Baracoin officially partners with Stellar to bring financial services to Africa

Today, we are proud to announce that we have signed a memorandum of understanding to cement our partnership with Stellar. The first part of this is integration onto the Stellar system aided by Lightyear.io. Lightyear’s mission is to assist partners with incorporating their service onto the Stellar network, developing, deploying and marketing partners.

With Stellar’s official integration team working alongside us, we are now poised to take our pace of development to another level, and the future we are working to create is closer and more tangible than ever before.

Here at Baracoin, we recognise the potential that financial inclusion has to lift millions out of poverty. To that end, we have taken it upon ourselves to build a low-cost, border free network that will connect millions of underbanked African merchants and customers through the power of blockchain technology. In order to fulfil that goal, we have to ensure that not only does the base layer we are building on top of provide low-cost, fast transactions and a record of reliability, but also that the philosophy driving its founders and developers matches with ours. The solution that stood out to us was Stellar.

Stellar is run by a non-profit foundation dedicated to providing low-cost, border free financial access to the unbanked all around the world. Because it is not for profit, transactions on the Stellar network cost a very low nominal fee, allowing us to lower the cost we will pass on to our own customers in service charges. This is very important if we are to succeed in our goal, as most Africans at the moment are simply priced out of the financial market.

There are also technical reasons for our choosing Stellar. It is important to us that we provide a service which is fast and can handle the volume of operations we need for a continent-wide network. Stellar performs admirably in both respects, capable as it is of processing 1000 operations every second, with a latency of just 2–5 seconds. Stellar also provides a mechanism for recovery of wrongfully sent funds thanks to its asset-freezing function, giving our customers recourse against scams and bad purchases.

“We are delighted to enter into a partnership with a company that shares such key values with us,” said Dr Robert Maweni, our CEO, about the development. “Speaking with the Stellar head of partnerships, Mr Ladipo over the past few weeks, I’ve seen just how committed they are to providing high quality financial services in Africa and have no doubt that this will be a long and fruitful partnership.”

Visit our website at https://www.baracoin.io/ for more information and join us on telegram to ask our team questions and engage with our community!