A few months ago, I once again set foot on the hot land of Africa. The pickup truck sped through the loess, and the sunset outlined the strange yet familiar impression of the African continent. Only by staying out of the matter can we have enough space to take on the role of "world citizens" and think about who I am, what I am doing, or the relationship between the Crypto industry I am engaged in and the world.
After a thorough investigation, we will find that what Crypto can give to underdeveloped African countries is an opportunity to reconnect with the world. From these countries’ belief and determination in Crypto, we can see that they are no longer satisfied with compromising with the old system. Instead of struggling and being dominated in the mud, why not fully embrace Crypto and run towards a bright future?
2049 had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Athena (X: @Athenaweb33) about her faith since she entered Africa and then Crypto. She will continue the entrepreneurial journey of Wello.tech and go deep into Africa to follow her simple faith that few people may understand in the chaotic society.
The following is a tweet from Athena (X: @Athenaweb33), enjoy:
At the end of Token2049, with the in-depth social interaction with some colleagues these days and the negative emotions flying around, the question of "Is the crypto industry over?" came to mind a small incident a few weeks ago:
I have lived in Paris for two years. One day, I was working remotely in a small cafe near my home when I suddenly received a call from Uganda on WeChat. After a mixture of surprise, joy and confusion, I counted on my fingers and realized that it was seven years ago that I left the traditional industry in Africa to join Crypto.
The person who called me was a senior advisor to the Ugandan government. He was on a business trip with the president during the China-Africa Cooperation Forum. During the years when I was rooted in Africa, I worked for state-owned enterprises and the UN international development system to promote Africa's industrialization and inclusive finance. With his help, we worked on projects of various sizes, such as China-Uganda cooperation in attracting investment and promoting women's handicrafts in Uganda, and forged a friendship.
I could actually spend half my life bragging about the years I lived in Africa. There were some great stories, such as chatting and laughing with the President of Senegal at his home, and some near-death experiences, such as my best friend's boyfriend was killed in a terrorist attack in the shopping district in the capital of Kenya that we always went to. Due to a temporary change of flight, we avoided the worst air crash in the history of Ethiopian Airlines, but my high school classmates, my friend's colleagues and several acquaintances within the third-degree network unfortunately lost their lives. But the decision to leave Africa was also resolute and firm.
It all started with an unexpected encounter with Crypto. Interestingly, seven years later, when I sat in a coffee shop and chatted with old and new Crypto friends, stories about Africa were a topic of interest to everyone, as if it was a utopia to escape from the current predicament, a kind of psychological sustenance that romanticized the adventures of foreign lands.
However, I think that these soul-searching questions and answers about the application value of Crypto are actually in those seemingly romantic and ethereal stories.
Transfer of value - where is the money, how to spend it, and where to spend it?
Everyone may know Binance's loud vision: to increase the freedom of money. So, to think about whether the Crypto industry is finished, let's first look at how the global value chain shifted several times in history, what stage of historical development we are in now, and why Binance has such a slogan.
Let’s start with the old “narrative”. There have been three global industrial revolutions in history. The “Steam Revolution” originated from the invention of the steam engine in the UK, which greatly improved productivity and enabled small-scale handicraft textile workshop production to be industrialized on a large scale. In the “Electricity Revolution”, Britain, the United States, Germany and France all achieved breakthroughs in the fields of electricity, chemicals, heavy industry, etc., and the industrial system of the whole Europe was developed and improved. The third revolution is the “Information Revolution” we are familiar with. The development of information technology, computers, electronics industry, automation and other industries has promoted countries such as the United States and Japan to become important participants in the world economy. The “Four Asian Tigers” (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong) also rapidly industrialized in the second half of the 20th century, developed advanced manufacturing and financial industries, and integrated into the world value chain system.
It can be seen that each round of industrial revolution is a change in productivity that has brought about changes in production relations, thereby promoting some countries to use their "comparative advantages" to participate in the world value distribution system. China benefited from the reform and opening up that began in 1978, and learned from the advantages of the rise of Singapore and other Asian tigers. In the developed coastal areas, China built franchised economic zones and industrial parks, took advantage of China's low labor costs, large base, and hardworking "comparative advantages", opened up the market, introduced foreign capital, and developed export-oriented manufacturing from some coastal areas, becoming the "world factory", establishing and consolidating its indispensable position in the world value chain distribution at that time.
