Helicarrier officially announces that it has today completed the signing of definitive agreements to acquire significant equity interest in Accrue. As part of this agreement, Buycoins Basic will be transitioning into Accrue effective immediately. “Embarking on this partnership underscores our dedication to democratising wealth building on the continent. Accrue has…

A lot of the time — I agree with detractors of cryptocurrency and all their associated technologies. There’s a lot to criticise: Majority of proclamations are utopian, mostly exaggerated because they lack nuance and a thorough understanding of the technology’s constraints at different levels of the stack. Majority of proponents…

What’s in a name? — Today, we turn 4 years old. I find it particularly poetic that our birthday coincides with the Nigerian Independence Day, for multiple reasons, but I digress. For the past 3 years, we’ve been called Buycoins. We think it’s a great name, but recently, we’ve been feeling like it doesn’t do…

At Buycoins, we don’t have “loyalty” to any particular technology stack. We think that technical decisions should be made based on goals & constraints. Goals — what are we trying to achieve? Generally, the answer to the first question is: We’d like to be able to get a new experience to our users as fast as possible so…

On the 5th of February 2021 the Central Bank of Nigeria circulated a letter to all Deposit Money Banks (DMBs), Non-Bank Financial Institutions (NBFs), and Other Financial Institutions (OFIs) in Nigeria. The letter, in summary, prohibited these institutions from working with cryptocurrency exchanges. What does this mean for BuyCoins? We no longer have any accounts or…

Our mission has always been to usher truly borderless exchange of value across the African continent and beyond. We’ve always been aware that this mission is a complex, multistage marathon and in 2020 we took some important strides that we’re admittedly proud of – not because we’ve achieved our mission…

Sometimes I think about those interviews where Elon Musk is asked about whether or not he thinks we’re in a simulation à la The Matrix. The question is somewhat nuts (like a lot of super broad, unanswered science questions) because it’s not necessarily straightforward to describe what being in a…

Not (just) Africa — There are a lot of very serious, seemingly insurmountable problems in Africa. I live in Nigeria, a place that’s now considered as the poverty capital of the world. The thing I find the most ridiculous about that assertion makes the situation feel even bleaker — we have no idea how…

A month ago, I wrote an article about a dApp game that someone anonymous built on top of NGNT. A good amount of people responded to me (on Twitter) that it all sounds very interesting on the surface, but they don’t really understand what a dApp (decentralised application) is and…