Introducing Bitkoin Africa
Problem
It’s quite difficult to buy and/or sell BTC (or other cryptocurrencies) in Africa. Currently, in some countries, bitcoin exchanges exist but they don’t provide the best possible experience with little or no barrier to entry. Card payments or direct bank payments aren’t possible which are inconvenient on their own but they lead to other issues:
- For P2P exchanges, there’s a need to trust the individual seller/buyer.
- Trades/transactions aren’t instant.
- There’s a higher chance of fraud and even when the exchange resolves this, it often takes time.
- P2P exchanges often require that users are online when trades are in progress.
Furthermore, moving money (both fiat and cryptocurrency) across borders is still unnecessarily difficult and expensive.
Solution
By combining the core functionality of a cryptocurrency exchange with indigenous payment processing solutions, it’s possible to create an escrow service that:
- Eliminates the need for trusting individual sellers/buyers.
- Make really fast purchases and remittances possible.
- Mitigate fraud.
- Makes it needless for users to be online during an ongoing trade.
Furthermore, by creating a system where fiat and cryptocurrencies are being exchanged, it provides a framework upon which a truly fast, cheap service for moving money (in all forms) across borders can be built.
For the past four months, an incredible team and I have been working on the first version of this solution and yesterday (1st October 2017), we were finally able to share it with you; https://bitkoin.africa
The potential benefits of cryptocurrency (and it’s underlying technology) are too glaring to be ignored and I think, making it easy to buy and sell is part of the first steps to making sure that the entire continent doesn’t lag behind in this new era.
