The Growing Role of Crypto in the Liberation of Africa | Dayo Adeosun - SudoCat

[Music] um and I am currently the founder and CEO of pseudoat which is a gaming and trading platform which allows you to play trade earn um where you can play games and earn money and then eventually trade that today I'll be speaking on crypto in Africa so I I'm based in New York City and Legos Nigeria that's where I spend most of my time and I've built a crypto project built on speculation before and I've also built projects um built on utility and I think Africa serves as the number one place for building products that have utility in crypto and then I think in the US you have you know is probably the best place to build speculation based crypto products so I believe Africa is the future of web 3 because Africa is where most of the utility based crypto applications are coming from um it's not about speculation it's really about survival you know whether it's in Nigeria um Tanzania Uganda Congo uh South Africa there are many builders in Africa who are building in crypto to survive so the the main use cases in Africa AFA for crypto are first I would say peer-to-peer payments and peer-to-peer uh swapping and just payments so when I set up my binance account in Africa I use WhatsApp to purchase usdt and when I use WhatsApp to purchase from using binance in Africa I realize the process of buying crypto in somewhere like Legos Nigeria is totally different than buying crypto in New York City where you can just get a coinbase account buy usdc start swapping immediately you have to work with third-party resellers to essentially find the price the amount the supply of a token you want through a WhatsApp or messaging based product in Africa and most places in Africa today secondly remittances remittances are one of the number one use cases so a lot of Nigerians a lot of Africans they get money they work in the US they work in foreign lands and they send money back to their mom their grandparents there's their little brother the little sister and they do that through many different products and most of those products are charging them 10% 8% on transaction fees to send money back home crypto allows you to do it for 1% you can send Bitcoin back home you can send usdc back home eth back home and the transaction fees are a lot less you have Bitcoin so Africa is serving as one of the number one places for Bitcoin because there is a huge energy problem um where over 300 million people don't necessarily have energy and electricity and so Bitcoin is becoming a solution to earn using you to use your electricity to earn Bitcoin to eventually fund or supply energy and electricity to local communities Villages Etc and so the energy opportunity and the Bitcoin opportunity are best sought out in Africa and that's that's why Jack dorsy was just in uh Kenya for Bitcoin Kenya because a lot of the new novel Innovations for Bitcoin are going to come from using excess energy to power Villages and communities in Africa savings and stable coins so a lot of people talk about stable coins stable coins are the number one business model I guess in crypto Africa is Nigeria specifically is one of the highest users of stablecoin so there's many different apps there's many different Founders um but I would say that stable coins are used as an inflation hedge because there's many African countries that are suffering from double digigit inflation so like 10% 20% I went to middle school in Nigeria and it was 200 naira for $1 and today it is 1,500 naira for $1 that that's the situation for a lot of people um in many different countries in Africa and stable coins is a solution for that along with Bitcoin and purchasing other cryptos there's payments and microloans and and identity so on on the payments front in Africa we're seeing a lot of different ways to do crossb payments so businesso business payments um agriculture based payments a lot of payments that were previously previously just done through cash we're finding ways to get these done through crypto uh rails and then micr loans there's there's a lot of projects a lot of Founders a lot of entrepreneurs in Africa how they fund their businesses today are through microloans they're starting to do this through crypto and then identity so Ethiopia is kind of leading the way in identity but because over 50% of Africans are unbanked identity you know relatively new a lot of people are just coming on to Facebook Instagram these other social applications identity is another huge opportunity in Africa so you know I believe Africa crypto Founders are going to be some of the biggest Founders um leading the world um Elon mus is is an African crypto founder uh there's many other African crypto Founders that I think are going to you know take the World by storm doing a lot of cool projects um and I think uh this is the time to bet on African Founders um I believe we we saw this meme coin created by the Central African Republic okay and we saw the Argentinian meme coin we saw the Trump meme coin I think we are going towards an African coin um and I know there's many nations in Africa thinking of dropping their own token for their country um presidents and and things like that and I think there will be a way to have one African coin to unite the 54 countries it's going to take some time okay uh so the current economic landscape of Africa right now is that there's 350 million adults unbanked um one out of two Africans um are unbanked so these people are not in the current Financial system they don't have a a Chase they don't have a Bank of America they don't have you know they don't have