How crypto is used in Africa today? Hear from leading builders | Devcon SEA

[Music] hello Defcon hello thanks so much for joining us uh on this very exciting panel discussion um we're going to be talking about exactly how web Tre is been used in Africa today and what are the types of Innovations people are building uh early this week we covered uh two really interesting threads of the impact of crypto on one side it is plugging African countries and economies into the global economy that has been a hyper globalizing impact and effect that traditional systems have kind of failed us and we'll hear from Founders who have basically at the Leading Edge of that movement in plugging payments banking infrastructure but also other services that we need to live our lives uh into the broader global economy and on the other side there's a lot of amazing opportunities to go even more local than where we are going today and we're going to hear about the hyper localization impact that perhaps were not possible to do in this way before blockchain Technologies became a thing so I'm very excited to have an amazing group of people to cover these threads with us we're going to do a very brief round of introductions and we're going to jump straight into the deep end uh jamb do you want to introduce yourself yes my name is jambin jog I work for Grassroots economics Foundation been working for the organization uh for the last six years now I am an advocate for Community inclusion currencies for poverty eradication and sustainable development super happy to be here and where are you from I'm from Nairobi but I live in kifi and that is also where I work nice if you guys have never been to East Africa kifi is an incredible place to visit one two awesome hey everyone my name is David Nanda I'm CEO and CTO of a business called honey coin and Pier we are B2B to see Financial super app and Treasury and payments platform I'm based out of Nairobi Kenya and like super excited to be here and thank you for all being in the room thank you hey everyone uh my name is y bosi um I'm the co-creator of onboard we're building a borderless digital money app for people in the global majority markets with a universal um on and offramp Gateway that allows anyone come on chain with Le to last 50 cents whilst paying zero fees um I live in um Lagos and London um but I call myself an African onchain if you're wondering why I'm wearing a pirate um costume today I'm currently pirate uru which means freedom in Swahili and essentially um I'm spreading the freedom of money so thanks for having me thank you so uh David I I want to start off with you and we just love to understand what is the problem that you guys are really focused on when it comes to payments and what is the gap that a project like yours is feeling and and what's the scale of opportunity that exists there yeah I know that's a really good question I think it really like sets the context for you know this conversation in general like I would say for us the main problem we're solving is when you look at a continent any continent you take any particular continent Africa has over like 45 plus countries we pretty much add addressing the fragmentation problem and the fact that the largest players on a financial stack like banks are not incentivized to solve that fragmentation problem if anything they benefit from it right um they benefit from the fact that someone in Kenya cannot do business with someone in Nigeria unless they're doing it through them and they're going to make sure that they they'll milk as much value from them when that money is moving almost as if you're traveling physically you know to that particular market and by solving and addressing that fragment comption problem we strongly believe that as we build that plumbing which is like this pipeline it's almost like a hyper tunnel between different markets between different corridors we then now actually incentivize people to connect do business with each other actually have conversations on collaboration and partnership so I see our work as important as you know in the US during the Industrial Revolution when they were putting in the railroads to connect different cities uh across States and so on and so forth and um I think if we succeed if we win and and why this problem is so crucial to solve is as I mentioned in the beginning there's very few players who are incentivized to solve it because their incentives lie in the issue we see the incentives as being much larger than the issue because when you actually create the initial Plumbing what you do is you open up a world of different use cases um and and and in different ways that people will now start to like actually think of you know how do I benefit and profit from this outside of just like like I'll profit of you having a very painful problem I like the analogy of plumbing and railroads those are like the Bas layer infrastructure that everything relies on can you like give us even more concrete examples of why is that broken right now like with the lack of those infrastructures how is value moving around and and what are the pain points in like in real terms yeah yeah yeah no that's a good question as well a good followup I mean like I think to give you guys some context right now most banks don't even own own the software that they're running their banking infrastructure on and I I'll I'll frequently use the bank use case because even if you were trying to build a web to fintech and your partner was like a core Bank in X market and they had access to all of these different regions you're basically just connecting to a pipe that's already leaking and trying to see how you can layer on an additional solution like so uh that context the the context of why we're in treasury why we're in payments why we're building a super app is we have to we're basically coming in to in a way like not build around but web3 and blockchain Technology gives us the ability to give the banks to give the licensed payment service providers to give the licensed