By Alex Tapscott

I am in Johannesburg this week for the Blockchain Research Institute Africa’s summit, where I am speaking and meeting with business and government leaders from across the continent. Our arrival was met with great interest and in a busy schedule, we sat down for a lengthy interview with CNBC Africa.

Africa is a continent troubled by many seemingly intractable challenges, including government corruption, climate change, conflict, and chronic underinvestment in traditional infrastructure. Young Africans are often underemployed. Many people lack access to basic financial services and other necessities we take for granted.

Some of these challenges were on full display here. The most industrialized country on the continent has an electrical grid in the nation’s capital that is on the verge of collapse with frequent “load shedding” where large swaths of the grid are simply turned off. Our interview took place at CNBC’s TV studio, which was powered by a generator, and offered a faint beacon of light in an otherwise darkened office complex.

Despite these glaring challenges, I’m leave this country immensely hopeful for its future, and I believe it will play a leading role in Web3 and other digital transformations. For starters, Africa has tremendous demographic tailwinds: Whereas most of the world is getting much older, Africa remains young with half the population under 20. In half a century it will also be the most populous. Overall, the continent has made great strides recently in health, education, and access to technology: Life expectancy has jumped 25% in the last 30 years. In the same period, literacy rates surged by more than a third. The diffusion of technology is equally startling: In 1993 half the world’s population had never made a phone call. Today, 64% of people in Sub-Saharan Africa owns a smartphone. Of course, Africa is a vast, populous, and diverse continent so we should be careful with generalizations, but taken as a whole, these trends are our friends.

This is a continent with a young, digitally native population, where technology tools are widely available, but where existing financial infrastructure is out of reach to most, and where many people are underemployed. Strangely, these weaknesses may prove to be strengths in adapting to and adopting Web3. Something similar has played out in other parts of the world: 20 years ago, there were 30 million landlines in India. Today, the same country has more cellphones than people. Africa has the potential to similarly leapfrog legacy financial infrastructure and tap into Web3 -- the ownership web -- seizing the digital property rights and payment tools that they otherwise lack in the physical world.

One South African executive, Ian Putter of Standard Bank, told me “Africans innovate out of necessity.” More than once, a South African used the word ‘survive’ to describe their livelihood, as in “I drive an Uber, but I also help my brother with his business to survive.” Technology and globalization have helped to flatten the world, but most people still face a steep uphill climb. Web3 will potentially help level the playing field even more. The hustler mentality of underemployed people in places like Africa, borne of necessity, will drive them to experiment with Web3, if there’ an economic incentive. In the long run, this will be their great advantage.

While here, I gave half a dozen speeches to various audiences from bankers to NGO’s working to use next generation technology to build a more prosperous and dynamic Africa. I confess to be delightfully surprised by the initiatives underway. I was also struck by the depth of knowledge among business leaders and some government officials I met, which exceed that in more so-called ‘developed’ regions.

Of course, there are many other reasons to pause before declaring the whole continent of Africa heir apparent to Web3. Today, most African governments are cautious or even hostile to cryptoassets, the native asset class of Web3 (see quantitative section). Adoption is high in certain parts of Africa, such as Nigeria, Kenya and Morocco all of which rank in the Top 20 of a recent survey by analytics firm Chainalysis, but it is extremely uneven (see quantitative section again). African countries do far more trade with far off markets in Europe, the U.S. and China than with each other, which is unusual in a world where proximity usually counts for a lot. The continent is fragmented into regional blocs with some stable nations abutting unstable ones. Reaching consensus at the government level has been a challenge. Sure, at the grassroots level, people are enthusiastic about Web3, and while there are some corporate leaders like Standard Bank blazing a trail, big companies and governments must do more to enable this transformation. Are these obstacles reason enough that Web3 will fail to take hold in Africa, or are they implementation challenges to be overcome? I am only a Canadian visitor, and this is not for me to decide.