Africa First
3 Reasons why Africa will LEAD the Crypto Revolution
I am a firm believer that decentralized networks will win and disruptive token economies will upend every industry vertical in our lives — that the future of economics will be user-centric and equitable — and that in some cases, such value will be value enough. I just think it will take a decade in the developed world, and will happen in the developing world first, particularly in Africa.
Reason 1: Value of Product & Value of Money
I believe that in the near future, users will be the owners and main profit earners of the products and companies they use.
For example, why use Google Drive, Dropbox or Apple — whether free or by paying a small $1 monthly fee — when you can get paid to share your data storage and use those same tokens for your own storage needs?
Filecoin, a decentralized storage network that raised $257 Million in a highly publicized token sale does just that. This is of course true for so many centralized systems and industry verticals — why use facebook when you could use the ‘peoples’ decentralized facebook that would pay you annually for the revenue made from your data footprint — why use Uber when you could be a co-owner of the peoples’ Uber, etc.
Lets use Filecoin and data storage as a walk-through example of why these models will work in Africa first and places like the USA second.
Value of the Product
Before the mass market will use a decentralized platform, its value must match the value of existing centralized platforms. For a longer read on this point, check out a great post by Chris Dixon.
In the developed world, these new models have to compete against the network effects of huge established players before having any value for an average consumer. Why take the time to earn filecoin tokens when google drive is free and a click away?
In the developing world, there are no incumbents to match pound for pound. For the most part, it is an evergreen playing field and blank canvas, hence the definition of developing. There isn’t must infrastructure, digital or otherwise, so building things from the ground up is just so much easier, AND, they can be built the right way directly off the bat. For more on this leapfrog potential, read Vinay Gupta’s great post from 2017.
But this isn’t just ‘leapfrogging’, which implies skipping a step to ‘catch up’, as Africa did with mobile phones in lieu of landlines.
This is LEAPING FORWARD — leading the way in the crypto-economic future that is inevitable. And this time around, it will be AFRICA FIRST.
Value of Money
In filecoin, you are earning in, or getting tokens by helping to propagate the decentralized network. Lets say I make enough filecoin in a year that is worth $12, or $1 a month. To a developed world consumer, this is truly peanuts.
To a person in the developing world making $80 to $120 a month, $1 matters. It is a much more rich incentive relative to their local income and will thus incentivize faster adoption.
In short, they can ADOPT TODAY, not in 5 to 10 years.
Reason 2: An inherent mistrust of centralized financial parties
Places like Ghana have to deal with the most raw pain-point: the repeated insolvency of major and minor financial institutions.
As recently as a few days ago on March 20th, 2018, the Bank of Ghana (Ghana’s Central Bank, aka the BoG) had to take over a MAJOR BANK, UniBank.
There are also investment scams, such as this one (also from March 20th!) that occur and dupe people out of their savings, when all the people want is fair access to capital and new wealth creation opportunities (did somebody say DAOs? More on that in a later post…).
Reason 3: Willing adopters of digital money through Mobile Money
Mobile Money is the main reason why I don’t believe Latin America or South East Asia will lead this revolution first. I think they will adopt this next — as they share the same pains of highly inadequate financial access and strong communal and entrepreneurial behaviors — but not first.
And that is because some African’s have been using Mobile Money for nearly 10 years — way ahead of the curve!
To illustrate this point — alot of our users at Atlas Money are elderly women. My grandmas — who I love to death — can barely use their phones, and are scared by most things ‘digital’, i.e. online banking. But in several nations in Africa the opposite is true — this same age population is embracing digital currency, and it is all the more true the younger one gets.
They are already aware that money on my phone is more safe and secure than money anywhere else.
There is also the notion of ‘human ATMs’, or Agents, that act as mediums of exchange in and out of digital cash. They number in the tens of thousands in most African nations and are agnostic to the mobile wallet provider they work with. In fact, no nation outside of Kenya has a mobile wallet provider with a stranglehold on the market — but they all charge astronomical fees to send money between users while paying Agents just enough to prevent industry wide strikes. Talk about ripe for disruption.
can you see what we see?
When you couple these 3 reasons, with the strong communal networks already in place (for a refresher read this past ACX post), and the opportunity to meet the full development needs of a continent full of entrepreneurial people — an opportunity to build new things, create new wealth and value and have it be equitably shared — well… to us at Access, it’s a no brainer.
The only question that remains is, can you see what we see? Do you see the opportunity to invest in a fast growing economic population and allow them to partake in our investment opportunities; aka financial access to each other? Do you see the opportunity for us to create, build and use wholly new decentralized vehicles together that will yield untold new value, such as decentralized insurance companies, banks, schools, hospitals, roads…?
DO YOU SEE THE POTENTIAL?!
If you do, then join the movement, join our community, and become part of the global financial family. Because it is up to us to take this new technology and empower each other to build a better world. If you think the incumbents will, no matter how ‘well-intentioned’, well, then I guess you don’t see what we see…
Stay Tuned — The Best is Yet to Come,
The Access Family