The details of these several grand industrial revolutions spanning a century can be written in great detail, which is not included here. It is worth mentioning that each industrial revolution is also a process of wealth redistribution. However, Africa, due to its special historical background of long-term colonization and various complex industrial policies and international political factors, has not been involved in this "cake-sharing" process.
Is Africa really that poor? Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, is the airport with the highest density of private jets in the world. After the exchange launched the local payment channel in Africa, the per capita transaction volume in Africa far exceeded that of European and Asian countries. The rich people in Africa are richer than we generally know and imagine. Because Africa is rich in resources, especially oil and agricultural resources, and relies on the primary industry of direct export of raw materials, the upper class in Africa can have no worries about food and clothing for several lifetimes; ordinary people are forced to only get some fur and food and clothing in the tertiary industry - the service industry. The manufacturing industry of the entire continent is vacant, and the financial industry is monopolized. Due to the lack of infrastructure, the cost of financial services is extremely high, and ordinary people cannot have a bank account or pay for bank transfers. The serious and ridiculous gap between the rich and the poor is the most common class situation in Africa.
During a research project of an international organization that year, the Djibouti government arranged for us to stay at the Kempinski Hotel, which is the most luxurious hotel in Djibouti, a small and impoverished country in East Africa. The price is 300 US dollars a night, which is half a year's income for many locals. I still remember a moment, in this hotel, on a beach lounge chair by the Red Sea, a white businessman smoking a cigar was talking loudly, and the black waiter in front of him was holding a tray, with his back straight, and his white shirt and red vest complemented his black skin. He looked at the fog on the Red Sea in the distance, his eyes full of numbness and confusion.
At that time, we were a group of young elites with degrees in economics, finance, sociology, etc. from the world's top universities. We had to design how and where the aid funds given to Africa by international organizations should be spent, and how to ensure that the money produced results. We had a British girl who had just graduated from Oxford University. When she heard that we were going to stay in a luxury hotel that cost $300 a night, she refused to stay with tears in her eyes. She felt that this was a mockery of her subject. However, when she saw the living conditions of ordinary people, the iron-covered house, which creaked in the 50-degree high temperature, she silently withdrew her insistence.
It was around that time that I decided to give up the job. Although what we did seemed compassionate, we talked a lot about industrial transfer, about developing manufacturing in Africa, integrating into the value chain, letting ordinary people go into factories, and learning about the experience of China and Southeast Asia in making clothes and shoes. I also personally spent a month in a Chinese factory in Senegal, interviewing female workers and watching them produce low-grade Adidas and Nike sweatpants for export to Europe and the United States. But this is too slow. In the entire huge system of traditional "aid", the ones who benefit the most are probably not the African female workers who are "taught how to fish", but the senior clerks who sit in the London office to write papers and do project audits, and us, the elites of international organizations who take business trip funds and stay in $300 hotels. From the data, it can be seen that in the entire chain, up to 70% of the funds are worn out in "proving how and where the money is spent, and generating audit reports and impact reports."
I began to see Blockchain, Crypto, blockchain technology, and the fourth revolution led by artificial intelligence. It has revolutionized currency, Africa, and the lives of the vast majority of poor people.
True decentralization, in the vegetable market of Kampala
The son of the Prime Minister of Uganda founded a Crypto organization a few years ago. Several "second-generation officials" who studied in the UK and the US and tech geeks got together to do a few small projects related to Crypto, such as peer-to-peer transfers of Crypto using mobile phones without smart apps in places without 3G networks. Africans understand Africans better. Most of their locals are using non-smart phones that can only make calls and send text messages. Since many Africans do not have bank accounts and are unwilling to travel across most of the city to find a Western Union or a few banks for transfers and remittances, the locals' remittance method is simple and crude: mobile phones based on USSD technology can directly remit money to friends by sending text messages, and everyone's mobile phone number is their "wallet"/account, and the balance of phone bills is the account balance .