financial institutions this infrastructure which is highly scalable we can allow money to move at the speed of the internet which is ex extremely crucial but then also we can in it's almost like in parallel we're not competing with you but down the road the the end goal is for you to stop being our competitor it's for you to be our customer right and um most of the people that we work with are I mentioned the banks the licensed fi the licensed payment service providers they're those people because like we believe that initial Beach head will create opportunities for us to like permeate this technology permeate the stable coin payment use cases the um blockchain payment use cases around on and off ramping to like the broader majority of people in on the continent and it starts though with the folks who have already you know deeply embedded themselves with what's broken within the financial system especially on the continent it's fragmentation one it's you know white labeling software another it's you know just bad you know code and like um Legacy web to technology on the third tier and and all of those things is kind of like how I think we now get to scale but we have to first start there and that's kind of like I would say the impact to which we're working with these different license FIS Banks and PSPs and Y you've been in the space for a long period of time trying to solve fintech before crypto and then with crypto trying to solve payments and like I would love to hear what are the patterns that you've seen on the continent so far so I think um y have talked about this idea of context and so I want to help everyone level set imagine if the US dollar lost 90% of the value or whatever currency or Fiat that you had so you could you had I don't know $1,000 in whatever currency and then today the value after two years is now $100 due to no fault of your own or for most people they don't even have money yet right so they can't even come into the financial system because they don't have any money right so if you look at the world today over 2.5 billion people are living on less than 50 cents a day 2.5 billion people and these are people that leave in global majority markets so we're looking at like Africa laam um southeast Asia India and unfortunately the world is still broken and you know when I when I first got into crypto I got into crypto because I was fortunate enough to have been part of an early exit in 2015 or 2016 um and began to support entrepreneurs in the web2 space and what I realized was two things it wasn't because of talent that somebody these ideas we in working it was primarily two things number one was the foundational infrastructure that we were trying to build this Financial Solutions on were broken it was a combination of institutional problems it was a combination of um sort of weak currencies and then also policies as well right um and when I first looked at the blockchain I thought like wow okay this is something that we can use to really build Financial infrastructure from the ground up and equalize access to Opportunities regardless of where you're from and so um it's been really interesting seeing the rise of stable coins and you know everyone now is talking about stable coins and it's like okay finally everyone gets it right because you know people complicate stable coins but I think of stable coins as essentially putting the US Dollar on the internet and the same way how when you don't understand or have you're trying to learn something you can Google it and then you have access to that information immediately when you do the same thing to finance a lot of positive things will happen and so um but yeah that's sort of you know just a little bit of context and you know why I've been um building and really excited to to contribute to this space so a few weeks ago actually chain analysis came out with a report of crypto use across the world and one of the stats they put out there that is that for uh traditional payments to move money from one country to another and we keep talking about that because Africa is a continent of 54 countries and so whenever you're Crossing value across any of those borders and you run into a lot of Swift Swift and Global Financial system challenges so if you're Crossing value across borders I mean information across borders very very easily right but when value crosses borders you're taking a 15% haircut five that's what CH analysis put out there um other reports that I've seen show you know in real life it's around 8 to 9% depending on how much value you're going and like David just even knowing what hinein is doing I love to understand a bit of the the types of customers that are coming and using your infrastructure to plug in the global economy because these are not like crypto Fanatics these are not people who are coming to defcons or crypto conferences these are people running the traditional economy right so can you just share a bit about like why are they coming to you what are they getting from you that they're not able to get elsewhere yeah yeah I think um and and you know it's it's it's it's it's literally what fuels me to keep going um I think a larger percentage of our customers are non-crypto non web3 companies than they are like just traditional web3 companies um and at the moment we're serving some of the larger Enterprises like I'm talking um you know traditional fmcg or like retail the likes of bitco unior um on the banking side of things we're working very closely with you know the United Bank of Africa the equity Banks um the brex say Columns of this world um if you're in the US as well and there the reason I use the two partners that I mentioned but then more so like these core customer use cases there's businesses in logistics who are literally moving physical goods from Kenya to Tanzania from Tanzania to South Africa and and back um and and these these folks chose us because uh and I I like to always use this analogy they chose us because uh Financial infrastructure and financial platforms were left in