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| Photo credit — Lisk |
On 31 October 2026, Lisk, the Swiss-based Web3 infrastructure company, will shut down its blockchain network and move what remains of its products and developers to Celo, a rival network.
A blockchain is the infrastructure that enables digital assets, such as cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, to be transferred between users without relying on a conventional bank or payment processor.
Lisk’s decision marks the end of a blockchain project that began in 2016, first as a foundational blockchain network built from scratch, before later shifting to Ethereum. While the company announced the wind-down in August 2026, the strategic reset began months earlier, when co-founder and chief executive officer Max Kordek returned to the business in December 2025 alongside former chief technology officer Oliver Beddows, who became chief strategy officer. Kordek stepped down as CEO of Lisk in 2024 as the Lisk Foundation expanded its focus beyond blockchain.
Their first move was consolidation. The Onchain Foundation, Lisk’s parent entity formerly known as the Lisk Foundation, discontinued several initiatives, including Onchain, its research arm, and Pass App, its wallet product, to focus resources on Lisk’s pivot away from blockchain infrastructure.
By May 2026, the restructuring had also made several roles redundant, affecting Lisk blockchain’s regional leads and business development teams as the company pulled back from blockchain expansion.
The company said it is now building a financial operations platform for businesses, focused on accounts, payments, and approvals across fiat and stablecoin rails. The shift is more than a product pivot. It closes a decade-long experiment in running a blockchain and, in Africa, removes one of the relatively few ecosystem companies still willing to back early-stage Web3 founders.
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Africa’s Web3 funding context in 2025
Africa’s blockchain companies, including finance, social, gaming, and infrastructure startups, raised $90.1 million across 28 deals in 2025, a 26.6% decline from the previous year, according to a report by venture capital firm Crypto Valley VC (CV VC). Deal volume fell only slightly, from 30 to 28, pointing to a more selective funding market.
Lisk’s African expansion approach
Lisk’s African expansion strategy had a commercial intent, but that was not uncommon for blockchain ecosystems. At its core, it wanted to find developers, help them build, give them a reason to use Lisk, fund them, then let their users bring activity and liquidity onto the network.
It sought to attract developers and users to its blockchain, creating the activity and network effects needed to make the chain viable and support LSK, its native token.
Some founders received grants, often worth about $4,000 and paid in LSK (the token currently worth less than $1). Several founders told me they converted their tokens into dollar-backed stablecoins, such as USDT, because they needed cash for their businesses.
Others said the more valuable benefit was the network that came with the money: introductions to investors, technology partners, and other founders, as well as opportunities to travel and build commercial relationships.
Building presence and programmes
Lisk began pushing harder into Africa in 2024. According to its year recap, Lisk was co-hosting roadshows in Cape Town, Nairobi, and Lagos, targeting developers. It also created local Telegram communities in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, and partnered with training institutes such as Web3Bridge, AyaHQ, CV Labs, and the accelerator run by CV VC. By the end of 2024, Lisk’s blockchain had about 95,474 accounts and processed over 22 million transactions.
Founders, mostly early-stage builders, received grants and support to integrate Lisk into their products. Azza, a Nigerian WhatsApp-based stablecoin trading platform; Jamit, a blockchain-based creator platform; and Payd, a Kenyan cross-border payments startup, were among those building on Lisk. But getting a founder to deploy on Lisk was not the same as getting a retail market to use it.
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Blockchain networks function somewhat like banks in user preference. Users may stick with familiar networks due to perks, cost, or perceived reliability. Introducing another network means asking users to learn a new route, acquire the right asset to pay fees, and sometimes move liquidity across chains.
Africa’s crypto market had already segmented.
Retail users on the continent had preferred blockchain networks, just as people prefer specific banks or payment platforms. TRON became a major route for USDT due to its low, predictable transaction costs and deep liquidity, while Ethereum, Solana, and other networks had established their own user bases.
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| Photo credit — Lisk Token (Once central to its blockchain ambition, now marks the end of that chapter |
In a 2025 report, Artemis, a US-based stablecoin intelligence firm, cited TRON (TRC-20) and Ethereum (ERC-20) as popular networks for sending and receiving crypto assets across the African markets it studied. Ethereum was the most used network in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, while TRON led in six of the ten countries in its sample, including Egypt and Ghana.
Between 2024 and 2025, stablecoin adoption accelerated. In 2024, stablecoins accounted for about 43% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s crypto transaction volume, according to research firm Chainalysis, while Nigeria accounted for roughly 40% of the region’s stablecoin inflows. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has estimated that Nigeria has accounted for more than 60% of stablecoin inflows to Sub-Saharan Africa since 2019.
Lisk, which at the time was trying to grow stablecoin assets on its network, recognised the opportunity in markets with rising stablecoin adoption, including Latin America. Switching costs, however, proved difficult to overcome.
In March 2024, CV Labs partnered with Lisk to launch a six-month Blockchain Incubation Hub for African startups building on Lisk. The programme offered $4,000 for completing its first block, up to $16,000 for the second, and up to $100,000 in additional funding.
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| Photo credit — Before the blockchain closed its door. |
Olaf Hannemann, CV VC’s co-founder and head of growth, told me that CV Labs admitted 43 startups across two cohorts, with 11 startups completing the full programme. Lisk supplied the funding, while CV Labs provided the infrastructure, mentorship, and operational support.
AyaHQ became another distribution channel. Across four cohorts, the programme supported more than 35 startups across 25 countries, with 25 ultimately receiving Lisk funding, according to co-founder and chief executive officer Eric Annan. Lisk provided equity-free funding, including grants of up to $20,000 and, in some cases, follow-on commitments of up to $150,000.
