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Supporting developers, startups, and full-fledged companies building on Stellar and Soroban
© 2025 Stellar Development Foundation
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By Stellar Surge
Stellar Surge seeks to build a community of engaged African engineers and startups innovating on Stellar and Soroban.
Sourcing and empowering African Developers for Stellar Community Fund
Summary Stellar Surge seeks to build a community of engaged African engineers and startups building on Stellar and Soroban. The program provides a pathway to innovation, learning, and meaningful connections within the African blockchain and developer ecosystem with special focus on building strong partnerships/alliances while supporting and raising developers within the African landscape to launch innovative products using the Stellar and Soroban network.
Background Africa is home to about 1.4 billion people with a projected population of 2.5 billion in 2050. Business Insider also projects Africa to become the world’s fastest-growing region, with six out of the ten fastest-growing economies in 2023 being African countries. Experts have also indicated that the continent is set to become the next global tech hub with developer communities across the continent growing rapidly, with some of the most significant population increases taking place in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Kenya. The blockchain ecosystem in Africa is not left behind in this growth and development. Amidst previous clampdowns across various African countries, Africa is ushering a new wave of interest in blockchain to provide solutions across various challenges. In 2022, the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) in South Africa announced a new licensing regime for cryptocurrency businesses and declared that crypto assets are financial products, lending them greater legal clarity, and also empowering financial investigators to better fight illicit activity in the space. The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has also been navigating the crypto landscape, issuing statements on potential volatility risks at the same time as leaders consider the implementation of a CBDC. At the beginning of 2023, the government proposed a bill advocating for a consistent securities definition of digital currencies and diligent recordkeeping by licensed crypto traders. Around the same time, the Nigerian government approved a national blockchain policy, highlighting ways blockchain adoption can benefit the country and paving the way for future legal frameworks. Also, in December 2023, the Central Bank of Nigeria also released Guidelines On Operations Of Bank Accounts For Virtual Assets Service Providers (Vasps). While there have been a few bumps in the road as regulators became comfortable with the new technology, key trendsetting governments have clearly moved to support blockchain technology and we expect others to follow suit in the coming year.
DFS Lab Proposes a New Program: Stellar Surge
Who is DFS Lab? The DFS Lab is a venture investor, supporting teams who are transforming daily commerce in Africa. We also operate as an innovation center where we help our partners and clients engage and understand the startup ecosystem in Africa through on the ground research, innovation programs, and strategy development. We have been a long term partner with the Stellar Development Foundation on multiple fronts. We currently manage the Stellar Africa Fund and have collaborated with SDF in organizing 3 past SCF bootcamps, supporting over 100 startups across the globe to build on Stellar. As such, we understand the key value that Stellar brings in supporting founders and developers keen on solving hard challenges through the Stellar and Sorban network. We are keen on working with SDF to achieve the vision of a dynamic and growing ecosystem of builders transforming everyday commerce in Africa using Stellar technology. While we have already built out capital investment and startup support models through our fund and bootcamps, we would like to further our partnership and add a developer and ecosystem engagement program to massively grow and energize the talent pool around Stellar. To achieve this, we, as ecosystem partners, propose the initiative "Stellar Surge” to engage a much larger community of developers and startups to the Stellar mission. Key objectives include engaging a much larger community than exists now and fostering a thriving Soroban ecosystem building on Stellar.
Table 1: A few examples of DFS Lab’s Successful Developer Engagement Programs
Stellar Africa Fund - a venture fund investing in Stellar companies in Africa. On behalf of the Stellar Development Foundation we manage a venture fund investing in African companies who are using Stellar in unique and impactful ways. Our portfolio consists of top African innovators building the future of commerce on the continent.
Stellar Global Bootcamp. We sponsored a bootcamp that attracted almost 30 companies from around the world to develop on Stellar over a 4 day period. Participating developer(s) and companies joining the bootcamp worked with SDF, DFS Lab, and Stellar ecosystem members to define a problem, storyboard a solution, and develop a rapid prototype before getting feedback from the Stellar community.
