BAF
Nonprofit accelerating blockchain education and community
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About BAF
BAF is a US 501(c)(3) non-profit that acts as a middle layer for university blockchain education: it helps universities launch for-credit courses, supports student clubs, runs hackathons and career connects, and provides fiscal sponsorship so clubs can receive donations and sponsorships compliantly without registering their own entity.
Its differentiation is compliance and pipeline: clubs often cannot take money directly, so BAF receives it as the parent entity and issues the paperwork, and it turns validator operation into a teaching programme, supplying hardware, playbooks and office hours so clubs earn revenue by running nodes while gaining hands-on experience. Partner campuses are concentrated in the University of California system, Caltech and UNAM in Mexico, and courses and partners are mostly public-chain foundations. Reach is bounded by geography and donor base, with few programmes in non-English markets.
In the first half of 2026 the Blockchain Acceleration Foundation tilted decisively toward Latin America. A 501(c)(3) registered in California in 2018, BAF has long worked to connect university blockchain clubs with industry, and this year it concentrated resources on two nameable programmes: GIVE Medellín in the first quarter, which gathered 45 builders from across the region in Colombia, and Código Alebrije, an educational bootcamp that opened with more than 500 participants and funneled selected builders into scholarships for Medellín and a second phase in Mexico, later split into a Genesis track and another aimed at more mature teams.
The numbers only make sense together. BAF's StarMaker ambassador programme with Stellar has run for about eighteen months and built more than 1,300 ambassadors across Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia and Costa Rica through courses, meetups, hackathons, retreats and scholarships rather than one-off grants. The organisation itself remains small: public data from July 2026 put it at roughly 30 people across five continents, with revenue in the low seven figures and funding coming mainly from sponsorships and grants. The model's ceiling is as visible as its strength: it is labour-intensive, hard to replicate, dependent on individual regional leads, and difficult to measure with a single yardstick for whether education actually became projects.
BAF plans to package the Latin American playbook into a repeatable regional template, extend toward Southeast Asia and Africa, increase the density of university tours and Builder Residences, and give sponsors clearer conversion data. For a nonprofit, the next milestone is not more events but evidence on retention and follow-on venture formation.
Cameron Dennis — Founder & President; leads BAF's university blockchain curricula and education programs.
Daniela Heano — Head of Latam Growth.
Laura Estupiñán — Head of DevRel and Marketing.
Isabelle Ki — Head of Operations.