the '90s in Africa and we're trying to you know help them catch up right and to give you context of what catching up actually looks like before a provider like us and there's a number of different providers and you guys are welcome to do your research I would have to go to my bank fill in a physical remittance form that's what we call it uh just to pay for like an invoice in a country that is probably uh 100 a couple of 100 kilometers between each other right that should not exist in 2024 but it does and and that's why a customer like them would choose us the second reason they would choose us is we offer kind of like a more refreshing experience to what they're used to in that the person you're serving uh no the person that is serving you um if they were an fx broker if they were a bank if they were uh web to fintech as well who I have nothing against to be honest um the person that's serving you would kind of like be offering you a solution and it's as if they're doing you a favor right like you ask you know the exchange rate on Google is this why are you selling to me dollars at this price I'll tell you this is the price of the day right there's nothing you can do um and I think one of the non-negotiable rights is optionality as a human in general like you should get to choose you shouldn't be told this is what you know exists this is how life is and so you should just go ahead and take it um and we're giving optionality not just from like a platform perspective like you can use us and but we're giving optionality on a more deeper level in terms of like look we are not trying to sell you the same thing that has been sold in this market with the tier One banks with the largest fi largest PSPs I think back to like one of the more you know even funnier scenarios that it just happened to us this week like we onboarded a payment service provide a customer on Monday and Tuesday they want to call it my head of products and they were literally pitching you know our platform to their customers right that's the kind of like I would say catalyst that excites me the most because it's like this person is so excited about what's happening with folks like us um with the onboards with the grassroot economics that they're literally like I will put in front of my customers and tell them look it's better now or it works you know it's efficient it's faster um and those are all very colorful adjectives but I think the tangibility of them is in those kind of like very traditional customers who would never touch crypto but if you bring it to them in a way that actually addresses the solution then you're solving a major problem it's interesting what I've heard you say is that you're you're not saying hey like let's destroy Banks let's recreate that you're actually saying saying let us bring a new value proposition that they're not able to do integrate with them because they have different types of distributions but create superpowers from money and build on top of them and like build the plumbing of like the Global Financial system and I guess one quick thing I wanted to kind of plug in there is that when many of us keep talking about financial service applications a lot of folks ask what is beyond Finance what are innovations that we should do Beyond finance and what comes to mind for me when you know we talk that is of course we need to look at Beyond Finance but if today for example for people in California paying something on the same website the same project in based in Texas if that took four weeks and if you're paying 15% extra and that was the case for all 50 plus states in the US of actually moving value between all those States was so hard and basically if you are flying halfway on the plane you had to change your monetary system right like I think we'll probably all drop everything and work on solving that problem right that's the problem that we're trying to solve from financial application perspective across Africa and the reason why we keep focusing on it a lot is because it is like where is it's like the the the the the train tracks as you put it that connects the foundation of a lot of our economies and once we have a better infrastructure there we can build a whole lot of things on top of that but we keep coming back to the base layer which is transfer of value is because there's fundamental problems there and and over to you y on that like the onboard vision is building a fully onchain life and I'll just love to understand a bit of how did you get to that place and what is a what does the world look like when once we fully realize that Vision yeah um I really loved the example you gave of like the US and Texas and all that I think it really does help understand you know what's happening on the ground in in Africa um like I said earlier Talent is eily distributed but opportunity is not and I think that when we talk about this idea of a global onchain e economy what is powerful about that idea is that it makes it doesn't make your geography determine the quality of your life right we want to make your location Irrelevant in terms of the opportunities that you have access to in terms of the quality of financial services that I have access to um and really building an economy that is open that is transparent and is meritocratic um we actually live in the world of abundance right it's just that you know that abundance is not um freely spread and that's why you have so many people in in in in in poverty and we know the reason why we all feel upset and unhappy about the state of the world today is because we know that the current system just doesn't work a lot of people don't have um sort of their fair share or don't feel like they have agency about how to change and improve their lives and this is kind of like what is creating a lot of the divisions and uncertainty and unhappiness regardless of where people are from and so to me the the the idea of an unin economy I know you know some like lamos says he wants to take Humanity to Mars and that's like an ambitious vision and