield.
  • Cross-Chain Liquidity Solutions - Enable seamless asset swaps across chains with low fees and minimal friction by building or integrating cross-chain liquidity protocols.
  • Unified DeFi Analytics and Data - Develop interoperable analytics tools that give users a clearer picture of DeFi markets and help th

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https://gov.scroll.io/proposals/48311222747566613620194412824332343511682265633997619649987934699400104272413