I followed a friend from this organization and personally experienced the smooth "registration, KYC, and transfer" process: I bought a $50 mobile phone from a telecom operator next to the Kampala vegetable market, lined up, and the counter staff had operated the KYC process thousands of times. The whole process was done in 3 minutes. The staff helped me recharge the "phone bill" with cash; there are a large number of fixed and mobile official/unofficial Kiosks (kiosks/service points) in the village. When you want to "withdraw cash", you go to the "villager representative" on duty at the kiosk, send him a text message to transfer money, and he will give you cash. "Recharge" is the opposite process. The whole process is smooth, and it is all point-to-point, there is no third party, and there is no trust issue at all. This product and process are not only in the capital, but have been deeply rolled out in the vast rural areas.
Later, I joined Binance. In the first year, I responded to CZ's vision of "mass adoption" and laid a truly blockchain- and Crypto-based network in Africa. I started with the simplest charity project, and Binance charity came into being. On this world's first completely "transparent" peer-to-peer donation platform, due to the characteristics of blockchain, every Internet spectator can monitor every Crypto donation without going through any third party, and directly reach the wallet address of the Ugandan villagers. The villagers used Crypto to buy potatoes and cabbage from vegetable farmers who accepted crypto, without the intervention of legal currency. When the vegetable farmers needed legal currency, they would regularly exchange Crypto for local legal currency through local exchanges or OTC.
Later, we also issued the world's first (and perhaps the only) "value stablecoin" on Binance Smart Chain (now BNB chain): Pink Care Token. Unlike other stablecoins, Pink Care Token is not linked to any legal currency "price", but to the value of goods: each Pink Care Token is linked to the "value" of a girl's sanitary napkins used in Uganda for one year. The origin of this project is that when I was distributing potatoes and cabbage in the local area, I chatted with the locals and found that "menstrual shame" is still widely present in the local female group. Due to the lack of sex education and the high price of sanitary napkins, they use leaves and grass instead of sanitary napkins during menstruation, causing serious gynecological problems. Many girls have to get married and have children at the age of 14, and premature pregnancy makes things worse, which directly causes many girls to die from infection during childbirth. Girls who get pink coins can go to the environmentally friendly sanitary napkin supplier that cooperates with us to "exchange" for one year of sanitary napkins.
I am still very moved by the fact that the Pink Coin project received donations and support from almost all the real bigwigs in the crypto at that time. I personally served as the Ambassador of the project and called on exchanges, VCs and other participants in the industry to raise funds and promote it, and established the "Pink Coin Alliance". At that time, the industry was in a deep bear market and was in a state of deep self-criticism and self-doubt, but the concept of value stablecoins, as well as the complete transparency and efficiency of the entire process based on blockchain, and the practice of eliminating third parties, is a small verification of the social value of Crypto. The value exchange attribute of Crypto as a "currency" is also reflected in such a simple way.
When I am increasingly troubled by the increasingly complex business models and narratives full of profound theories, and when the industry is now in trouble, I will think of this Ugandan vegetable market full of stories, and always sigh at the clean, pure, and simple Crypto applications, which are so plain and unpretentious, and good deeds will be rewarded. For example, those vegetable farmers in Kampala who were willing to accept the challenge and walk at the forefront of the Crypto revolution received only 6 yuan of BNB at the time. Maybe they are people who really have firm Crypto beliefs.
PayFi or FiFi
Back to the bustling Singapore, PayFi became a new hot spot at this year's 2049 conference. The new narrative of Payment+Finance has brought new life to many desperate capitals and projects. How the narrative is translated is not too important, especially another big shot joked that PayFi can actually be called FiFi, because Payment itself is finance. What is really interesting and meaningful is that after a long detour, we began to return to the fundamental attribute of crypto related to payment in addition to investment and speculation.
Just like the redistribution of value and wealth, the development of all things in the world follows the basic laws of history. From a product to a track and industry, what really lasts is the product that truly creates positive value for society. If we return to this essence, our beliefs will not be so fragile and easily shaken .
I really hope that after so many years, I can go and see those girls who buy sanitary napkins with stablecoins and the vegetable farmers who use BNB as payment. Maybe the original intention of Crypto is just that simple.
