Everyone likes certainty to an extent. I certainly do. I do not like suspense. I used to start reading novels from the middle or somewhere in between page 1 and page end. Then I would start over from the beginning. I like epilogues, I don’t mind spoilers at all, and I google plots mid-movie.

I would like to be able to google the plot for where we stand today, as we are flooded by multi-polar consensuses about progress for humanity. We see this in a large language model-dominated artificial intelligence (AI) world, and in Africa, the inevitability of stablecoins. By “multi-polar consensuses,” I mean that we are now living under several competing ends of the utility and value of technology.

AI and stablecoins—in particular, United States dollar-backed stablecoins (the associated non-USD fiat pairs, and the implications for global finance architecture)—are two areas where the pace of change and speed of development suggest that a massive Change Wave is forming. For Africa in particular, stablecoin infrastructure may become the retail layer of a new dollarisation confrontation, at the exact moment China is testing how far it can export the yuan, and the world rediscovers gold. So we have a situation where the traditional gatekeepers are as off-balance as everyone else. It is a rare, brief window where the playing field is temporarily leveled by the sheer velocity of the transition.

I chose these two because both are surface-line themes with deeper structural implications for a lot of things we take for granted today. And I will be exploring them to the nethermost in 2026. But I also chose these two examples because, among all the other important things worth paying attention to, these two technologies will have an impact that will heavily contour growth and progress in developing countries (1), and this impact will happen faster than we are prepared for (2).

Each of these tools represents fundamental upheavals to, and, in some cases, an overhaul of the consensus thinking that we ran with for the better part of the 20th century and the first 25 years of the 21st century. We are confronted with the promise of:

• AI for knowledge work, controlling physical quantities, and shaping reality, or at least the transmission of reality (which is really the same thing); and

• Stablecoins to preserve the global reach, speed, and currency reserve status of a flailing super-power, and restrain a shifting global financial order.

For developing countries contending with many other top-of-mind priorities, it will be easy to develop serious blind spots and miss how AI could compress or expand the cost of knowledge, coordination, labour demand, and wage growth. Or miss how hard-currency-backed stablecoins might compress trust (a.k.a banking) and speed. And even how the desire to mitigate against stablecoin effects on monetary policy will affect other segments of the economy.

Stablecoins are probably not going to take over the world in a “displace” traditional finance sort of way. And the AI bubble, much like the dot-com era, may end up with a different shape from what its trajectory suggests today, or on a longer timeline. So my point is not that everyone should become an AI nerd or stablecoin maximalist. Rather, we should treat both as buoys in the ocean showing where the tide is pulling. Or to put it more clearly, as legitimate frames to test what a new era will look like before the current chaos solidifies into controlled homogeneity. We need to learn how to operate in uncertainty before the new consensus hardens again. And the time window to shape what will become generally accepted is worryingly small. Just as it always has.

Consensus is not always a bad thing. It is useful as a tool for organisation, order, and coexistence. At multiple levels, the need for and utility of consensus is innate. Society, markets, and democratic politics demand a consensual premise. Consensus is also not always fixed. History is full of examples where the generally accepted substratum of conducting business, markets, and using technology has changed. However, the initial phases of manipulating the material world, a.k.a technology, and the resource pool, a.k.a entrepreneurship, are one area where, sooner or later, consensus becomes the bottleneck that must be broken to create something new. Consensus is not always a bad thing. But it can also easily become a cage.

I mentioned earlier that I dislike suspense. I am also not a natural risk-taker. Taking risks is one of my recessive traits. So I, too, find myself frequently caught under the curl of uncritical consensus. But, now and then, I find myself bristling whenever I sit in that soup of consensus for too long. So, the more people begin to agree about certain ideas, frames of reference, and playbooks in business, especially with respect to the application of technology and entrepreneurship, the more dissatisfied I get with neat explanations and tidy boxes. Because these are consensus stories in motion. Stuff we repeat because they are emotionally satisfying and (very often) appeals to well-understood funding logic.

Whether it’s a neat explanation for why we act like payment fintech will continue to be the Holy Grail of the continent’s startup technology ecosystem in perpetuity. A well-thought-out argument for abandoning venture capital altogether. Or a maximalist venture capital position that enjoys near-total freedom from reality. I am not a fan of silver bullet thinking. And just as equally, not a believer in stasis.