it's like okay we're going to have rocket ships that would take everybody to Mars and I think like that's that's amazing but what if you just build an actual onchain economy that is better than what we have today right and you know for instance I'll give you an example um I haven't said this publicly but I feel a bit comfortable saying this now like my personal um accounts were were were blocked um over the last couple of months right and if there wasn't any crypto I would have been really been in a very bad place right so the fact that I had stable coins and I had my keys gave me that agency and gave me that freedom of money that it doesn't matter where I'm from and even if I you know I've been in Thailand for the last couple of weeks I've been spending my stable coins with a with a with a card to pay for grab and jumping on motorcycle taxes that I've never entered before when I go to the US it's the same thing on Uber when I traveled when I went to e um Brussels was the same same thing so when when an individual has control over their money and is on chain you know it doesn't matter sort of where they are they can move spend freely build their onch reputation you know a lot of people in imer markets don't have a credit score right imagine if in the US or in Europe for you to buy a phone you had to pay for it upfront at once if you wanted to get a house you have to pay for it offering at once when to go to university before it offering at once so actually in a lot of global majority markets it's not that people are poor it's the fact that they cannot actually leverage their reputation to get access to Capital to build future for themselves right and so to me the ENT economy is giving everybody access to the same Global World Class Financial Services giving everybody control and freedom of their money giving everybody control of their own unchaining reputation think about it as a credit score that then truly unlocks a whole host of opportunities and they are fully empowered to create a better future not just for themselves for the world around them thank you yeah and and and I guess the importance of that just even bring it down to specifics in Nigeria uh GitHub came up with the report earlier like later last year there's about 900,000 plus uh uh open source contributors on GitHub alone right so the GitHub page is their resume it's not their LinkedIn because no one will hire like just to be very blunt people don't like to hire Nigerians all around the world unless they know them personally right but stuff like that is actually making it more meritocratic and those guys are receiving income and salary in what way like it is really hard to send money from elsewhere to Nigeria like PayPal doesn't like to work in Nigeria stripe doesn't work in Nigeria right so the plumbing is broken right and so this is not just like a nce to have it's a plan a for a whole lot of folks right so yeah I mean and and and the other bit of what I think what you guys are building which is very interesting there are quite a few like other builders doing this is you're moving Fiat to stablecoin and then in a self- custo or custo wallet and then you have a digit sell debit card they can actually use that to spend internationally because your local banks have a limit of how much money you can spend how much is it in Nigeria right now uh it's probably there was a time when it was really bad and it was like $20 a month $20 a month so even if even if you had like thousands of dollars you could only spend $20 a month and you couldn't even go to the bank and be like oh I have you know $1,000 or $2,000 I want to redraw it it's like you can't redraw that money right so um or your your or your dollar card won't even work on some websites you know um just because the the the underlying Plumbing wasn't working and that's why people and businesses have turned to stable coins because it it dis intermediates it's like you as a person you have the dollars but the financial infrastructure is so broken that is preventing you from connecting with the global economy and with stable coins and and blockchains it's like okay Mr Bank get the F we don't need you we're just going to connect directly to the global economy and transact freely um and that's kind of yeah that's the F that's it's not even the future it's like the future is here it's just not evenly distributed you know so if you guys and a whole lot of other builders are radically successful what we're basically doing is we are building the plumbing for our economies to easily integrate with the rest of the world our location is not a liability but it's part of who we are it's our culture but that is not stopping us from fully participating contributing benefiting from the global World let us change the gear a little bit and come local we've got Jambi here who's building one of the most exciting uh initiatives uh in Kenya uh can you tell us a little bit about how you see the world and what what you guys are building with Grassroots economics yes uh thank you so much um we have been working on a nice economic uh protocol called commitment pulling so it's h being it's inspired by um indigenous wisdom so when I talk about indigenous wisdom I mean um Traditions around mucho Aid and mostly rotation of Labor associations um so what we have noticed is that it's not a New Concept it's been there for ages and ac across um Nations you know so like in my community we call it muia um you know we work with Kenya Red Cross at the refugee centers and the somalis call it go you know the guys from Burundi call it and every other community in Kenya like have a name for it so it's not new so what you're doing as an organiz a is really um adding you know formalizing commitments cuz rotation of Labor really meant making promises to help one another and these promises are really commitments and I'm going to give you a good example like in a village X there's family a family B family C so family a will make family all the families will make commitments to help one another and then