BuyCoins: Reflecting on 2020
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 (we’re very far from that) but because we feel like we now have a decent foundation upon which we can build.
Stats
- In 2020, users bought and sold a total of $141,395,605.75 of cryptocurrency across all products (Instant, P2P etc).
- That’s 5 times more than last year’s trade volume (~$28m).
- There were 16,768 Actual Trading Users.
- These are unique users that actually participated in a trade (either directly or indirectly) in 2020. This number doesn’t include any user that might have participated in other activity (deposit, withdraw, coinlock etc) but didn’t end up buying or selling.
- The Actual Trading Users number is ~12 times more than it was in 2019 (1400).
Beyond The Exchange
Our plan has always been beyond just building a cryptocurrency exchange. We strongly believe that the mission of using cryptocurrency to facilitate the financially connected African requires more than an on/off fiat-crypto ramp.
This isn’t to diminish the importance of the exchange – far from it. Building an exchange experience that fulfils the need of different kinds of traders (retail, institutional, pro traders) is a core building block with which we can do some interesting things.
After roughly 3 years, we became able to create products that benefit people beyond traders and the crypto savvy. We see it as a responsibility to provide experiences that abstract the complexity of crypto from the end user. It is, for us, a really important part of facilitating widespread adoption.
In 2020, we launched two products to begin this phase of our journey.
Sendcash
Sendcash lets anybody, anywhere in the world send money to Nigeria & Ghana using Bitcoin [or USDC] at better rates than you can find anywhere else. We launched Sendcash in April and since then users from all over the world have sent $6,682,529.78 to 3,026 recipient bank accounts.
With Sendcash, recipients don’t need to interface with cryptocurrency at all. All they get is Naira or GHS in their bank accounts. Senders can complete a transfer using familiar payment tools/methods like Cash App, bank cards & Apple Pay.
getcards
getcards is the simplest way to get giftcards for 3000+ international stores and digital services.
Paying for international goods and services from Nigeria has always been extremely difficult [mostly] due to capital controls. getcards is our attempt at helping solve that problem.
With a simple Naira bank transfer, Nigerians can now:
- Pay for Spotify, PSN, Xbox Live, Steam etc
- Buy apps & subscriptions via the App Store or Play Store
- Shop on ASOS, Sephora, Amazon, Best Buy and thousands more.
- Also, gifts.
This enables much more than just end user consumption. There are many crafts that require the ability to make purchases like this – personal shoppers, interior designers & architects, make up artists etc.
getcards [beta] launched on the 18th of December (slightly over two weeks ago). Our users have bought $11,500 (NGN 5.5m) worth of giftcards since then.
Like Sendcash, getcards does some crypto stuff behind the scenes. Using getcards requires zero crypto knowledge & interaction.
People
In 2020, we more than doubled the size of the team, bringing up the headcount from 10 to 22.
This was admittedly scary to do, especially as the pandemic forced us to move from being partially on-site to fully remote. As such, there are some teammates I’ve never met in person! In spite of this, we managed to transition relatively easily as our work culture was very amenable to working remotely.
I’m very proud of the team we’ve been able to form. Everybody embodies the company culture — autonomy, communication, and a laser focus on making the lives of users easier.
What’s next?
We plan to spend a good chunk of early 2021 fleshing out Sendcash and getcards while preserving the simple, fast, no-sign-up-necessary experiences that our users love.
We’re also going to make dramatic changes to the user experience of the exchange [products]. Over the past two years, BuyCoins has evolved into something that’s much more robust than what we initially designed. We think it is time for that growth to be reflected in how our users interact with the product.
2021 is also the year of continued expansion across the continent [and maybe even beyond].
As always for us — it’s Day 1!
