Crypto in Africa, simple and pure

Original title: "Seven years after leaving Africa and entering Crypto, we are still talking about faith"

Original author: Athena

A few months ago, I once again set foot on the hot land of Africa. The pickup truck sped through the raised loess, and the sunset glow outlined the strange and familiar impression of the African continent. Only by staying out of the matter can we have enough space to substitute our role as "world citizens" to think about who I am, what I am doing, or the relationship between the Crypto industry I am engaged in and the world.

After really going deep, you will find that what Crypto can give to underdeveloped countries in Africa is an opportunity to re-synchronize with the world. From the belief and determination of these countries in Crypto, we can see that they are no longer satisfied with the compromise with the old system. Instead of struggling and being dominated in the mud, why not fully embrace Crypto and run towards a bright future.

At the end of Token2049, with the deep social interaction with some colleagues these days and the negative emotions flying all over the sky, about "Is the crypto industry over?" I thought of a little thing a few weeks ago:

I have moved to Paris for two years now. One day, I was working remotely in a small cafe near my home, and suddenly I received a call from Uganda on WeChat. After the greetings of surprise, joy and confusion, I counted on my fingers and realized that it was 7 years ago that I left the traditional industry in Africa to join Crypto.

The caller was a senior adviser to the Ugandan government. He came to China on a business trip with the president during the China-Africa Cooperation Forum. In the few years when I was rooted in Africa, I worked for state-owned enterprises and the UN international development system to promote Africa's industrialization process and inclusive finance. With his help, we cooperated on projects of various sizes, such as China-Uganda cooperation in attracting investment and promoting women's handicrafts in Uganda, and forged friendships.

I can actually brag about those years in Africa for half my life. There are some grand stories, such as chatting and laughing with the President of Senegal at his home, and some near-death experiences, such as my best friend’s boyfriend was unfortunately killed in a terrorist attack in the shopping district in the capital of Kenya that we always go to. Due to a temporary change of flight, we avoided the worst air crash in the history of Ethiopian Airlines, but my high school classmates, my friend’s colleagues and several acquaintances within the third-degree relationship network unfortunately lost their lives. But the decision to leave Africa was also resolute and firm.

It all started with an unexpected encounter with Crypto. Interestingly, seven years later, when I was sitting in a coffee shop chatting with new and old Crypto friends, stories about Africa were a topic of interest to everyone, as if it was a utopia to escape from the current predicament, a psychological sustenance that romanticized the adventures in foreign lands.

However, I think that these soul-searching questions and answers about the application value of Crypto are actually in those seemingly romantic and ethereal stories.

Transfer of value - where is the money, how to spend it? Where to spend it?

Everyone may know Binance's loud vision: to increase the freedom of money. Then, to think about whether the Crypto industry is finished, let's first raise a high level and look at how the global value chain transfer occurred several times in history, what stage of historical development we are in now, and why Binance has such a slogan.

Let's start with the old "narrative". There have been three global industrial revolutions in history. The "Steam Revolution" originated from the invention of the steam engine in the UK, which greatly improved productivity, and small-scale handicraft textile workshop production could be industrialized on a large scale; in the "Electricity Revolution", Britain, the United States, Germany and France all achieved breakthroughs in the fields of electricity, chemicals, heavy industry, etc., and the industrial system of the whole Europe was developed and improved. The third revolution is the "Information Revolution" we are familiar with. The development of industries such as information technology, computers, electronics, and automation has promoted countries such as the United States and Japan to become important participants in the world economy. The "Four Asian Tigers" (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong) also rapidly industrialized in the second half of the 20th century, developed advanced manufacturing and financial industries, and integrated into the world value chain system.

It can be seen that each round of industrial revolution is a change in productivity that has brought about changes in production relations, thereby promoting some countries to use their "comparative advantages" to participate in the world value distribution system. Thanks to the reform and opening up that began in 1978, China has learned the advantages of the rise of Singapore and other Asian tigers. In the developed coastal areas, China has built franchised economic zones and industrial parks, taking advantage of China's low labor costs, large base, and hardworking "comparative advantages", plus opening up the market and introducing foreign capital, and developing export-oriented manufacturing from some coastal areas, becoming a "world factory" and establishing and consolidating its indispensable position in the world value chain distribution at that time.

