Image source: MarsBit
A few months ago, I once again set foot on the hot land of Africa. The pickup truck flew past the raised loess, and the setting sun outlined the strange yet familiar impression of the African continent. Only by staying out of the situation can we have enough space to assume our role as "global citizens" and 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 digging deeper, you will find that what Crypto can give to underdeveloped countries in Africa is an opportunity to be on the same page with the world again. 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 in the mud and being dominated, why not fully embrace Crypto and move towards a bright future.
Just in time for 2049, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Athena (X: @AthenaWeb33) and talk about the beliefs she has always insisted on since entering Africa and then entering Crypto. She will continue the entrepreneurial journey of Wello.tech and will also go deep into Africa to follow her unpretentious faith that few people understand in a chaotic society.
The following is reproduced from a post by Athena (X: @AthenaWeb33), Enjoy:
At the end of Token2049, as I have been deeply socializing with some colleagues these days, and with the negative emotions flying all over the sky, I think of a small thing from a few weeks ago: "Is the crypto industry over?"
It has been two years since I moved to Paris. One day, while I was working remotely at a small cafe in front of my house, I suddenly received a call from Uganda on WeChat. After a pleasant exchange of surprises, pleasant surprises and confusion, I realized with a few fingers that it had been 7 years since I left my traditional industrial job in Africa to join Crypto.
The caller was a senior adviser to the Ugandan government. During the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, he came to China on a business trip with the president. During the years when I was based in Africa, I worked for central enterprises and the UN International Development System, aiming to promote Africa's industrialization process and inclusive finance. With his help, we have collaborated on large and small projects such as China-Uganda cooperation in attracting investment and promoting women's handicraft industry in Uganda, and have forged friendships.
I can actually tell you about those years in Africa that I can tell you for half a lifetime. There are some high-ranking ones, such as chatting and laughing with the President of Senegal at his home, and there are narrow escapes, such as the boyfriend of a good friend who is in the capital of Kenya. We must go to a shopping mall every time. Unfortunately, he lost his life in a terrorist attack in 2016. Due to a sudden and unexpected change of flight, he avoided the worst air crash in the history of Ethiopian Airlines. However, my high school classmates, friends and colleagues and several acquaintances in the third-degree network unfortunately lost their lives. life. But the decision to leave Africa was also decisive and firm.
That starts with an unexpected encounter with Crypto. What’s very interesting is that seven years have passed. When I sit in a coffee shop and chat with new and old Crypto friends, the story of Africa is a topic of interest to everyone. It seems to be a utopia that escapes the difficult status quo, a kind of foreign land. The psychological sustenance of romanticizing adventure.
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.
Source: X
Transfer of value – where is the money and how is it spent? Where do the flowers go?
Everyone may know Binance’s resounding vision: to increase the freedom of money. So when you think about the soul torture of whether the Crypto industry is doomed, let’s hold it high and look at how several global value chain shifts occurred in history. At which stage of historical development are we now? Why is Binance There will be slogans like this.
Let’s start with the old “narrative”. Three global industrial revolutions have occurred in history. The "Steam Revolution" originated from the invention of the steam engine in the UK. Productivity was greatly improved, and small-scale handicraft and textile workshop-type production could be transformed into large-scale industrial production. In the "Electricity Revolution", Britain, the United States, and France all engaged in electric power, chemical industry, and heavy industry. When the industry achieved breakthroughs, the industrial system throughout Europe developed and improved, and the third revolution was what we are familiar with as the "information revolution." The development of information technology, computers, electronics industry, automation and other industries has promoted countries such as the United States and Japan to become important participating forces 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 brings 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 from the advantages of the rise of other Asian Tigers such as Singapore. By building concession economic zones and industrial parks in developed coastal areas, China has taken advantage of China's low labor cost, large base, and hard-working and enterprising people. "Comparative advantages", coupled with the opening of the market, the introduction of foreign investment, and the development of export-oriented manufacturing in some coastal areas, it became the "world factory" and established and stabilized its indispensable position in the distribution of the world's value chain at that time.