As a continent, Africa’s entrepreneurial circles are familiar with what works and what is proven, and this is a useful skill and context to possess. What we are often less familiar with is what could work but does not yet exist. Or what could work but would be difficult to bring to maturity. And so forth

It’s popular these days to bash “imported Silicon Valley models” and so forth. But to the best of my knowledge, if there is a Silicon Valley mindset or model, it is that nothing is set in stone. I prefer to think of the Silicon Valley mindset as educated (not schooled), Entrepreneurial Uncertainty. If this is true, then the so-called Silicon Valley mindset is a globally available and imbibable quality. Entrepreneurial Uncertainty is the quality that creates markets. 

Ultimately, markets will force entrepreneurs to build businesses that converge into sameness. But at the early stages, homogeneity is fundamentally opposed to the spirit of the rugged entrepreneurialism that forces the status quo to change or seizes upon a Change Wave to attain escape velocity.

“One of our theories,” Don Valentine of Sequoia fame, famously said, “Is to seek out opportunities where there is major change going on, a major dislocation in the way things are done. Wherever there’s turmoil, there’s indecision; and wherever there’s indecision, there’s opportunity.”

Valentine was right, but there is a second half to the story. Turmoil does not just create opportunity. It also creates a rush for certainty. And whenever people rush for certainty, they begin to manufacture consensus—new boxes, new slogans, new orthodoxy. Before long, the dislocation becomes a doctrine, and the opportunity becomes a playbook. Another thing that we will be forced by the economics of scale to import, adopt, or adapt to.

Consensus often has a cyclical lifespan; what is generally accepted today may very well become anathema tomorrow. And ancient principles are frequently rediscovered as fresh inspiration. Much like the endless cycle of pursuits described by the Teacher in the first chapter of the ancient book of Ecclesiastes. Because of this cyclical nature of progress, it's easy to become like me and try to skip to the end prematurely. It is only human. But while it is good to keep an eye on the consensus, we should not forget that the most meaningful work happens while the plot is still a mess. And in 2026, the plot is a hot mess.

The uncertainty of 2026 can make your head spin. But it is also an asset—a temporary one. Because it is a window when the playing field is truly level. Once the AI or stablecoin playbooks harden into consensus, the advantage shifts back to those with the most capital and the deepest legacy infrastructure (they are already ahead). And if we wait for the neat explanation of how this will settle in Africa, we will again become very good adaptors.

Everyone likes certainty to an extent. I certainly do. I do not like suspense. I used to start reading novels from the middle or somewhere in between page 1 and page end. Then I would start over from the beginning. I like epilogues, I don’t mind spoilers at all, and I google plots mid-movie.

I would like to be able to google the plot for where we stand today, as we are flooded by multi-polar consensuses about progress for humanity. We see this in a large language model-dominated artificial intelligence (AI) world, and in Africa, the inevitability of stablecoins. By “multi-polar consensuses,” I mean that we are now living under several competing ends of the utility and value of technology.

AI and stablecoins—in particular, United States dollar-backed stablecoins (the associated non-USD fiat pairs, and the implications for global finance architecture)—are two areas where the pace of change and speed of development suggest that a massive Change Wave is forming. For Africa in particular, stablecoin infrastructure may become the retail layer of a new dollarisation confrontation, at the exact moment China is testing how far it can export the yuan, and the world rediscovers gold. So we have a situation where the traditional gatekeepers are as off-balance as everyone else. It is a rare, brief window where the playing field is temporarily leveled by the sheer velocity of the transition.

I chose these two because both are surface-line themes with deeper structural implications for a lot of things we take for granted today. And I will be exploring them to the nethermost in 2026. But I also chose these two examples because, among all the other important things worth paying attention to, these two technologies will have an impact that will heavily contour growth and progress in developing countries (1), and this impact will happen faster than we are prepared for (2).

Each of these tools represents fundamental upheavals to, and, in some cases, an overhaul of the consensus thinking that we ran with for the better part of the 20th century and the first 25 years of the 21st century. We are confronted with the promise of:

• AI for knowledge work, controlling physical quantities, and shaping reality, or at least the transmission of reality (which is really the same thing); and

• Stablecoins to preserve the global reach, speed, and currency reserve status of a flailing super-power, and restrain a shifting global financial order.

For developing countries contending with many other top-of-mind priorities, it will be easy to develop serious blind spots and miss how AI could compress or expand the cost of knowledge, coordination, labour demand, and wage growth. Or miss how hard-currency-backed stablecoins might compress trust (a.k.a banking) and speed. And even how the desire to mitigate against stablecoin effects on monetary policy will affect other segments of the economy.

