In this time of global economic reset it is crucial to give billions of unbanked people the ability to use digital currency and payment systems. KamPay will address this challenge using lotteries to incentivize users in Africa to get digital wallets.
Recent Developments
KamPay successfully executed an IDO on BSCstarter and was listed on PancakeSwap on 6th June 2021. KamPay’s CEO, Chris Cleverly says about the project’s plans: “We are going to start our program, not just in terms of the corporate activity and the speculation and the investment that people are going to put in behind our coin and our community, but also just getting down on the ground in Africa and actually starting up a program there that we’ve been working on for some time, fully funded”.
The KamPay team is developing the KamPay wallet for the unbanked. The wallet will be specialized for Binance Coin, but also obviously Ether to support the KamPay Coin token. Initially, the wallet will be for use in Africa as a payment gateway and a way in which KamPay will be able to distribute products as part of the launch.
Project Background and Economic Conditions in Africa
KamPay wants to find a solution for banking the unbanked in Africa and allowing them to have the fungibility of currency that doesn’t exist for them.
KamPay’s initial push is to create a payment gateway that’s useful for everyone in Africa, including farmers, merchants, government officials and everyday users. The African continent has great potential with population expected to double in coming decades (up to 2.5 billion people) and GDP growth anticipated to increase by 1,000% to 2,000%.
The project started from a visit to a blockchain conference in Santa Monica in late 2017. The KamPay team recognised the potential of giving credit and microfinance to the unbanked in Africa and the project was born.
There are two key issues that KamPay concentrates on. First is the very limited ability for intracontinental trade between the 53 African countries. Each country has its own currency that cannot be used anywhere else, and there is a second problem in the very high commission rates for inter-state money transfers between currencies. Interest rates at the moment are about 20% in Africa, and are much, much higher the poorer you are. It doesn’t matter whether you’re holding rand, kwacha, leones, naira or another currency… you can’t take it out of the country without paying those 20% fees. It’s a huge problem that’s been solved on other continents (the Euro, for example), but Africa still has this issue. KamPay fees will be much lower and the token will be usable across borders.
The second issue the KamPay team is addressing is helping farmers. The launch will put a proper mix of cash crops and crops that people can eat into the hands of the farming community, creating a sustainable and circular economy in which all the parties and participants do very well. KamPay will create a special blockchain version of vouchers for farmers to get funds before the harvest.
What is KamPay
KamPay is a blockchain-based innovative financial platform. It is at the same time a payment system, a wallet and a lottery. The wallet itself will be a crypto wallet, but will combine with ZymPay, the fiat payment gateway that presently exists between South Africa and Zimbabwe. KamPay is going to combine those to facilitate proper, easy crypto-to-fiat exchanges and encourage simple onboarding with fiat, whether it be Zimbabwe dollars or U.S. dollars. At the same time, the wallet will include messaging, so it will work like an encrypted blockchain messenger.
KamPay is also a lottery operating partner. The main onboarding model is to use lottery tokens. There’s nothing else that can get people to sign up to something like lotteries can, and a lottery is a powerful engagement channel. As Chris Cleverly explains, “The first premise is that, you know, you get into KamPay, you get into the lottery. There’s a chance for you to win a lot of money. The money will also be made and will also go into social causes, which you’ll be able to see and benefit from, community policies which will affect you in your community.”
To set up the lottery, KamPay has acquired all the appropriate documentation — lottery licenses, state licenses, registered and regulated licenses — in 7 African countries, where the project will be launched.
The wallet will eventually have a DeFi and microfinance solution, which will allow outside participants to participate. It also includes the insurance elements, the Oracle elements, the need for DeFi and the yield elements to bring in the yield farmers and the yield players and the people who are just looking for a good position on loaning out their tokens.
KamPay offers its users and merchants lower fees than traditional payment systems (Visa, WorldPay) and makes automatic and secure funds transfers by smart contracts. At the same time, it helps tax calculations for governments.
Team
KamPay’s CEO, Chris Cleverly has been working in Zimbabwe and in southern Africa. Together with social organizations, he plans to attract the farming community. He is the founder of the law firm Trafalgar Chambers, described by the Evening Standard as ‘one of Britain’s most diverse and coolest chambers’, and has founded and sold numerous listed and unlisted companies. Chris is an advisor on African and African development issues in the UK and for a number of African governments.
Raymond Sze, co-founder of the project, has an extensive background in online gaming with multiple multinational gaming companies and has extensive on the ground experience in Africa having spent over 10years on the continent in over 20 countries.
Advisors include local entrepreneur and philanthropist Prince Hassan Kimbugwe of Uganda and CEO of Keemoji, policymaker and futurist Alex Lightman.
Expanding the Number of Crypto Users
Bitcoin is very popular in Africa. Nigeria is now the world’s second largest trader in Bitcoin, just behind America and ahead of Russia.
That’s why Bitcoin in Zimbabwe and Nigeria has reached such high prices — often with a 30% premium on the global price. With such popularity and importance as a store of value, Bitcoin obviously has a very important role to play in Africa and will be offered in the KamPay wallet.
The main difference between KamPay and BTC is that KamPay is a BSC token, with cheaper and faster transactions-per-second. Users will have the ability to buy and earn crypto by performing tasks using the KamPay wallet — on both desktop and mobile apps.
Engaging the Community with Pilot Projects in Seven Countries
KamPay plans to launch in Cameroon, Ghana, Chad, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The initial pilots will be in Cameroon and in Zimbabwe. The KamPay pilot will start with an initial quarter of a million, loaning out money to farmers through the wallet.
KamPay will then purchase inputs, which will be fertilizer, seeds and so on, which the farmers will use to grow produce for consumption and sale. According to Chris, the first cycle of the launch will run for three or four months, during which time the team will test growth, input purchases, sales and the distribution of profits to the farmers, KamPay and other participants — and the ability to then start it all again.
According to KamPay’s calculations there are about million farmers in Zimbabwe and a further 10 million across southern Africa. They will start with an initial pilot of 50,000 farmers using smartphones.
African and Global Roadmap
KamPay could be the gateway for providing financial inclusion, providing language functions, providing fiat to crypto (in local currencies) and supporting those functions, as well as supporting the tokenization of currencies. That opens doors to credit and remittance across the continent and outside of the continent to anyone interested in supporting Africa and African growth.
As African growth is going to be the world’s fastest growth, KamPay can be a currency available to everyone and, because of its unique status in providing good fortune and goodwill, it has the opportunity to be the currency for all of the African continent.
This pilot means KamPay will be in the hands of 50,000 people within three months. The project will expand to three different countries, maybe four, in that same period. And in each of those countries, it could easily be in the hands of over 250,000 people. So by this time next year, it may be a wallet used by at least a million Africans.
The KamPay team has already received interest from interested parties across Africa, but are focusing on the MVP launch and beta test pilot in Zimbabwe and Cameroon before scaling up further. The team is also looking for partners and partnerships outside Africa that can help with expansion.
AUTHOR — ALEX LIGHTMAN
Alex Lightman is a Blockchain industry entrepreneur, advisor,
writer and keynote speaker known globally. He is the founder of
Token Communities Ltd., chairman of NextHash and Blockchain
Commodities Exchange, and an advisor to 20+ companies on
coin/token offerings. He is also a co-founder and one of the
seven steering committee members of the Digital Asset Trade
Association (DATA), wrote the membership benefits, and raised
the first outside funds.