Two Stellar Africa Bootcamps. Our virtual bootcamps gave early- to mid-stage startups in Africa an opportunity to build on Stellar, an open-source blockchain network optimized for payments, over a three day period. We engaged 100s of applicants and selected 20 across two bootcamps, most of whom went on to win grants from the Stellar Community Fund and become members of the Stellar Community.
COVID 19 Innovation bootcamp for the Central Bank of Egypt. We did a 4 day developer bootcamp with the Central Bank of Egypt to foster linkages between the fintech community and local banks.
Series of 4 Mojaloop Payment Bootcamps for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We run a developer engagement and bootcamp program for the Gates Foundation’s Mojaloop platform. We use the Design Sprint methodology to do four day sprints to help market leading startups across Africa build cutting edge products incorporating Mojaloop technology.
Digital Kaduna lab supporting startups across Kaduna State in Northern Nigeria. We have a long term collaboration with Colab and the State of Kaduna in Nigeria to support the growth of the digital ecosystem there.
Objectives: Through Stellar Surge, our long term goals and objectives are to:
Support Stellar Development Foundation in solidifying its presence in Africa through strategic alliances and raising awareness within the developers ecosystem.
Launch a growing community of Stellar developers advocates in Africa.
Create a pipeline for more viable and novel use cases coming from Africa for submission to SCF.
Program Themes and Metrics: We envision Stellar Surge as a multiyear program that provides a pathway to innovation, learning, and meaningful connections within the African blockchain and developer ecosystem with special focus on building strong partnerships/alliances while supporting and raising developers within the African landscape to launch innovative products using the Stellar and Soroban network. The program is anchored on three interconnected themes: ‘Learning, Community, and Innovative Projects’:
Theme 1: Learning and awareness raising (top of funnel) - While we aim to build awareness of Stellar and the Soroban network within the African blockchain space, Stellar Surge will place priority on learning and building the knowledge bank of developers of what’s possible on the Stellar and Soroban network.
Theme 2: Community building (middle of funnel) - This program will also adopt a set of activities to foster an ongoing community of the developers that we engage through Theme 1 activities. The approach will aim to galvanize developers across the African landscape and create a continuous engagement and learning environment for Stellar developers on the continent.
Theme 3: Innovative Projects (bottom of funnel). With the above, the DFS Lab Stellar Surge team will identify and support developers within the African ecosystem who Stellar should pay close attention to. Alongside constant communication, we will have an on-going quarterly sync with the Stellar team to present these teams, their products, and work together to provide them with the best resources (including potential funding) to build on Stellar and Soroban. Our three-themed approach is designed to first establish the necessary foundation for Stellar with the developer community in Africa through reputation-building, learning, and community. We can then subsequently utilize that pipeline to highlight truly interesting and high potential projects for deeper collaboration with the Stellar team and its suite of developer resources.
Application structure We have structured our application in two parts. First, we have an overview and long term vision for the program. We want to situate our work in a longer term vision for the project that goes beyond this initial grant. Next comes the specific proposal for what we will do with this initial grant to help launch the program and go through its initial phases.
Long Term Vision for our Stellar Surge Developer Activation Program To drive the Stellar Surge program, we are proposing a range of initiatives across the 3 thematic areas. These initiatives will be continuous and iterative for a span of the first 12-18 months in which afterwards, documented learnings will be used in designing future interventions. With this first grant we are asking for funding to get started and launch the program over the next 3-4 months whereafter we plan to apply for more funding to continue the program.