The details of these several grand industrial revolutions spanning a century can be written in great detail and will not be listed here. It is worth mentioning that each industrial revolution is also a process of wealth redistribution. Africa, on the other hand, has not been involved in this "cake-sharing" process due to its special historical background of being colonized for a long time, as well as various complex industrial policies and international political factors.
Source: X
Is Africa really poor? Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, has the highest density of private jets in the world. After the exchange launched local payment channels in Africa, the per capita transaction volume in Africa far exceeded that of European and Asian countries. The rich in Africa are richer than we generally know and imagine. Since Africa is rich in resources, especially oil resources and agricultural resources, the upper class in Africa can rely on the primary industry of direct export of raw materials for several lifetimes; ordinary people are forced to work in the tertiary industry-the service industry. The middle part is about fur and food. The manufacturing industry across the 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 own a bank account or pay for bank transfers. The comically serious gap between rich and poor is the most common class situation in Africa.
During a research project conducted by 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 what many locals spend half a year. income. I still remember a moment when a white businessman smoking a cigar was talking loudly on a beach chair in this hotel on the Red Sea. The black waiter in front of him was holding a tray, his back straight, a white shirt, a red vest and dark skin. Complementing each other, he looked at the fog on the Red Sea in the distance, his eyes full of numbness and confusion.
Our job at that time was a group of young elites with academic qualifications in economics, finance, sociology, etc. from the world's top universities. We had to design where and how the aid funds from international organizations to Africa were spent, and how to ensure that the money was effective. 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 check in with tears in her eyes. She thought it was a mockery of her subject. However, when she saw the living conditions of ordinary people, houses covered with iron sheets that creaked under the 50-degree heat, she quietly retracted her persistence.
It was around that time that I decided to give up that job. Although what we do seems to be compassionate, we talk a lot about industrial transfer, about allowing Africa to develop manufacturing and integrate into the value chain, allowing ordinary people to enter factories and learn from China and Southeast Asia’s clothing and shoemaking experience. I have also personally worked with Chinese people in Senegal. I stayed in the factory for a month, interviewing female workers and watching them produce low-grade Adidas Nike sweatpants exported to Europe and the United States. But this is too slow. In the entire huge system of traditional "aid", those who benefit the most are probably not the African female workers who are "taught to fish", but the senior people who sit in the London office writing papers and doing project audits. Clerks, as well as us international organization elites who use business trip funds to stay in hotels worth 300 US dollars - it can also be seen from the data that in the entire chain, up to 70% of the funds are worn out "to prove the money." How to spend, where to spend, generate audit reports and impact reports".
I began to see Blockchain and Crypto. Blockchain technology and the fourth revolution led by artificial intelligence have become the revolution of currency, the revolution of Africa, and the revolution of the poor people.
Real decentralization, wet markets in Kampala
The son of the Prime Minister of Uganda established a Crypto organization a few years ago. Several "second-generation officials" who studied in the United Kingdom and the United States and technical geeks got together and made several small projects related to Crypto. For example, it can be used without 3G at all. Where the Internet is available, use a mobile phone without a smart app to transfer Crypto peer-to-peer. Africans understand Africans better. Most of their locals use non-smart phones that can only make calls and send text messages. Since many Africans do not have bank accounts, they are unwilling to travel across the city to find a Western Union or There are only a few banks that do transfers and remittances, and the locals’ remittance methods are simple and crude: mobile phones based on USSD technology can send money directly to friends by sending text messages, and everyone’s mobile phone number is their “wallet”/account , the phone balance is the account balance.
I followed a friend from this organization to personally experience the smooth process of "registration, account opening, KYC, transfer": I bought a $50 mobile phone from a telecom operator next to the Kampala wet market, queued up, and the counter staff I went through the KYC process tens of thousands of times, and the whole process was completed in 3 minutes. The staff helped me use cash to store the "phone bill"; there are a large number of fixed and mobile official/unofficial Kiosks (kiosks/service points) in the village. When you want to "withdraw cash", go to the "villager representative" on duty at the Kiosk, send him a text message to transfer money, and he will give you cash. "Stored value" is the opposite process. The whole process is smooth and point-to-point, with no third party and no trust issues at all. This product and process is not only available in the capital, but has also been rolled out in the vast rural areas.
