Borderless Africa: Ethereum’s Pathway to Scale Through Mass Adoption

Transcript

uh hi everybody uh so uh today we're gonna talk about uh vision for a borderless Africa this is not my vision it is just a reflection of what's already happening so before I jump in I want to give you a little bit of a background on myself uh as the gentleman mentioned my name is Yosef I'm from Ethiopia grew up between Tanzania Kenya Ethiopia and a little bit in Nigeria um and the internet changed my life I learned most of the world and a lot of things online uh in internet cafes paying per minute uh access internet access even learned most of my English

online but the internet is very gated and the world is very gated for an Ethiopian so I got a scholarship to study at Harvard I moved to the Bay Area to work in Tech but then I was kicked out of the US because my education and my degree did not match in a government database that was made in 1990s uh so I decided to move to New Zealand and experiment with new Visa programs and created something new to help build a borderless world basically hacking the nation state apparatus to help greater human movement but then I discovered crypto and web free and a lot of that made a ton of sense to me and it did so through the African context and that's what we're going to unpack today so I'm

going to start off with uh a ball statement is that in all the work we're all doing in web 3 we actually need Africa to reach our full potential we are about 5 10 sometimes fifteen percent of the world working in this space but if we're talking about Mass adoption if we're talking about real world use cases people using these Technologies and Primitives for their for their daily lives the masses are not what the Technologies are being built the masses are in parts of the world that are huge and massive and that's Africa is a big part of that so let's unpack that first of all Africa is a frontier Market I don't believe in

this concept of a developing Market because developing a CMC linear predetermined path there's no absolute way that the whole continent of Africa is going to follow a 200 year path that the West has followed to reach where it's at today um why is that because Africa is transforming so fast right now and there are four main tectonic shifts that is driving that we'll break this down in pieces let's look at the demographic changes so Africa has 1.4 billion people today just to give you context of that that is all of Europe all of South America and all of the United States combined as one

but that's not it in the next 20 something years we're going to add two whole europes to the continent of Africa and today the median age is 19. um and more than 30 more than 75 percent of our population is under 35. it's very very fast growing here you'll see a chart of a breakdown of different age groups the bottom is the youngest and the the top is the oldest people you'll see sort of a change between even some of the major regions in the world um Africa is going to be very young in the next 20 or so years more than a quarter of all the world's population is going to be in Africa so that massive

demographic change is having ridiculous transformation on the continent second base internet uh access to information flow that is growing really fast as I told you the internet changed my life and it's doing that for a whole lot of young people who are accessing more online and learning more on YouTube than what they're learning in universities and local schools and that is very transformative more than two-thirds of all developers on the continent are self-taught or learning on the job so the information technology and access the information is ridiculously changing how we see the world the other bit is technology access and new paradigm Technologies is also helped us LeapFrog generations of

Institutions so we did not spend decades stretching the grounds across our entire continent to build landline cables to be able to communicate to each other we jump straight into mobile we didn't spend decades building the JP Morgans of this world for Africa and putting ATM machines in every corner would jump straight to mobile money and as you can see more than 70 percent of the entire Global money market is in Africa um we'll talk more about the challenges of the financial institution but we are not waiting for the Gated Financial system to slowly reach the needs of the African population so a lot of Africans are jumping into crypto we've seen a hundred

billion dollars of on-chain transactions last year and it's growing really fast the other area is that we have big institutional vacuums more than like about half a billion uh Africans don't even have any form of legal ID 40 countries in Africa don't print our own money we ship we get like printing companies in Europe printing it and shipping it to us and we pay six percent of the total money supply to the printing press and for just shipment Alone um and there are a whole lot of African countries that were colonized by France and as a result of that they are on this What's called the CFA the the French colonies of Africa currency which kind

of constitutes that 50 of all the income you get from outside the world goes to the French Treasury and any type of infrastructure development mining whatever you want to do at scale the French government or French companies get first writer refusal so these types of challenges and so many more are basically creating a an open landscape for for Innovation and for creativity so with all this in mind I believe that Africa is very ripe for decentralization that's because centralization is failing us I have conviction that if we stick with the status quo Africa's position at the bottom of the pyramid is pretty much

locked in for the next at least a hundred years and that's not good enough and it's not this is not ideological it's very practical people like myself and a number of people who are here have been able to find like little loopholes or scholarships or whatever to get out and access the rest of the world but 900 million young Africans want as much of the world as all of us have it and centralized systems are not giving that to them so they are thirsty they are hungry they want to be part of building this world like all of us and I believe that a huge part of what we're working on here with the centralized Technologies offers a big part of that solution predatory Financial systems today are