Learning and awareness raising: Organize Developer Activation program(s) as in person events across key regions in Africa. These activation programs are aimed at building awareness of the Stellar and Sorban network in Africa among the developer ecosystem while also building strong partnerships and alliances with the wider blockchain community in Africa. The Developer Activation program has 3 channels:
Side events alongside existing high profile African tech events. Our approach to doing this is to scan high profile events to partner with to organize activation programs as side events. Some of the high profile events we’ll be tracking to accomplish this includes: Fintech Summit in Johannesburg, Africa Fintech Summit in Nairobi, Blockchain Africa conference in Johannesburg etc. We believe a roughly half year cadence for these convenings is enough of an investment to keep the Stellar brand relevant to attendees (vs. going shallow with more events).
Establish partnership with local developer groups for Developer Meetups. Part of our strategy in implementing Stellar Surge, is partnering with developer groups across key regions (Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Rwanda) in Africa to expose community members with existing learning contents on what’s possible with the Stellar and Soroban network. These developer meetups will feature capacity building sessions leaning on the existing developer learning contents and documentation developed by Stellar for a more comprehensive and seamless experience that equips these developers to build on Stellar and/or Soroban network. Meetups will also feature informal conversations with members of the Stellar Community and possibly other blockchain ecosystem players with the goal of promoting more open dialogue across the continent around Stellar, blockchain, and its benefits. We envision that through these meetups, we will create a pipeline for developers to demo their ideas/projects and subsequently create a path for submissions into SCF. Alongside these meetups, we will also launch a Stellar Surge Developers Community which will unveil community champions for Stellar Surge. Community champions are developers who will serve as advocates of Stellar in Africa. Developers will cut across early and mid-stage developers and will also be a part of the Stellar Developers Community on Discord. Some existing developer groups we are tracking to partner with include: Africa Blockchain Institute, Women In Blockchain Africa, HerDAO, Blockchain Nigeria, Blockchain Hub Africa, MEMOI Africa etc.
Outreach to Universities/Colleges. Through the Developer Activation Program, we will harness the growth and interest of the developer ecosystem among undergraduate and fresh graduate college students in key regions in Africa. Our approach to these outreach will rest on building awareness and creating a funnel for developers within colleges to join the Stellar Surge Developers Community and introduce them to opportunities to test and build. We believe working with early developers out of school can be a critical pipeline for fresh new ideas and create long-term champions for Stellar in Africa.
Community building: Upon the launch of Stellar Surge Developer group (building from our efforts in raising awareness), we will work with the Stellar team in integrating this community on the Stellar Developers Discord with a specific channel dedicated to Stellar Surge Developer group- so that way we are able to measure number of developers who join the group and invariably build a pipeline for projects specific to Africa submitted for SCF funding. We will take an experimental approach to seeing what works to engage and bring value to the community. To keep the community engaged, we will adopt the following:
Day to day engagement: the community manager, DFS Lab team, and community champions will endeavor to stimulate conversation and activity within the subchannel on Discord and to actively manage the community to make sure it is lively, engaging, and produces value for the community members.
Monthly Community Engagement: Drawing from the learnings on the Developer Activation Program, we will adopt a systematic approach in engaging monthly with members of the Stellar Surge developer community. We will host Stellar engineers and mentors at our monthly office hours, ‘Ask Me Anything’/workshop sessions for community members to share their project ideas and get feedback.
Quarterly Stellar Demo/Pitch sessions: We will host quarterly pitch sessions for developers within the African community to pitch their projects with the wider Stellar Developers Community on Discord. We will work closely with the community manager of SDF to host these pitch sessions and help guide the best participants to successful applications.
Innovation projects: Quarterly pipeline sync with Stellar: Once a quarter our team will summarize our interactions from the above awareness and community-building efforts to highlight the 5 to 10 highest potential and interesting teams whom we believe Stellar should support more deeply. We believe this kind of pipeline curation is critical for your team to utilize its assets in Africa most efficiently while we take on the initial work of qualifying the best teams. Once these teams are identified, we will work with Stellar and the developers to assist in more rapid integration with Stellar by serving as local mentors/liaisons. This may include helping the team submit proposals to the Stellar Community Fund if appropriate.
$50.0K
Jake Kendall
No other submissions.