they're going to pull their commitments together with uh to to bring about exchanging and accountability with agreed upon rules so if family a needs a house built that means family b and c will come and help family a so they will fulfill their commitments you know then family a has already accepted the commitments so family B will do the same they will accept commitments from family B and see and they will get their farm tilled so that means they have um a and C has fulfilled their commitments to B eventually they will balance out and clear the debt and start over again so um this whole uh protocol is not just with the humans like it's across disciplines and you know I would give one example of the plants just to show you how Grassroots economics is coming in um like the maze the beans and the Squash you know for the longest time our ancestors have been growing them together because of the nutrients that they share um we see how the maze will bring the phosphorus you know the the beans will get the nutrient nitrogen from the air convert it and um they squash the potassium so the sharing is is is made possible like how much of the phosphorus does the squash need need so that is made possible by the micop fangi so now the pulling aspect is now the micro of fangi uh what economics is doing so these commitments Grassroots is uh formalizing them adding technology you know making them have a value number one number two they have a special signature you can't copy them number three um there's a demor do the deduction to make sure that um know say circulation and also to make sure that the holder of you know these commitments can um Can can convert them from the issuer of the debt you know so that's the whole idea like grass economics you know formalizing this and helping make a pool where community members can put in their commitments and pull out um what they need you know also bringing out the aspect of of resilience because if for instance I do not need what you have what you have and maybe you need mine I can use your commitments to get something else from the pooling yes amazing um and can you share a bit about the the types of commitments people are saying hey I will do ABCD and also just give us a bit of an indication what is the scale of operation that is happening in this way right now so um I'm going to give you a good example of where I come from um I come from kifi and uh from my community I'm in three groups so group one um is a group of women um the already have you know formed a group they have their own Vision um you know they have their own rules a constitution so the idea when you go to a community is for them to understand the different assets that are in the community for them to understand they have a lot to share like the you know the social assets the financial assets the governance assets at what level is each one of them and how can they help one another so you in these groups you know we will see see that there's a person who will have hairdressing skills uh there's a farmer there's a person who can teach tell stories you know they can teach traditional songs we you know at the end of the day there's just so much like in kiriba kiriba is one of the groups um there's uh cooking skills there's you know people who can wash clothes there are people who can teal land there are people who can build houses there are people who have um food to offer yes so that's a good example and and so like my understanding is a you a community is made up of around 20 people yes and how many of these communities do you have right now we have 120 groups in Kenya and also Beyond Uganda Colombia yes yeah and just give us a bit of an indication how have people using this over the last years like the transactions you've had and we can talk a little bit about the offchain and onchain element as well yeah so in they use the ussd wallet which is also um connected to the web interface um so each of these users um of the vouchers have a wallet um and so when they're doing the trades they normally just send the vouchers so for instance when they're doing the rotation of Labor the the hosts will accept um these people to come and work for him build a house at the end of the day the host will pay them with the vouchers the next time they'll go to someone else and the vouchers will will be paid so so there are going to be several pools and the pools are going to be interconnected together uh by um having a market day that is unique for that is common for all the groups so that is where the pools meet and more and more services are exchanged yeah that's amazing so some of us came and visited uh the operations in kifi and we actually used the uh ussd app is basically for future phone so you're basically using the telone network to send commitment vouchers to each other and each transaction would trigger an onchain transaction from a wallet that is actually connected to the phone number of that person yeah right and did I hear correctly there's a million transactions have happened 1.2 million transactions wow wow and how many people used it so far we have 65,000 um holders and issuers of these vouchers commitments yeah so this is like rethinking what what is money ultimately right money is kind of a representation of a commitment it's a bank note You' use money to go back and get some value from a bank right you guys have basically used actually defi Primitives to recreate like a localized money system built with commitments and these pools of a community connect to many other community pools so there's basically like we're sharing liquidity but liquidity is not like a dollar stable coin it is basically actual commitments people are making what has been the impact that you've seen so far in how this is changing people's lives you talked about houses being built like what have people been able to do with this yeah so I'm going to give you a good example of what I actually do and how I get to know all the kinds of impacts on the ground so we are also borrowing another traditional practice from