# Scaling Crypto? There's an App for That. Onboarding Millions in Africa with MiniPay | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 09:36
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-cxrKuY7XQoc
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxrKuY7XQoc

## Description

Post-EthCC, everyone’s talking about the industry’s influx of infra & lack of consumer apps. These conversations overlook the strides made in Africa with MiniPay, a self-custodial stablecoin wallet with 3M+ activated accounts since launching less than a year ago. In this panel, Rene, Yoseph & co-panelists will discuss building, scaling, & updating a truly user-friendly crypto wallet, introducing net new users to Web3 and dApps, & the power of ERC-20 stablecoins for payments in emerging markets.

Speaker(s): Charles Hamel
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Real World Ethereum
Keywords: Protocol Design, Scalability, UI/UX, Mobile

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

[Music] all right hi everyone um I'm Charles from Opera I'm leading the product team for minay and I'm here to tell you about how we're onboarding millions of users in Africa to crypto and to stable coins oppra as you may know is a browser company um we have many apps and we have over um million users on the on the African continent oppra mini is our most popular app it's a browser that allows you to surf the web but in a very efficient way that means that you don't have to buy as much data um to browse the web so people love it um and minip is built right into oppra mini and distributed through um through this channel uh We've launched about a year ago uh to five African countries um and we've been getting a tremendous traction mini is not only built inside Opa mini but it's also built on the best of cell and it's different in many ways to other crypto wallets minip doesn't try to be a Swiss army knife that sees all your assets and all the chains and all the swaps it's really focused around a payment use case using stable coins and cell is perfectly suited for that um it allows us to use phone numbers instead of wallet addresses um so as similar as to mobile money systems already in market today it's super fast and almost free so typical stable coin transfer on C is 0.1 Cent so we don't need things like account abstraction um to really get the the user benefit of gas abstraction it also has automatic key backup so when users uh activate mini pay their keys are backed up they don't lose them which is a common thing in in self- custody wallets and it's a UI that's really tries to speak to users with familiar terms and has this web to experience to it with the full power of web 3 and the last part which very few wallets do is really have a localized approach to on andof ramp by working with smaller Partners to really make sure that it's possible to buy and sell stable coins for very low amounts um using local payment methods zooming in on one of these um differences um the phone number to wallet address system is actually built on social connect with which is a cell protocol that allows us to map this in a privacy preserving way from number to address but not the other way um and it really improves discoverability of you can see who you which one of your friends is already on minay and it makes copy pasting addresses a thing of the past another interesting feature of of Opera Mini uh sorry mini pay is that although we've added support for more stable coins dollar stable coins we wanted to make it easy for users to uh move in and out of them uh if needed by having this concept of swaps using Pockets so you can simply drag and swap from one pocket to the other uh one to one and we used a mental protocol for this which allows us to have super low slippage and um excellent uh fees as this is a developer conference I'll uh mention that we also have mini apps which are web apps that are integrated within minay we have over 10 of them now uh also getting tremendous traction since launch and this is something that um you can do and you can build uh using existing web and ethereum Technologies uh and the cell team is is there to to assist also in in making this a reality I'm happy to share that since launch we've activated over 4 million wallets uh map to phone numbers and uh as of October we've done over a million uh during October we've done over a million P2P transfers between those users thank you um you know going past the tech and the um the numbers right we're starting now to tell a bit more of these stories that we're seeing in Market using mini pay I'll go a bit quick now I see time's running up but um this is a story of a freelancer getting paid in Stables um and being able to to use them uh locally this is another one in Kenya being able to use usdt and pay local Merchants for groceries um interacting directly with the payment system locally and PESA so it requires no Merchant integration this is another one um someone has lost their wallet in Kenya and it was able to basically pay for everything during a week uh thanks to minay and this uh integration with the local payment system minay is now growing outside of Opera Mini so I'm also glad to announce that we've made available now the Android app as a standalone app so you can just go on the Google Play store and try it out it's enabled in over 60 countries um and we basically ramp up as as we have good cash in and cash out in those countries this is what it looks like really trying to focus on the dollar uh use case and um the payment use case and we foresee that you know users in country in Nigeria or Kenya will invite people to from outside Nigeria to the Standalone app and you can imagine uh crossb payments being powered through this system also happy to reveal that uh the iOS version is coming very soon um so if you are Keen to be one of the first to try mini pay on iOS scan this QR code sign up the form and uh we'll be sending invites to the test flight uh very shortly and if you want to build on minip pay please reach out to us on X at minay or at COD devs and the Cod devs uh are organizing bounties during e Global so if you're joining the hackaton make sure you check it out thank you thank you Charles that was incredible all attractions any question from our audience any questions okay well a few um I see the the gentleman in the red shair first so uh my understanding is that in Africa there's not much of a savings culture because uh many of the currencies are uh you know losing their value every year so um there's more of a borrowing culture than a savings culture uh with access to stable coins in mini pay are you seeing more of a savings culture develop are people using this for savings and acing those savings over time uh what sort of uh data are you seeing around that so savings is certainly something that that we hear could be useful in the context of mini pay this is not a use case we're really focusing on now um so for us right now it's it's a marginal use case it's really around money movement uh at this point another one over there um with using USD there is that somehow in conflict with the local currencies is that is that something that you see as a risk like for example when integrating with tax payments that should be happening or just with local governments not being happy that they're original money is not being used or how is that in Africa so I mean these economies already have a lot of demand for dollars um this is just a different channel to to access them um and you know users can use opam mini in sorry minay in a way that they can think in local currency like they can denominate everything in local currency so a lot of people are doing that to to alleviate the kind of mental friction one more over here good job all right what is a mini app is it like an if frame or yeah it's an embedded web app yeah it's not an iframe but we just invoke your app um and each app is um is within a sendbox so we only allow known uh blockchain interactions okay is is the outputs um like is it dumping HTML or is it yeah this is existing web technology this is existing web 3 API um it's not it's not exotic anyway but it's packaged in a way that users don't have to connect their wallet it's integrated and um the signing process is very human readable okay cool I see that there's a few people wanting to ask more question but we are the time is up for for the session feel free to feel free to reach out to char for further discussion uh let's thank Charles for another thank you Charles