Web3Bridge provided another route into Nigeria’s developer community. Its founder, Ayodeji Awosika, told me Lisk backed the organisation with $80,000 to build Web3Bridge Garage, a hub for training developers and supporting founders building on the blockchain.
By August 2025, Lisk told TechCabal that its programmes with CV Labs and AyaHQ had trained more than 30 startups, with 12 graduates receiving grants of up to $20,000.
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The economics of growing a blockchain
Building a blockchain is one challenge; making it a default rail for retail and institutional users is another. Some networks have used developer incentives, ecosystem funding, and local community-building. Solana has employed all three.
Base (built by Coinbase) has supported developers and creators in Africa and benefited from Coinbase’s existing user base and fee subsidies.
Coinbase itself later reduced its global workforce, affecting some regional growth teams. Lisk did not have a comparable parent platform behind it.
Its spending still produced measurable activity for a period. Between 2024 and 2025, Lisk’s total value locked (TVL)—the total US dollar value of digital assets deposited on the blockchain—peaked at about $20.6 million in July 2025. Stablecoin market capitalisation reached about $3.3 million in June 2025.
Both figures have since declined sharply. As of 24 September 2026, Lisk had about $143,208 in TVL and $33,780 in stablecoin market capitalisation, according to DeFiLlama.
One founder who built on Lisk said his startup has started moving liquidity out of the network, leaving limited capital to settle customer transactions. Lisk has also told users to withdraw their assets before 31 October 2026. The process can take more than a week because assets must first be unstaked and then bridged back to Ethereum.
While some commentary framed the move as a retreat from Africa, the decision was broader. The core issue was the blockchain’s unit economics; the network was not generating enough revenue to sustain operations and incentives.
Lisk’s governance materials indicated the project spent roughly two and a half years bootstrapping an ecosystem around the Lisk Chain. The intended model was a flywheel: more activity would create value for LSK, which could then fund further ecosystem incentives. The company concluded the blockchain was not generating sufficient revenue to sustain the loop. It also noted selling pressure from incentives paid in LSK and the difficulty of maintaining fragmented operations and spending.
Creating network effects requires upfront cost. Developers need users; users need applications; applications need liquidity; liquidity needs incentives. A blockchain can invest heavily across these layers and still generate limited ongoing revenue if activity fades once incentives stop.
Lisk’s treasury disclosures illustrate changing asset values over time (these are snapshots, not operating profit-and-loss statements). The Onchain Foundation’s reports show total assets of about CHF 98.2 million ($124 million) in March and May 2024. By March 2025 that had fallen to CHF 52.1 million ($65.7 million), before recovering briefly to roughly CHF 73 million ($92 million) in September, and ending 2025 at about CHF 53 million ($66.8 million).
The treasury composition also evolved—from largely fiat, Bitcoin, Ether, stablecoins, and LSK in 2024 toward a broader mix that included equities and additional crypto assets by 2025, plus substantial staked LSK positions.
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R&D formed a significant part of blockchain operations. In 2023, related expenses (including bounties and operations) totalled CHF 630,265 ($749,000) for the year under the Lisk Foundation (now Onchain Foundation), executed via its development studio Lightcurve.
Lisk’s cumulative app revenue reached $981,163 as of 24 September 2026, according to DeFiLlama. Growth has been modest—rising by just $56,510 since the start of 2026. Against the cost of operating and incentivising the network, this helps explain the decision to shut the chain down.
What this means for founders
Depending on the person asked, Lisk functioned as a supporter of early-stage startups, an accelerator funder, and a partner for grassroots talent development.
From conversations with people close to the project, it appears Lisk may have exited earlier than some would have preferred. Relative to Africa’s overall startup funding market, the loss is limited in scale.
Still, Lisk played a noticeable role by funding blockchain-native products at a time when many investors had become more selective.
The grants were modest but useful for builders needing cash for small teams or compliance costs.
Some supported founders have since received backing from other ecosystems.
Alternatives remain. CV Labs, for example, is running an accelerator with Stellar across Europe, the Middle East and Africa; three of its ten current participants are African companies.
Africa continues to need early-stage capital, yet that capital is selective. Of the 28 blockchain funding deals in 2025, seed rounds accounted for the largest number of deals, while larger cheques increasingly went to companies with clearer commercial models.
The ecosystem has moved past the period when startups could raise large rounds primarily by building exchanges, wallets, or simple crypto-to-fiat infrastructure—the pattern common during the zero-interest-rate environment that saw funding peak at $474 million in 2022. Traditional venture firms appear more cautious about purely blockchain-native startups. Investors generally look for working products, regulated distribution paths, revenue, and clearer connections to existing financial infrastructure.
Stablecoin-related businesses have often found it easier to articulate their use case under this shift. The funding path remains harder for founders building infrastructure that does not map quickly onto payments or financial services.
Lisk’s blockchain is shutting down because the economics of maintaining it no longer made sense for the company. The relationships and early support it provided in Africa raise a separate set of questions about the durability of ecosystem-funded growth.
For founders on the continent, the episode illustrates how dependent ecosystem grants can be on the continued priorities of the organisation providing them.
Lisk did not stop trying to build an ecosystem; it invested, supported programmes, and generated activity for a period. It is now pursuing a different direction: financial software. The doors to offering that software to African businesses remain open, given the market familiarity the company already has.
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Editor’s note: This article uses retrieved links from the Wayback Machine. After Lisk announced its pivot, the company removed many previous blockchain-related updates.
Samuel O. Sulaimon is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Naijapiz. He covers news, politics, current affairs, education, and technology.
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