Beam Africa: 2019 Highlights & Achievements. 2020 is Going to be Epic!
2019 was a terrific year for the Mimblewimble implemented confidential cryptocurrency — Beam. Since the announcement of the project’s mainnet, on the 4th day of January 2019, Beam has been growing ever since from strength to strength. The Mimblewimble protocol held strong promise in solving Bitcoin’s privacy constraint on which a decentralized, scalable privacy token can be built.
Although Beam is still a relatively young project, one can without a doubt say Beam is regarded as one of the leading privacy coins in the crypto world, and it’s only a matter of time before it becomes “The Go-To Privacy Token”.
A lot happened within the space of that one year since Beam launched. Beam’s development team deployed user-friendly wallets for both desktop and mobile on all major platforms, along with many updates and improvements. New features are periodically added to improve user experience, while bug fixes happen periodically all to make the Beam wallet user-friendly, and the best-in-class privacy coin.
Ambassadors Working Behind the Scenes
Behind the tech development scenes, lies other important elements of the Beam framework, that complement one another. An example is the Beam Ambassador program. Beam ambassadors are tasked with the footwork of generating awareness for Beam in various corners all over the world. The Beam ambassadors support the community both online and offline, playing an important role in promoting the project.
Since it’s inception, the ambassador program has gone through several numbers of changes and improvements, one of the most notable last year was a change in leadership within the ambassador community. It was an amazing feat when one of Beam’s founding ambassadors in the person of Angus Sullivan took over the leadership of the Beam ambassador program.
Beam Africa Was Born!
Angus together with Beam’s CMO, Beni Issembert, lay the blueprints for the Beam Africa initiative. On 16th September 2019, Beam Africa was formed. The idea and strategy were laid out by Mr Beni, while myself and Angus were tasked with strategy implementation. The first order of business was to recruit talented ambassadors across the face of Africa who will help us achieve our goals.
We were able to attract a team of talented young Africans who were a perfect fit, and over the next few months, the Beam Africa team have been involved with several promotional activities in various parts of the region.
The First Official Beam Africa Movement
We flew the Beam Africa flag at week-long dual tech events that took place in Port Harcourt. We started building the Beam Africa community from the Garden city of Port Harcourt. We have Wisdom Augustine, currently a final year student of Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, where he serves as an ambassador for Beam.
The Startup Port Harcourt Week, and the Edge Conference, both took place within the same period, the last week of October. Both events were successful, as they both attracted tech thought leaders within the region, some of which we had the opportunity to speak to about Beam, who eventually joined our WhatsApp community.
The trip served several purposes, among which were for networking and connecting with members of the tech ecosystem, onboarding interested persons to the Beam communities, content creation, and strategic partnership. Also, I got featured in an interview with Okechukwu Matthew during an episode of his dialogue series. So, it’s safe to say the trip to the Garden City of Port Harcourt was a success for Beam Africa and the Beam global community.
Other Community Building Activities
There were other opportunities to represent Beam at smaller meetups, one of such was the Divi Nigeria meetup that held in November, around Ikeja axis of Mainland, Lagos. It was an intimate event which made Networking and promotion quite easy. We seized this opportunity to grow the Beam Africa community on both WhatsApp and Telegram communities.
However, the highlight of November was the AMA session with Beam’s CEO, Alexander Zaidelson, and the Binance Nigeria community. The AMA held on the Binance Nigeria Telegram channel, and it was a huge success. You can find the transcript of the entire AMA session here, which includes all the questions asked by both the interviewer and members of the Nigerian Binance community members. Participants of the AMA were delighted about the responses, as well as the gift prizes. The AMA session was yet another amazing promotional effort done well.
Events in Other African Regions
We had Obinna Nwankwo, our ambassador based in Cotonou, Benin-Republic represent Beam at a local event where the Beam logo made it to the backdrop. Obinna is a tech entrepreneur and has been helping the project gain popularity within the region.
Some time ago, he was on the radio to talk about the enabling power of technology, and he made mention of Beam, he also went at length to explain how Beam can help people in the region escape some of the governments double-dealings.
We also, have Wisdom Augustine (Butterbee) who represented Beam at the Umuahia Blockchain Conference a meet-up geared towards educating the student’s community in the commercial city of Abia state.
Being one of the invited speakers, he made an impressive presentation about the basics of blockchain and cryptocurrency. Since a number of the audience are new to cryptocurrency, Wisdom helped the audience understand the difference between a blockchain and a database. He gradually built on that knowledge to explain cryptocurrencies, their importance and the need for the adoption in African communities.
Lastly, he introduced the need for on-chain privacy and transactional confidentiality and why Beam is the best solution for Africans.
More Lagos 3rd-Party Events
Lagos, Nigeria is currently Beam’s stronghold in Africa, a vast majority of members of the various cryptocurrency communities are very much aware of Beam, and its value proposition. That is simply because of our activities within the region for the past year and a half. On the 5th of December, myself and the Lagos Beam Ambassador Niran, attended the Art of Technology event, where we connected with members of the Lagos tech ecosystem.
We were also present at the Telos4Africa Meetup which turned out to be of great impact to the community. I was part of a panel discussion, that looked at success in the African crypto space. After the event, I was also granted an interview with Simple Tv where I talked about Beam’s goal in African to ensure financial sovereignty.
Immediately after the Telos4Africa event, we had to make a quick dash to the other side of town — Lagos Island for Quidax (a local crypto exchange) Meet and Chill event.
It was sort of the exchange’s annual general meeting, the only difference is, the event was informal. The event took place at Workstation, the ambience was right, and the conversation was great.
The goal is to have further conversations on how we can have Beam listed on their exchange, to make Beam accessible to locals who aren’t familiar with cryptocurrency.
The last bit of business that had to be taken care of with regards 3rd party events, was the Uptrennd Naija Meetup that was organized by members of the Nigerian chapter of the Uptrennd platform. I was one of the invited speakers, during the event I engaged audience about Beam and it’s use cases, and what makes Beam unique.
A vast number of participants downloaded the Beam wallet.
…Incoming 2020
The year is already looking promising, several juicy tech updates are coming up, as well as other exciting news within the Beam communities.