The details of these several grand industrial revolutions spanning a century can be written in great detail, which will not be discussed here. It is worth mentioning that every industrial revolution is also a process of wealth redistribution. Africa, due to its special historical background of long-term colonization, as well as various complex industrial policies and international political factors, has not been involved in this "cake-sharing" process.

Is Africa really that poor? Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, is the airport with the highest density of private jets in the world. After the exchange launched the local payment channel in Africa, the per capita transaction volume in Africa far exceeded that of European and Asian countries. The rich people in Africa are richer than we generally know and imagine. Because Africa is rich in resources, especially oil and agricultural resources, and lies in the primary industry of direct export of raw materials, the upper class in Africa can have no worries about food and clothing for several lifetimes; ordinary people are forced to only get some fur and food and clothing in the tertiary industry - the service industry. The manufacturing industry of the entire continent is vacant, and the financial industry is monopolized. Due to the lack of infrastructure, the cost of financial services is extremely high, and ordinary people cannot have a bank account or pay for bank transfers. The serious and ridiculous gap between the rich and the poor is the most common class situation in Africa.

During a research project of an international organization that year, the Djibouti government arranged for us to stay at the Kempinski Hotel, which is the most luxurious hotel in Djibouti, a small and barren country in East Africa. The price is 300 US dollars a night, which is half a year's income for many locals. I still remember a moment. On the beach lounge chair by the Red Sea in this hotel, a white businessman smoking a cigar was talking loudly. The black waiter in front of him was holding a tray, his back was straight, and his white shirt and red vest complemented his black skin. He looked at the fog on the Red Sea in the distance, and his eyes were full of numbness and confusion.

And our job at the time was a group of young elites with degrees in economics, finance, sociology, etc. from the world's top universities. We had to design where and how to spend the aid funds given to Africa by international organizations, and how to ensure that the money produced results. We had a British girl who had just graduated from Oxford University. When she heard that we were going to stay in a luxury hotel that cost $300 a night, she refused to stay with tears in her eyes. She felt that this was a mockery of her subject. However, when she saw the living conditions of ordinary people, the iron-covered house, which creaked in the 50-degree high temperature, she silently withdrew her insistence.

It was about that time that I decided to give up the job. Although what we did seemed compassionate, we talked about industrial transfer, talking about developing manufacturing in Africa, integrating into the value chain, letting ordinary people enter factories, and learning the experience of China and Southeast Asia in making clothes and shoes. I also personally spent a month in a Chinese factory in Senegal, interviewing female workers and watching them produce low-grade Adidas and Nike sweatpants for export to Europe and the United States. But this is too slow. In the entire huge system of traditional "aid", the people who benefit the most are probably not the African women workers who are "taught how to fish", but the senior clerks who sit in London offices writing papers and doing project audits, and the elites of international organizations like us who stay in $300 hotels with business trip funds. From the data, we can also see that in the entire chain, up to 70% of the funds are consumed in "proving how and where the money is spent, and generating audit reports and impact reports."

I started to see Blockchain, Crypto, Blockchain technology, and the fourth revolution led by artificial intelligence, which has revolutionized currency, Africa, and the lives of the vast majority of poor people.

True decentralization, in the vegetable market in Kampala

The son of the Prime Minister of Uganda founded a Crypto organization a few years ago. Several "second-generation officials" who studied in the UK and the US and technology geeks got together to do a few small projects related to Crypto, such as peer-to-peer transfers of Crypto using mobile phones without smart apps in places without 3G networks. Africans understand Africans better. Most of the locals are using non-smart phones that can only make calls and send text messages. Since many Africans do not have bank accounts and are unwilling to travel across the city to find a Western Union or one of the few banks for transfers and remittances, the locals' remittance method is simple and crude: USSD-based mobile phones can directly remit money to friends by sending text messages, and each person's mobile phone number is their "wallet"/account, and the balance of phone bills is the account balance.