Stablecoins are probably not going to take over the world in a “displace” traditional finance sort of way. And the AI bubble, much like the dot-com era, may end up with a different shape from what its trajectory suggests today, or on a longer timeline. So my point is not that everyone should become an AI nerd or stablecoin maximalist. Rather, we should treat both as buoys in the ocean showing where the tide is pulling. Or to put it more clearly, as legitimate frames to test what a new era will look like before the current chaos solidifies into controlled homogeneity. We need to learn how to operate in uncertainty before the new consensus hardens again. And the time window to shape what will become generally accepted is worryingly small. Just as it always has.

Consensus is not always a bad thing. It is useful as a tool for organisation, order, and coexistence. At multiple levels, the need for and utility of consensus is innate. Society, markets, and democratic politics demand a consensual premise. Consensus is also not always fixed. History is full of examples where the generally accepted substratum of conducting business, markets, and using technology has changed. However, the initial phases of manipulating the material world, a.k.a technology, and the resource pool, a.k.a entrepreneurship, are one area where, sooner or later, consensus becomes the bottleneck that must be broken to create something new. Consensus is not always a bad thing. But it can also easily become a cage.

I mentioned earlier that I dislike suspense. I am also not a natural risk-taker. Taking risks is one of my recessive traits. So I, too, find myself frequently caught under the curl of uncritical consensus. But, now and then, I find myself bristling whenever I sit in that soup of consensus for too long. So, the more people begin to agree about certain ideas, frames of reference, and playbooks in business, especially with respect to the application of technology and entrepreneurship, the more dissatisfied I get with neat explanations and tidy boxes. Because these are consensus stories in motion. Stuff we repeat because they are emotionally satisfying and (very often) appeals to well-understood funding logic.

Whether it’s a neat explanation for why we act like payment fintech will continue to be the Holy Grail of the continent’s startup technology ecosystem in perpetuity. A well-thought-out argument for abandoning venture capital altogether. Or a maximalist venture capital position that enjoys near-total freedom from reality. I am not a fan of silver bullet thinking. And just as equally, not a believer in stasis.

As a continent, Africa’s entrepreneurial circles are familiar with what works and what is proven, and this is a useful skill and context to possess. What we are often less familiar with is what could work but does not yet exist. Or what could work but would be difficult to bring to maturity. And so forth

It’s popular these days to bash “imported Silicon Valley models” and so forth. But to the best of my knowledge, if there is a Silicon Valley mindset or model, it is that nothing is set in stone. I prefer to think of the Silicon Valley mindset as educated (not schooled), Entrepreneurial Uncertainty. If this is true, then the so-called Silicon Valley mindset is a globally available and imbibable quality. Entrepreneurial Uncertainty is the quality that creates markets. 

Ultimately, markets will force entrepreneurs to build businesses that converge into sameness. But at the early stages, homogeneity is fundamentally opposed to the spirit of the rugged entrepreneurialism that forces the status quo to change or seizes upon a Change Wave to attain escape velocity.

“One of our theories,” Don Valentine of Sequoia fame, famously said, “Is to seek out opportunities where there is major change going on, a major dislocation in the way things are done. Wherever there’s turmoil, there’s indecision; and wherever there’s indecision, there’s opportunity.”

Valentine was right, but there is a second half to the story. Turmoil does not just create opportunity. It also creates a rush for certainty. And whenever people rush for certainty, they begin to manufacture consensus—new boxes, new slogans, new orthodoxy. Before long, the dislocation becomes a doctrine, and the opportunity becomes a playbook. Another thing that we will be forced by the economics of scale to import, adopt, or adapt to.

Consensus often has a cyclical lifespan; what is generally accepted today may very well become anathema tomorrow. And ancient principles are frequently rediscovered as fresh inspiration. Much like the endless cycle of pursuits described by the Teacher in the first chapter of the ancient book of Ecclesiastes. Because of this cyclical nature of progress, it's easy to become like me and try to skip to the end prematurely. It is only human. But while it is good to keep an eye on the consensus, we should not forget that the most meaningful work happens while the plot is still a mess. And in 2026, the plot is a hot mess.

The uncertainty of 2026 can make your head spin. But it is also an asset—a temporary one. Because it is a window when the playing field is truly level. Once the AI or stablecoin playbooks harden into consensus, the advantage shifts back to those with the most capital and the deepest legacy infrastructure (they are already ahead). And if we wait for the neat explanation of how this will settle in Africa, we will again become very good adaptors.