the past you know um the idea of a councel meeting so every time the rotation of labor would happen and a cycle would end the elders would meet and discuss matters Community like what are the issues we have like what do we need to work towards is it a planting season do we need a water pan you know so that would um motivate and and also you know decide like what kind of activities they'll be meeting to do so what we do we we now are doing is identifying like a community representative also from the community and this is the person who is also going to be attending some of the rotation of Labor associations and recording the kind of activities made like a house was built 15 members took one hour or took two hours you know and then so what we do the pools also accept uh stable coins like Coda and this is really to support with uh communication so what you're doing is like buying some of the monitoring and evaluation from the from these stewards from the community so when we put them into the pool we put in Prior it's production financing and then we take the vouchers which are the commitments or which um the offerings the monitoring and evaluation Services once the report is sent end of the month um we send the vouchers back to the to the owner you know the monitoring evaluation Services vouchers and then they are able now to go into the pool and take of the cell dollar and eventually offramp those to Fat so so to understand the the kind of impact created we are able to see the transactions on the dashboard which also relates to all the reports sent like uh these transactions today equals to 10 houses five Farms five roads fixed and this is from the community members so also speaking to sustainability of this uh project you know so um we kind of all got together before this panel and when I heard and I understood what this was it was incredibly mindblowing and I wanted to just add some thoughts as to why this is really special when I got into crypto you know one of the first things I read was um andreas' book and it was talking about the history of money and we talk about the batter system now one of the challenges with the batter system is this notion of double coincidence of once so even if I have I don't know shoes and you have a shirt if I if you don't want my shoes we can't transact so this solution first of all solves that problem because you you don't need to want something in real time it's sort of like this this commitment the second thing that I thought was incredibly valuable about this as well is I talked about this idea of the lack of credit right and how do you build sort of unchain reputation and how do you unlock capital I think what is incredibly interesting about like grass economics and the work that you do as well is that people who don't have money can actually get something offered to them on credit without them having money and putting anything at risk so we all talk about def Defi and things like that but for you to get a loan on chain today you need to have Capital so when we talk about 2.5 billion people that are not yet on chain and need access to Opportunities how do you unlock sort of those opportunities so this is super interesting in that regard now if you take this this idea two steps forward and this is why I'm so excited about what you're doing and I'll R up quickly but number one is that because every commitment is on chain each of the 65,000 people now actually have unchain reputation that can be used as a credit score to then actually give them real Capital into that Community right and in the final piece when I think about it is a lot of majority of Africa almost everybody is doing sort of like agriculture now people small scale farmers are farming you know um goods and things like that that gets transported to the cities when the farmers sell you know let's say maze they sell it for $1 when it gets to the stores in the cities it's $10 so if you're trying to create wealth you want to sort of bridge that gap between the sale at production and the cost at consumption and how do you bring that back into the villages so for me like what you guys are doing is is is incredible and I can't wait to build and co-create together I think it's it's amazing yeah it's amazing like there's just so many ways there's so many ways to use the commitments um even for big businesses like you know they create their own vouches to act as loyalty points uh and this is also a call for everyone like it's it's an open you know um it's for everyone like there's so many ways to use the vouchers like even Market you know like I mentioned loyalty points yeah to make your to keep your business going and to keep your clients coming yeah and um so you know a lot of what you're building is not just technology you're leveraging existing social infrastructures and trust infrastructures and can you give us a bit of more context of where does that come from like what are other patterns like Chamas that you've seen where basically social trust is the foundation for um how we relate and interact with each other even economically so um first of all before prust was really um built when commitments were made commitments were accepted and commitments were fulfilled so nothing recreated same same so they're just doing exactly what they were doing then and really making sure that now at least now the the the commitments have value you know the the can be able to know like how much of my commitments are worth yours yeah and do we need the blockchain for that the blockchain for that I mean that's that's one question someone might ask like like why are we building with crypto on this in your opinion uh for visibility number one it also builds trust because you're able to see like how many of these are here and also you know the confidence that I know I can get this even without money even the people who don't have money at that moment they are sure that they will get what they they have you know because it's on blockchain yeah and actually no I was just going to actually add to