Sarah Wahinya is a Web3 and fintech growth strategist and East Africa Lead for Stellar, a US-based blockchain firm, building the rails for Africa’s next wave of digital finance. She operates at the intersection of partnerships, market expansion, and developer ecosystems, helping global companies localise and scale across African markets.
With a strong focus on execution, Wahinya has led go-to-market strategies, unlocked high-impact partnerships, and built thriving tech communities that turn innovation into adoption.
- Explain your job to a 5-year-old.
You know how you have a piggy bank? Now imagine the piggy bank lives inside a phone, and it can talk to other piggy banks all over the world, even ones in places you’ve never been.
My job is to help grown-ups understand these new piggy banks, pick the good ones, and not be scared of them. Some days I’m a teacher. Some days I’m a storyteller. Some days, I’m the person reminding everyone that girls also want to play.
The grown-ups are still building the playground. I help them build it better.
- What does a typical day look like for you as a Web3 and fintech growth strategist?
It starts before coffee, usually with a market scan and a quick scroll through Discord, Telegram, and X to see what the community woke up to and what broke overnight.
From there, my day splits into three parts: building (campaigns, partnerships, growth experiments), talking (calls with founders, mentees, investors, and the occasional regulator), and writing (threads, decks, frameworks).
Somewhere in there, I’m answering DMs from women trying to break into Web3, drafting a launch plan, and explaining to my mum again what stablecoins are. No two days look the same. That’s half the appeal and half the chaos.
- If your role came with a warning label, what would it say?
⚠️ Caution: May cause irreversible vocabulary changes, an emotional attachment to charts, and the inability to attend dinner without checking your phone.
Side effects include calling everything “bullish,” forgetting weekends exist, and explaining gas fees to people who did not ask. Operate on stable Wi-Fi. Do not mix with poorly designed tokenomics.
If symptoms of burnout appear, log off. The market will still be there. Probably.
- What has chasing this career cost you, personally or professionally?
Rest. Crypto doesn’t sleep, and for a long time, I didn’t either. There’s no “after hours” in a global, 24/7 industry. Markets move on weekends, communities live in your pocket, and the unspoken rule is that the person who’s always online wins.
I bought into that for too long. I missed birthdays, skipped meals, and treated burnout like a badge of honour. The cost wasn’t one single thing. It was the slow erosion of boundaries I didn’t realise I had.
I’m still unlearning it. Showing up for myself, it turns out, is also a growth strategy.
- Describe a moment in your career that made you feel really good about your work.
A woman I’d mentored months earlier sent me a voice note from her first day at a Web3 job. She’d gone from “I don’t think I belong in this space” to leading a community at a protocol I respect.
She thanked me, but the truth is, she did the work. I just held the door open.
That moment recalibrated something for me. Growth isn’t always total value locked (TVL) or token launches. Sometimes it’s one woman with a Notion doc, a Discord handle, and the audacity to keep showing up.
That’s the metric I’m proudest of.
- What’s the biggest misconception you hear about crypto and digital finance in African markets?
The biggest misconception is that it’s all speculation. That we’re all chasing memecoins and get-rich-quick fantasies.
The reality is much more grounded and much more interesting. For a Kenyan freelancer paid in USDC because their bank takes a week and a 7% cut, crypto is infrastructure. For a Nigerian trader hedging against a currency that lost half its value in a year, stablecoins are survival.
Africa didn’t adopt Web3 because it was trendy. We adopted it because the existing system was failing us in ways that much of the world never had to experience.
The misconception is that we’re playing—no, we are solving a problem.
- What’s one thing people get wrong about “growth” in Web3?
Growth doesn’t mean prices going up. If there’s no value on the ground, it’s hard to show the real metric.
Growth is the user who comes back next month. The dev who ships a second time. The community that survives the bear.
Most of what gets celebrated as “growth” in Web3 is acquisition wearing a costume: paid users, airdrop farmers, and mercenary liquidity. The actual work is retention, education, and trust, and none of that fits in a tweet. If your growth strategy disappears the moment incentives do, it wasn’t growth. It was a sugar rush.
- If you weren’t doing Web3 and fintech, what would you be doing instead?
Probably storytelling, in some form. I’ve always been drawn to unconventional bios: the woman re-skilling at 40 or the founder building something the world hasn’t named yet.
So I think I’d be a journalist, or running a media company that platforms African builders without flattening them into “inspiration.” Or teaching—I love a whiteboard and a confused face I can win over.
Whatever it was, it would still involve community, women, and a stubborn belief that the good stories are the ones we’re not told to tell.
