Africa Could Now Be Mining Coins With Their Smartphones
The rich and plentiful lands of Savannah, has always attracted multinational corporations, globally, to rush for dominance in the region. And not surprisingly, this beautiful continent of Africa has never failed to deliver. With the outreach of capitalism, the African nationals have lost trust in the central banks that never safe guarded their interests, or the economy. This lack of faith in traditional financial institution has given birth to an acceptance of crypto-currency.
People rushed towards Africa with payments technology like mobile wallets, and creating businesses on these novel, frontier technologies like blockchain. We had earlier posted about how ad-based revenue is challenged by the blockchain. Blockchains stand challenging as it went out of hand for the governmental regulatories to restrict the invisible, inaccessible money and an unbreakable system. In a press conference,
The Central Bank of Nigeria stated: “We cannot control, or own blockchain. We don’t own it”.
Now, Africa sees cryptocurrency as a means to escape the quasi-colonial state rule, and to democratize the economy. Simultaneous developments that are happening in Africa aids this cause. According to the recent reports, smartphone penetration is at its peak, and this has further widened the opportunity to implement blockchain technologies that can empower every citizen.
Why the Lock In on Africa?
The financial revolution of 2017, was faced with immediate resistance from some national banking institutions that saw the blockchain as a threat. Some have banned it, while others welcome it’s possibilities. Africa welcomed this new and independent economy seeking to cure rampant inflation. Crypto and Blockchain companies rushed to bank the under-banked with initiatives like BitPesa, and an attempt to bring stability to financially under-regulated regions, around the globe. More specifically, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Africa’s political instability and the unaffordable banking rates with traditional institutions, have lead people to not trust in banks.
Therefore, events are unravelling in Africa, to mark the deemed rapid development that is rising. Economic stability and financial inclusion in a global ecosystem is substantial for the nation. Where else would, a decentralised approach like that of crypto-currencies and, moat competition survive like that for the nation that favors security over risk? Yet, the investment options for the people of a developing and dynamic continent like Africa are slim. In this context:
Africa, is like a fine bottle of unopened wine.
What Sector is Thriving in Africa and Breaking Down the Figures
The Global Findex Database established that as of 2017, 1.7 Billion adults around the World, have no bank account. Around sixty percent / 700 million, adults in Africa are unbanked. That means that there is as much dormant opportunity to their livelihood as well as for institutions to fuel the economy.
The figures are contradictory, in the case of mobile phone connections, a.k.a the smartphone penetration. There is an exponential rise in this sector, in those developing regions that do not know banking or, those who don’t trust banking.
When development is underway and change is oncoming, tensions and insecurities will be a constant. Africa is on that path. Education and career is encouraged by the new governments that impose restrictions on social media and other channels of distraction. Technological advancements can aid the developments in a huge way, as can be seen from recent trends in the region. These very same reason leads to the unprecedented success with telecommunications and, money transfer with SMS facilities.
“This opens up a bag full of opportunities for those institutions to come to the aid of the scores of people who will better cope with a decentralised banking mechanism, or simply put, the blockchain.”
As of now, Africa is taking up the use of mobile phones for internet access, making it the primary device to use mobile wallet money, and payments accounts. The telecommunications industry are already exploiting the wide opportunity in Africa, and now it is high time for crypto-currency to take the weight off of age-old transaction options, like M-Pesa. Interestingly, many experts do not see how services like these, can withstand better technology innovations.
Ovum, a research firm based in London, evaluated that smartphone penetration is predicted to exceed over 900 million by 2021. And, the phone usages are set to increase at 52.9%, year by year.
An unbanked population, and a farm of hundreds of millions of smartphones. Knock, Knock!
Opening the Doorways for Raven
Raven is a distributed and decentralized protocol for deep learning training so that users online can contribute to training an AI system via their desktop/laptop or a smartphone and get incentivized in return. Read more here.
High smartphone penetration and unbanked population lights up the path for Raven and its peers. Something like Raven, where people can utilize their existing resources like a smartphone or a laptop to build a sustainable income for themselves and their families. And more than anything, bringing in more people to join the blockchain revolution, and with them growing the local, and global economy.
Contributing, and earning through Raven will be as simple as opening a website on the browser. Users will not have to install any nasty application which sucks up on their data, nor have to buy a high-end system to mine Raven tokens. Anyone, and repeat, anyone can contribute.
Sounds very easy. And it certainly is, for the contributors; ’cause we at Raven are going miles and miles to make it that easy for you. Let’s explore how we make this possible:
Exploring Partnerships
We want to come and build business with the companies in Africa. Say someone like Nairaland.com who garners to multiple people in Nigeria and provides a platform to them to discuss what’s happening in their life and around them. Ads being one of major revenue sources, will be leaving companies like them thin on options. We on the other hand can open other avenues for a sustainable revenue by joining hands and working together. A situation where, the readers/viewers/users of a website can help that website’s content creator/owner, by lending their compute resources in return for incentives and consumption of the website content, that they love. We have written more in detail, here.
Supporting AI community in Africa
We really would love to come together with the rising startup ecosystem in Africa. Startups in Africa are one of the most active startups in adopting frontier technologies like Blockchain and AI to solve local problems. Raven is pleased to extend its hand to partner with Ecosystem builders, to provide cheap infrastructure to the startups in Africa and also, to provide technical mentorship for them to be able to exploit the potential of AI to invent and discover solutions to the problems which seems unsolvable due to its sheer size.
A majority of the human crowd are still oblivious of the extensive struggle that a small section of the AI community are facing, to make AI an easy and accessible affair for all. This stems from the realisation that AI is here and will become part of our lives in ways that we may not yet fathom. Regular AI companies or companies seeking to implement AI into their systems strive to bring about new ways to improve life with AI are finding themselves at a crippled stage to fully explore their ideas. Raven aims to help such set of individuals and companies to fully exploit the potential of AI, economically.
If you want to join us in this mission, come talk to us in our Telegram group. Over a thousand people are waiting their to hear your views.
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Looking forward to talking to you guys.
