Seven years after leaving Africa to join Crypto, we are still talking about faith

Author:Athena

Seven years after leaving Africa to join Crypto, we are still talking about faith

At the end of Token2049, with the deep social interaction with some colleagues these days and the negative emotions flying around, the question of "Is the crypto industry over?" reminded me of a small incident a few weeks ago.

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

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

I could actually spend my whole life bragging about the wonderful years I spent living in Africa. There were some great ones, like chatting and laughing with the President of Senegal at his home; there were also some near-death experiences, like my best friend’s boyfriend who unfortunately died in a terrorist attack in a shopping district in the Kenyan capital that we always visited; and due to a sudden and unexpected change of flight, we avoided the worst air crash in Ethiopian Airlines’ history, 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 kind of psychological sustenance that romanticized the adventures in foreign lands.

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

1. Transfer of value—where is the money, how to spend it, and where to spend it?

Everyone may know Binance’s loud vision: to increase the freedom of money. So, to think about whether the crypto industry is finished, let’s first look at how the global value chain shifted 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 Britain, which greatly improved productivity and enabled small-scale handicraft textile workshop production to 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 vigorous development of information technology, computers, electronics industry, automation and other industries 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. China benefited from the reform and opening up that began in 1978, and learned from the advantages of the rise of Singapore and other Asian tigers. In the developed coastal areas, China built franchised economic zones and industrial parks, took advantage of China's low labor costs, large base, and hardworking "comparative advantages", opened up the market, introduced foreign capital, and developed export-oriented manufacturing from some coastal areas, becoming the "world factory", and established and consolidated 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 is not included here. It is worth mentioning that each industrial revolution is also a process of wealth redistribution. However, 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 current government of Djibouti 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, and the black waiter in front of him was holding a tray, with his back straight, and his white shirt and red vest complemented his black skin. He looked at the fog on the Red Sea in the distance, his eyes full of numbness and confusion.

At that time, we were a group of young elites with degrees in economics, finance, sociology, etc. from the world's top universities. We had to design how and where international organizations should spend their aid to Africa, 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 creaked in the 50-degree high temperature, she silently withdrew her insistence.

It was around that time that I decided to give up the job. Although what we did seemed compassionate, we talked a lot about industrial transfer, about developing manufacturing in Africa, integrating it into the value chain, letting ordinary people go into factories, and learning about 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 it was too slow. In the entire huge system of traditional "aid", the ones who benefited the most were probably not the African female workers who were "taught how to fish", but the senior clerks who sat in the London office writing papers and doing project audits, and us, the elites of international organizations who took business trip funds and stayed in $300 hotels. From the data, it can also be seen that in the entire chain, up to 70% of the funds were worn out in "proving how and where the money was spent, and generating audit reports and impact reports."

I began to see blockchain and crypto. The fourth revolution led by blockchain technology and artificial intelligence has revolutionized currency, Africa, and the lives of the vast majority of poor people.

2. 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 tech geeks got together to do a few small crypto-related projects, such as peer-to-peer crypto transfers using mobile phones without smart apps in places where there is no 3G network. Africans understand Africans better. Most of their 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 most of the city to find a Western Union or a few banks for transfers and remittances, the locals' remittance method is simple and crude: mobile phones based on USSD technology 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 are not only in the capital, but have been deeply rolled out in the vast rural areas.

Later, I 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, starting with the simplest charity project. Binance charity came into being. On the 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 arrived at the wallet address of the Ugandan villagers without going through any third party. The villagers use crypto to buy potatoes and cabbage from vegetable farmers who accept crypto, without the intervention of fiat currency. When vegetable farmers need fiat currency, they regularly exchange crypto for local fiat 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 cabbages 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 and difficulty of purchasing sanitary napkins, sanitary napkins are replaced with leaves and grass 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 from infection during childbirth. Girls who get Pink Care Tokens can go to the environmentally friendly sanitary napkin supplier that cooperates with us to "exchange" for one year of sanitary napkins.

I am still very moved by the fact that the Pink Coin project received donations and support from almost all the real bigwigs in the cryptocurrency circle at that time. It was a time of deep bear market, and the industry was in 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 increasingly complex business models and narratives full of profound theories, and when the industry is now in trouble, I will think about this Ugandan vegetable market full of stories. I always sigh at the clean, pure, and simple crypto applications, which are so plain and unpretentious, and good deeds will be rewarded. For example, those vegetable farmers in Kampala who are willing to accept challenges 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 firm crypto beliefs.

3. Payfi or FiFi

Back to the bustling Singapore, PayFi became a new hot spot at this year's 2049 conference. 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 another big shot 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 product to a 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, I can go and see those girls who buy sanitary napkins with stablecoins and the vegetable farmers who use BNB as payment. Maybe the original intention of Crypto is just that simple.