that and I think if you even look at like how big savings groups so they're called SOS in Kenya are right now they're holding tens of millions of dollars to the the point where the government had to regulate them and I think those kind of communities is what just tells you like people have been enabling and like coming together to organize themselves to build their own kind of like local bank and in most cases crypto is not really required but what crypto does is right now if you go to asako and ask them how much can I borrow on what is my collateral Sak mostly work also on a reputational basis so you have to have a garant all of those things are incredibly manual which which makes SOS a painful process even while they have aom that would rival uh most micr Finance Banks and tier 3 tier 2 banks in a country right uh bringing it on chain is literally the you know the secret to now helping them to onboard so many more people much faster and you know you're not trying to replace their processes and like their um the way they do things and there are hundreds and thousands of these circles in Kenya alone in Kenya so this are basically small like Cooperative Society Banks of made of 10 to 20 30 people right it's crazy and and I think you know coming back to why blockchain perspective it would be really hard to have a 100 different commitment pools connected and actually sharing um like commitment pools with each other and I think that would not happen on paper and like doing this on chain and ALS go ahead sorry it becomes very easy yeah yeah and and and doing this on chain and having also a commitment pull with a pair of Fiat pull like with stable coin or something like that for people to exit if they want to I I think this I guess like the the the I think the most interesting part of this conversation for me is that we can do both it's not about like hey Africa is crude so then maybe let's doize the whole continent and stable coins for everyone that's that's helping in integrating us with the world but that's not the only solution I think what you're doing is actually making a level of localization that would be really hard to do on paper or with web 2 like making that scalable but in still maintaining the small element of it I think it's super powerful I think we should jump into questions from you all mark um while we wait for the questions to come up any uh last Reflections from you guys yes so I think um the part that we've not spoken about is this idea of like open finance and that as a builder I can contribute to her ecosystem without without even having to talk to her because these commitments and these individuals are on chain and that is actually the truest form of innovation um so yeah it's just it's just amazing to kind of see this future where we have like open financial services that just connect people businesses from across the world we have a number of questions here uh I want to ask ask uh briefly is PDP trading a big thing in Africa the answer is yes uh so I was uh one of the earliest uh the first African hire for binance in Africa and sort of worked on a number of things including P2P um and also built probably the largest um synthetic African stable coin um that was doing about 700 million a week uh peerto peer so the answer is yes nice um what western Builders trying to provide crypto services in Africa do not understand yeah yeah maybe I can take that I think the the thing I've seen the most uh which I I always help my friends especially if they're coming from like you know some geography or you know like let's say the US Europe UK Asia New Zealand Australia wherever the thing they don't understand is fragmentation problem is not on a financial level only it's also on a cultural level uh within a country like even Kenya um there's the Muslim Community that needs Sharia compliant banking so like a lot of crypto investing is like completely you know removed from them like they wouldn't be able to invest in most tokens wouldn't be able to invest in crypto unless it was Sharia compliant um there's other nuances to say that like um as El said you know more than you know 2.

5 billion people living under 50 cents a day um I think the banking the unbanked pitch never you know goes well with me because these folks don't need to be unbanked they've already been unbanked they're using mobile money they're their bank account is just an accessory for them uh understanding that is very crucial because then you actually know how to distill a solution to them and in some cases a solution to them could be serving who who they're served by so going to the supermarket going to the grocery store going to the oil company going to the um retail chain uh and helping them make their processes more efficient because those costs go down and trickle down back to the actual uh people within like a particular Market those nuances are always ignored um and you know never go well because when you think oh 1.4 billion people in Africa you know uh majority population under 25 all of those stats are very exciting you're like I'm going to go ahead and launch it and everyone will be amazed and like they'll use what I'm I'm I'm I'm building and like you know giving to them uh but I said this on a video and I'll say it again it's like uh Africa needs water not vitamins we're in the we're in the point where we need necessity tools uh and most people need necessity tools they don't need nice to Hales um when you come with that perspective you will quickly distill uh SAS tool that helps you with time management or you know some kind of like productivity tracker um that that's really not what the uh folks are looking for at this time but if we do the lowlevel uh the the lowlevel plumbing stuff then you open up uh the floor for those kind of use cases that's kind of like what I think Weston Builders you know might not quite understand we have we have like a lot of questions so I want to be very short with my answer in terms of what you could can do as a builder thinking about the the African