bloXmove tech debate #6: CELO and Nigeria

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bloXmove

5 min readSep 21, 2022

Two weeks ago, we held our 6th tech debate and focused on the bloXmove Nigeria project. Our Co-Founders Harry Behrens and Sophia Rödiger were joined by TJ and Dayon Elings from the bloXmoveNG team and special guest Aliu who’s the project lead for Celo Nigeria. The panel discussed not only the current status of bloXmove’s market entry but also the advantages and risks the Nigerian market holds and answered questions from the community and live audience. We would like to reward the engagement and interest of our community, so we selected a winner with the most original question: Thanks to Herwanda P. for joining and asking your quality questions!

If you are new to the bloXmove Nigeria project take a look at our introduction article or the bloXmove Nigeria website to get the full picture of this business. In this article, we will provide a recap and summary of our latest tech debate. If you want to listen to the full record of this twitter space session, click here.

Why did bloXmove choose to enter the Nigerian market?

CTO Harry Behrens: “We first got interested in the Nigerian market because of our existing BLXM community. When we discovered that a lot of our community members are from Nigeria and show real interest and enthusiasm for new digital technologies we followed this ‘community pull’ and realized that the country is very advanced when it comes to crypto adoption and acceptance. That’s when we started to look for business opportunities.”

Initially stirred by our very own community we quickly realized the great potential the Nigerian market holds for our Mobility Blockchain Platform. Not only is the population already experienced with crypto (about 35% have already used cryptocurrency) but also generally interested and open to new digital and technological trends which both our local team and Aliu from CELO Nigeria could confirm. This offers an easy market entry and a great market potential for bloXmove as our platform runs on BLXM tokens. In addition Nigeria is also already one of the largest mobility markets in Africa and expected to grow further in the coming years.

Additional positive indicators supporting the decision to launch in Nigeria, are:

The Nigerian mobility market is highly fragmented,
a lot of the population lives in urban areas and
more and more people own a smartphone.

What problem does bloXmove solve in Nigeria?

As our project lead for bloXmoveNG Dayon explained, our Mobility Blockchain Platform (MBP) offers an app solution that bundles transport options and connects mobility providers so the end user can benefit from a “one-app, one-ticket” solution.
On the other hand there are great advantages for the mobility providers to join the platform as we offer an immense reduction of fees and commission in comparison to other aggregators in the area such as Uber or taxi companies.
Drivers can onboard themselves onto our platform using automated and standardized processes.

bloXmove.NG will be launched on CELO

Our collaboration with CELO and the integration of the CELO Valora wallet ecosystem to handle financial and identification processes offers a lot of benefits. Multiple payment options are included and users as well as providers can conduct their transaction in FIAT (Naira, US-Dollar) as well as crypto (BLXM). As Aliu highlighted this is a great fit for the Nigerian market, because a lot of people will be able to handle these transactions using their digital wallet. The Valora wallet will be at the heart of the ecosystem and because they already have a great community in many African countries as well as trust in their stable coin we are grateful for this collaboration and eager to see the completed app in action.

What are possible risks the team faces?

The whole panel agreed that the greatest risk we face with this solution is governmental regulations and legislation concerning the use of cryptocurrencies. Currently the team is making sure that the project is covered on all sides and bloXmove CTO Harry took a spin on this view with his experience in the European market. In comparison to Nigeria the European and US regulations for crypto are much stricter and we face a lot more hurdles when it comes to integrating crypto transactions into everyday solutions. That’s why one could also argue that we are minimizing the risks by choosing a market such as Nigeria which is very open and fast for the implementation of new technology — makes sense when you look at it from Harry’s point of view right?

What is the current status and next steps for the project?

Growing the team: we are looking to expand our local team and hire new bloXmovers to support with business development, legal work and marketing
Onboarding business partners: in the next weeks the team will start to onboard first mobility providers and drivers. Right now a lot of promising talks and pitches are happening and we are looking forward to closing some deals soon and start a pilot project with the first business partners.
Finalizing the tech: the local team as well as the CELO team are working on the last details before the app can go into beta testing in the next month. The Go Live is planned before the end of this year.

Stay tuned, especially the beta testing will be the next important step where we need you — the BLXM community — to engage, to explore and to get your valuable feedback. Are you curious what else is on our roadmap for this year? Keep an eye on our announcement channel as we will share a tech roadmap update for quarter 3 very soon!