I followed a friend from this organization and personally experienced the smooth "registration, KYC, and transfer" process: I bought a $50 mobile phone from a telecom operator next to the Kampala vegetable market, lined up, and the counter staff had operated the KYC process thousands of times. The whole process took 3 minutes. The staff helped me recharge the "phone bill" with cash; there are a large number of fixed and mobile official/unofficial Kiosks (kiosks/service points) in the village. When you want to "withdraw cash", you go to the "villager representative" on duty at the Kiosk, send him a text message to transfer money, and he will give you cash. "Recharge" is the opposite process. The whole process is smooth, and it is all point-to-point, there is no third party, and there is no trust issue at all. This product and process is not only in the capital, but has been deeply rolled out in the vast rural areas.

I later joined Binance. In the first year, I responded to CZ’s vision of “mass adoption” and laid a truly blockchain- and Crypto-based network in Africa. I started with the simplest charity project, and Binance charity was born. On this world’s first completely “transparent” peer-to-peer donation platform, due to the characteristics of blockchain, every Internet spectator can monitor that every Crypto donation has directly reached the wallet address of the Ugandan villagers without going through any third party. The villagers used Crypto to buy potatoes and cabbages from vegetable farmers who accepted Crypto, without the intervention of legal currency. When the vegetable farmers need legal currency, they will regularly exchange Crypto for local legal currency through local exchanges or OTC.

Later, we also issued the world's first (and perhaps the only) "value stablecoin" on Binance Smart Chain (now BNB chain): Pink Care Token. Unlike other stablecoins, Pink Care Token is not linked to any legal currency "price", but to the value of goods: each Pink Care Token is linked to the "value" of a girl's sanitary napkins used in Uganda for one year. The origin of this project is that when I was distributing potatoes and cabbage in the local area, I chatted with the locals and found that "menstrual shame" is still widely present in the local female group. Due to the lack of sex education and the high price of sanitary napkins, they use leaves and grass instead of sanitary napkins during menstruation, causing serious gynecological problems. Many girls have to get married and have children at the age of 14, and premature pregnancy makes things worse, directly causing many girls to die of infection during childbirth. Girls who get pink coins can go to the environmentally friendly sanitary napkin supplier that cooperates with us to "exchange" for one year of sanitary napkins.

What still moves me is that the Pink Coin project received donations and support from almost all the real bigwigs in the cryptocurrency circle at that time. Yijie personally served as the project ambassador, calling on exchanges, VCs and other participants in the industry to raise funds and promote, and established the "Pink Coin Alliance". At that time, the industry was in a deep bear market, and it was in a state of deep self-criticism and self-doubt, but the concept of value stablecoins, as well as the complete transparency and efficiency of the entire process based on blockchain, and the practice of eliminating third parties, is a small verification of the social value of Crypto. The value exchange attribute of Crypto as a "currency" is also reflected in such a simple way.

When I am increasingly distressed about not understanding the increasingly complex business models and narratives full of profound theories, and when the industry is now in trouble again, I will think about this Ugandan vegetable market full of stories, and always sigh at the clean, pure, and simple Crypto applications, which are so simple and unpretentious, and good deeds will be rewarded. For example, the vegetable farmers in Kampala who were willing to accept the challenge and walk at the forefront of the Crypto revolution received only 6 yuan of BNB at the time. Maybe they are people who really have a firm belief in Crypto.

PayFi or FiFi

Back to the noisy Singapore, PayFi has become a new hot spot at this year's 2049 venue. The new narrative of Payment+Finance has brought new life to many desperate capitals and projects. How the narrative is translated is not too important, especially when another big guy joked that PayFi can actually be called FiFi, because Payment itself is finance. What is really interesting and meaningful is that after a long detour, we began to return to the fundamental attribute of crypto related to payment in addition to investment and speculation.

Just like the redistribution of value and wealth, the development of all things in the world follows the basic laws of history. From a small product to a large track and industry, what really lasts is the product that truly creates positive value for society. Returning to this essence, our beliefs will not be so fragile and easily shaken.

I really hope that after so many years of going around, I can go and see those girls who buy sanitary napkins with stablecoins and the vegetable farmers who use BNB as accounts. The original intention of Crypto may be that simple.

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