Source: X
Later, I joined Binance. In the first year, I responded to CZ’s vision of “mass adoption” and laid a network in Africa that is truly based entirely on blockchain and Crypto. I started with the simplest charity projects and Binance charity came into being. , on the world's first completely "transparent" peer-to-peer donation platform, due to the characteristics of the blockchain, every melon-eater on the Internet can supervise every Crypto donation without going through any third party. , arrived directly at the wallet addresses of Ugandan villagers. The villagers used Crypto to buy potatoes and cabbage from vegetable farmers and suppliers who accepted crypto, without the involvement of legal currency in the whole process. When vegetable farmers need legal currency, they regularly exchange Crypto for local legal currency through local exchanges or OTC.
Later, we also issued the world’s first (and probably the only) “value stablecoin” on Binance Smart Chain (now BNB chain): Pink Care Token. Unlike other stablecoins, Pink Care Token The currency is not linked to the "price" of any legal currency, but to the value of items: each pink coin is linked to the "value" of sanitary napkins used by a girl in Uganda for one year. The origin of this project was that when I was distributing potatoes and cabbage in the local area, I chatted with the locals and found that "menstrual shame" still widely exists among the local female population. Due to the lack of sex education, and the high price and difficulty of purchasing sanitary napkins, menstrual period Replacing sanitary napkins with leaves and turf has caused serious gynecological problems. Many girls will get married and have children at the age of 14. Premature pregnancy makes things worse, directly causing many girls to die from infections during childbirth. Girls who get pink coins can go to the environmentally friendly sanitary napkin supplier we cooperate with to "redeem" sanitary napkins for one year.
I am still very touched that the Pink Coin project received donations and hands-on support from almost all the real big names in the currency circle at that time. The first sister personally served as the project ambassador, calling on all industry exchanges, VCs and other participants to raise funds and promote the project. , established the "Pink Coin Alliance". It was a time of deep bear, and the industry was in deep self-criticism and self-doubt. However, the concept of value-stable currency, as well as the complete transparency, efficiency, and practice of removing third parties based on the blockchain in the entire process, were a great development for the Crypto society. A small validation of value. Crypto's value exchange attribute as "currency" is also reflected in such a simple way.
Source: X
When I am increasingly distressed that I cannot understand the increasingly complex business models and narratives full of profound theories, and when the industry is now in trouble, I will think about this story-filled Ugandan wet market and always sigh. For a clean, pure, and simple Crypto application, it is so unpretentious and good deeds are rewarded. For example, those vegetable farmers in Kampala who were willing to accept the challenge and be at the forefront of the Crypto revolution received only 6 yuan in BNB. Maybe they are people who really have strong Crypto beliefs.
PayFi or FiFi?
Back in bustling Singapore, PayFi became a new hot spot at this year’s 2049 venue. The new narrative of Payment+Finance has given life to many desperate capital and projects. How the narrative is translated is not too important, especially as another big guy joked that PayFi can actually be called FiFi because Payment itself is finance. What’s really interesting and meaningful is that, coming full circle, we’re starting to get back to crypto’s fundamental properties as it relates to payments, beyond investment and speculation.
Just like the redistribution of value and wealth, the development of everything in the world follows the basic laws of history. As small as a product, as large as a track and industry, what truly lasts for a long time is a product that truly brings positive value to society. Returning to this essence, our faith will not be so fragile and easily shaken.
I really hope that after so many years of wandering around, I can go and see those girls who use stablecoins to buy sanitary napkins, and the vegetable farmers who use BNB to make accounts. The original intention of Crypto may be that simple.
[Disclaimer] There are risks in the market, so investment needs to be cautious. This article does not constitute investment advice, and users should consider whether any opinions, views or conclusions contained in this article are appropriate for their particular circumstances. Invest accordingly and do so at your own risk.
This article is reproduced with permission from: (MarsBit)
Original author: Athena