holding us back in a massive way for example in order to send money from Ethiopia to Kenya which are neighboring countries money has to go all the way to Europe and the US and back in US Dollars which none of us actually use for daily lives and we pay about 10 fees for uh the Western Unions and MoneyGrams and all these different institutions we pay five to five to ten billion dollars on sweet fees alone as a continent and in order to access Credit most regular people spend like pay about 10 to 27 in some cases even one percent a day interest just to borrow a little bit amount of money to buy infantry or to order things

to do work and as many people in Latin America also face many Africans have very high inflation rates 600 million Africans are with you know 20 to 30 percent inflation rate so uh even when we look at stable coins I believe stable coins have found their US dollar stable coins they found the best product Market fit in Africa because in many countries you can access US Dollars table coins much easier and faster than you can access Fiat dollars the other drive towards decentralization is that trust trust is one of the my view is one of the best things that the blockchain solves for and that's one of the biggest gaps that we have across

many African countries asking the question will you do the thing you say you're going to do are you who I think you are do you have what you say you have is that peace of land yours um is someone gonna steal that money are you gonna drive me to where this app says you're going to drive me to the friction cost of trust is so high something that I've actually been trying to attract myself is how much time and headspace do I spend when I'm in a number of different African countries basically trying to establish trust and when trust is negotiated it really slows us down and that's the beauty of trustless Technologies is that we can actually function without needing to really like trust each other and be

being the veter of trust at multiple different levels so that's this is one of the most transformative areas that that I believe Africa is really tapping to this space the other area which is very close to my heart why decentralization matters is borders I believe borders is a big enemy for The Thirst and hunger and drive many African especially young people have and I think what decentralization creates is a space for a borderless economy so let's put that in a very practical lens so if you invited a hundred African Builders to come here with African passports I can almost guarantee you less than five will be able to actually get a visa to come here and physically attend this event we

don't have many African Builders and Community Builders attending most eat Global events I just got a New Zealand passport a few years ago and like nothing about me changed but overnight the whole world opened up and it wasn't the case before even to try to fly from one place to another Transit into one country some folks have to wait six months just to get a transit Visa so the plane Iran can land in that country so when the world is heavily gated like this it really kind of it breaks the possibility for people to be able to move around the world and decentralized Technologies are giving us access to what's now a borderless economy I can participate in a global economy I can work build community collaborate and do

all the things that I want to do without having to leave home and without missing home-cooked food and I think that's a big transformative aspect of what we're building here so where does ethereum play a role in this um I believe we have a big role to play in the African story why is that because if we really break down the core values of the ethereum revolution of movement I believe that's extremely aligned we talked about decentralization well centralized players are failing us we talk about permissionlessness well you know permission world is not working for us we talked about trustlessness well we don't have trust infrastructure so that

is a really great fit we talk about sovereignty well we don't have sovereignty because if we have foreign powers controlling our monetary system is not even just individuals but even nation states are fighting for sovereignty right so um I I think there's multiple layers of values alignment that exist here so how do we really build this beautiful partnership between the ethereum community and the massive emergence and Frontier work that is happening across the continent I'm going to leave you with some sort of first principle thoughts and ways to approach it as opposed to just do ABCD and magically be created so let's flash what that looks

like first is approach Africa would differ with a different mindset too often we have many people kind of saying oh well let us build the X for Africa let us just you know build this beautiful amazing thing let's have a marketing team there just help us grow and scale and and whatever I don't think that's gonna work because the variables we optimize for are very different from those in the west including the east as well we have very different constraints and very different variables we're working around so very you know some very tangible examples um how many of you here use feature phones no one so oh you do okay no okay no one

um so if no one uses feature phones then you wouldn't be able to actually do a user experience test for the majority of African users um how well here we have uh ATM machines in every corner well in many African countries the ATM machines are actually not machines they're little kiosks with the human behind them who does basically like onboarding and off-boarding into crypto tools as well as Mobile Banking as well as selling chewing gum as well as selling so many other things and those are like the the merchant networks that basically run the Grassroots financial institution of many countries so how on Earth are you actually going to embed that into a tool that you're building and scaling in other markets

