Top African blockchain-based companies transforming business services today

A new generation of companies in sub-Saharan Africa has been working to leverage blockchain technology to offer innovative services for businesses in a variety of sectors including finance, supply chain, security, e-commerce and agriculture. 

While wild fluctuations in the value of bitcoin may grab headlines, the blockchain programming architecture underlying cryptocurrency is being used to make critical enterprise business processes more efficient and secure.

Blockchain is a distributed electronic ledger built on a peer-to-peer system designed to create a record of transactions, each cryptographically linked —or ‘chained’ — to the previous one. The blockchain distributed ledger architecture helps secure the integrity of data.

Smart contracts — automatically executing transaction applications — are hosted on blockchains to simplify and secure multiparty operations. Smart contracts often incorporate blockchain tokens: essentially, strings of characters that represent physical or digital assets.

Blockchain is not a new concept in Africa. Blockchain-based applications are already  helping to boost Africa’s socio-economic development and operational systems, according to the African Union Development Agency in a recent report. ” Blockchain technology can support Africa’s financial digitalisation and this digital revolution can rescue numerous of Africa’s economies. Such a digitalisation process is effectively enhancing service delivery with certain products and services through efficient institutional digitalisation processes and data management technologies,” the report said. “The adoption and adaptation of blockchain technologies can help institutions manage and formulate robust supply chain systems for the African continent.”

Here are a half-dozen, blockchain-based startups seeking to innovate services in a range of business sectors.