the rails to get onto the credit system the massard V system that uh the US has pioneered there's inflation currency devaluation remittance inefficiencies the amount of real use cases that African Founders are solving for are actually outrageous you know the the the average founder in Africa is working on a stable coin product right now um whether it's WhatsApp stable coin payments telegram stable coin payments you're seeing things where you're going from your local bank account to us or usdc and under one minute um but you know these not all these products are getting the light of day because speculation is is really dominating the the the attention right now so we saw that you know Nigeria um arrested one of the guys at binance and and the US also arrested you know the CEO of binance okay so we think that some of these African countries are going to become the leaders and reg atory Clarity for the entire crypto space um and because a lot of businesses that want to do stable coins or want to do bridging or cross chain transactions have to come to Africa they are trying to figure out regulatory Clarity on who to go to what to partner with which countries in Africa are going to be lenient and right now with Trump's um with Trump in office I think we're going to see a lot of positivity in the regulatory Clarity in Africa uh going forward so I think crypto is the number one Financial tool for African Liberation so a in Africa the first I guess Financial tool that was really used widely was called impesa and impesa was a form of mobile money that essentially gave the venmo founders the idea to do venmo and that idea was that you could use mobile phone minutes to transact with others so there was already ways to essentially use minutes which you could think of as tokens to pay for certain things in Kenya Ethiopia and many other places so we think um the the the tools and the the the ways to get unbanked online have already been solved in Africa now it's about bringing this to crypto rails and not just fintech Solutions uh in Africa so you know like I said earlier you know stable coins are you know a inflation hedge um crypto remittances peer-to-peer transactions um and I think one thing that's really important for Africa going forward is having the confidence to build this new Financial World we're going into Africans directly deal with the products of not being able to um you know you go from Nigeria to Ghana and you might not have the local currency you go from K Shasha to uh uh uh the other Congo right and you might not have the currency and those are like two different countries that are literally separated by a river so Africans have to come together for Africa to make the new rules the new economic rules for the 21st century and I think in this decade um that that's what's happening um so we did a a hackathon three three four weeks ago in Legos Nigeria and we got over 200 applications building different types of nft marketplaces stable coin swap applications bridging tools um nfts and just all types of things and I think what the Hacked showed us was that there's literally untapped potential not just in Africans that are going to consume crypto projects but in Africans that want to build crypto projects and I think we've seen that the community organization around African specifically you know you see Nigerian Twitter you see all these twitters where the some of the strongest communities in crypto are coming from these African communities South Africa has a very strong crypto community and there's going to be ways for the Dows to form where whether it's a investment fund Dow to invest in different projects in Africa or whether it's a hackathon based Dow or whether it's a uh project incubator based Dows there's many ideas that are being explored on ground too many to mention but I think Dows will find their sweet spot in Africa um so just like some some case studies that I've been working on um in my time me me and my brother we run a a family office where we invest in subsaharan uh African companies as well as liquid crypto assets and um we're seeing MasterCard partner with Alx which is a developer Community to build up developers that are building on Stacks blockchain we're seeing flow blockchain come in E Nigeria you know is developing a presence we see salana super team um kind of developing a presence with salana super team Nigeria super team Congo super team around so I think um where we're heading is that in pretty much any country in Africa you can find Innovation that you never even thought was possible whether it's from uh using you know excess energy to earn Bitcoin to um you know using deepin to map the roads that are un you know unmapped um I think there's there's really unlimited opportunity you know Google Maps is not fully mapped in Africa you know starlink is Al also offering a solution as well and so I think most of the web The Innovation to come is the most of the great ideas I'm seeing are in Africa you know me as an investor and founder I'm finding a lot of great projects in Africa um and and what's important is that they're solving real world problems you know problems that are you know sometimes about you know payment delays and payment um contributions and just many types of problems um and then we also see really cool Defi nft and play to random projects as well but uh I think that's closing it up and uh if you want to follow up with me um you guys can follow my Twitter or follow my company's Twitter as well at sudat AI um where I just share thoughts on Africa as well as just scaling gaming and trading to the world thank you guys [Applause]