it's not going to work so you have to like really see the world through the local Builders lens and to the local communities and the variables that we are uh um you know working around um so one of the best ways to do that is to show up and spend time there and connect with people and listen and understand um and one of the things that I helped lead in February is uh with a number of ethereum community folks including vital Lake I uh and a number of other people we did a trip across four African countries just listening learning having Round Table conversations and building mutually respectful conversations and relationships and that was really amazing because it creates opportunities

for two ways of learning now with ethereum mainnet is just not accessible in Africa because we're very uh transaction cost sensitive no one's going to spend five dollars for a dollar transaction right so um that's just not mean it hasn't been scalable but now with layer twos and ZK Technologies and all other uh experiments that are happening to build on top of ethereum's uh security layer that is making ethereum a lot more accessible and reachable to the content and so that's that's one of the areas that we see there um and the last bit I'd say here is that we've got to think long term so if you're kind of thinking how do we work

with you know one billion people or 2.8 billion people that is coming ahead that is a massive massive massive market and Africa is you know 54 countries it's not one country multiple different contexts and regions so you got to play a long-term game and that's an area where unfortunately many other protocols and projects keep failing at is because they're focused so much on what they can get right now and they get in the Trap of uh just short-term kpis as opposed to actually building partnership and being part of the the bigger transformation that is happening the second first principle for ethereum showing up and doing well in Africa is participating in soil building we talk

about creating the infinite Garden well the infinite garden needs rich soil and we need to participate in helping build that rich soil well that's the question of then what conditions do we need to have in place for Builders to rise and address the problems that they're facing in their communities we've got to weave different ecosystems focus on Grassroots community building events meetups like the the sub type of stuff that's happening here these things matter because they create the fertile soil for beautiful trees and forests to fully Thrive and that's a critical part of the foundational work I think we need to do I want to just give a few shout outs on that context there are a number of

events that are happening on the continent there is it Safari happening in Kenya this September 18 to 24 you're all invited will be fun to see you all there this eat Akra a small number of folks are organizing a a hackathon in Accra Ghana uh I believe it's early September uh some of us have met the afropolitan crew they're creating a community of a lot of African diaspora and and people in the continent who are basically sharing knowledge and and creating ways of you know building magic together one project I'm really passionate about is wet tree Bridge they're doing very Grassroots level of talent development primarily training

people with solidity and embedding them into ethereum values uh over in Nigeria and sort of like projects like these and there's so many more out there that is basically doing the soil building and so if you want to really help be part of that then connect with them support them um the last thing around showing up is that there are certain points of tension that exist and I think sometimes instead of resolving them it's best to just sit with the discomfort of it one of it is the tension between globalization and localization so there's a version of this story that says hey well if U.S dollar stable coins are doing really amazing then let's dollarize all of Africa let's dollars the whole world

well in that sense you're also handing over sovereignty in a massive way to a part of the world that just you're not from and you're not connected to so like where do we hold that tension point between globalization and localization when you go to countries like Kenyan actually a whole lot of countries have this there's this concept of table banking where a small number of 5 10 women come together put money in the table and they lend each other and then they have interest that comes back to the table and then they share the interest as profit at the end of the year well does plugging them into the global liquidity pool make sense I don't think so that's not what they're asking for they're just finding ways to collaborate and coordinate easier so in that context

maybe globalization is not the answer that's one of the I think tension points we've got to keep in mind the other one is speed versus longevity there are things we do to show results and really see a tangible value right away and sometimes we've got Corners sometimes we make deals with governments just to get them to sign something without them even understanding but then governments change and when governments change nothing really sticks right so um how do we really think about building for the long term but also achieving shorter term results the other one that attaches decentralization as well is user experience versus you know wanting to decentralize everything um there are some really interesting experiments happening building uh defy

at the back end of fintech so when people are what they're experiencing in the in the front end is just regular fintech startup that is lending the money but at the back end it's actually powered by stable coins and D5 protocols and liquidity pulse and all of that so that's that's kind of one of the areas that we're seeing like maybe reaching massive audiences right away how do we kind of think about easier user experience and where decentralization lives but I guess with all of this you know the best way to achieve this goal is to show up and and partner because um I believe that Africa is a big role to play in this movement that we do and it can be the Saving Grace for an industry that is still

figuring out where it's long-term value proposition is across multiple different verticals we have all these ideas we have many prototypes we're still deep in r d phase but we're not there yet reaching a billion people and you have a whole community and a whole Market that is ready for the core principles that we have to offer them so see you all in Africa thank you [Applause]