continent the best thing you can do is get on a plane and go to one of the Cities you would learn way more than anything I would say on the yeah and I have two two quick takes on that one is Empire Building doesn't work uh if you're basically saying hey we're just going to create the alipe that's going to eat everything across all of Africa and be the only thing good luck trying to secure on that I would love to meet you and wish you all the success um but it's basically a lot of pieces tackling different problems and the second bit it's a bit of a spicy take is that um there's actually profit in Africa I'm sorry guys I know this is a weird term and frame for a lot of us building in crypto but we tend to build with a lot of sort of assumed Visions for the future but there's a positive feedback loop by adding value to real people is they're willing to pay for it so a lot of tools that we see like this across Africa actually are profitable they're building actual businesses that can last a long period of time and that's not a bad thing and that's a great thing um what evm chams are most widely used in Africa and if there's a dominant one why do you think that chain gain more adoption and if non evm chain then uh like chains that are getting what are the non evm chains that are gaining adoption um jamb you guys are on Cell yes right can you tell us a little bit of if you understand why you guys chose to work with cell specifically uh yeah I'll talk about it's been a journey for grass economics like we started with paper vouchers and of course we went to digital we've tried out with different blockchains and cell obviously became um better um because at least you know we have a validator now that people can stick into yeah yeah because you you guys are running a operating a valid a cell of validator right so that's a very interesting model you're you're contributing to its success but also using the chain yeah and what about you guys yeah I was going to say like um you know ethereum is definitely like a primary but like one of the chains people don't actually think about is like Tron Tron is very big in Africa uh and it's big for a couple of reasons but one of the core primary ones is The Exchange that was doing the most on the continent uh a couple of years ago is still quite big now was binance uh at at there was a time where like the two primary chains they had was like etherum and Tron uh we tend to think that people are like oh there's this huge evm ecosystem I'll jump to the next thing but we're actually very simplistic beings all of us humans like where're the first thing that I used is something that I'm comfortable with for whatever reason and it's just maybe because it was like the first thing that I experienced so Tron is massive in Africa and then non evm chains like um even even outside of the their Eco system Stellar is a huge chain that uh we use at hyon and Pier um but we've intentionally made ourselves evm compatible cuz you're seeing all of these different exciting like you know new developments like uh like world for example you know creating their own blockchain which is evm compatible that's very intentional because like for them they want own their ecosystem own their users and that's kind of like the only way to do it um but I think for me like ethereum Tron Stellar cell would be the top chains that are most widely used in Africa um are these questions going to be available afterwards because these are like really really great questions and I wish I wish I could answer like all of them um but I think we've kind of talked about the evm evm stuff and we have just two minutes um and I think maybe the last question is a good way to end the panel which is just like what crypto-based products do we reach exed in Africa um I'm generally interested in anything that actually allows an unchain economy to thrive um and the most popular digital economic infrastructure in the world that is at what I call population scale that is used by a billion people is the India stack but but the India stack is very similar to impesa impesa was mobile money owned by a particular corporation the India's stack is also technology that is owned by the government right usdc or usdt or stable coins is digital money that is on the blockchain and so the India stack and ideas across identity digital locker and like like moving that and putting that on chain as well I think is the next sort of big like really big meta and people across the global majority are building this building blocks and they're going to be composable so that that stream is actually when when people talk about real world ethereum that's kind of like what I think you know the India stack on chain quickly you guys what other crypto-based projects you wish existed uh for me like uh one of one of one of the ones that's like been you know going across my mind for a long time is so uh RPC layers that make crypto feel less scary for people now I say that to to mean uh imagine telling your grandma that no you should have sent it to this ethereum address now the crypto is gone you send it to a random one onchain right right she will basically wonder what are you even talking about I tried to send you money uh can't you just call them and they'll reverse it now I don't have italic number but I don't think anyone the ethereum foundation can help if you send crypto to the wrong address right um but that RPC layer is interesting to me oh because uh like we need to build more guard reils around it yeah yeah jamb anas for like uh for like um the addresses well no like even withouts I think that RPC layer is like helpful so like you can reverse you can like authorize trans well thank you all so much for the session here and for listening to us I hope you found I hope you found it valuable and if you want to take this relationship to the next level you're very welcome to visit the continent and spend time in many of these communities thank you thank you big thank you to all the panelists that was awesome and have a lovely afternoon