In recent years there has been a strong adoption of cryptocurrencies among young sub-Saharan Africans, driven basically by the gloomy economic realities of many countries in the region. However, the progression and adoption of cryptocurrencies in Africa turns out to be entering a new era, with a growing number of African governments looking for tactics to integrate cryptocurrencies into their respective economies. In April, the TON Foundation announced that it was in talks with 3 Central African countries to launch regionalized stablecoins. The Central African Republic also recently announced that it would make bitcoin a legal tender in the country.
Now, MARA, a new pan-African crypto exchange, will sit at the intersection of emerging crypto adoption across government and retail in Africa. (FTX), Distributed Global, TQ Ventures, DIGITAL, Nexo, Huobi Ventures, Day One Ventures, Infinite Capital, DAO Jones and a hundred other crypto investors.
MARA plans to launch a suite of products, adding a retail cryptocurrency wallet, a professional exchange for professional traders, and a layer one blockchain that targets the access network for developers to create Africa-focused crypto and blockchain products. The retail app will launch in July, and the exchange will take place next, the company said. The MARA chain is expected to be launched in the fourth quarter. In addition, the startup will first launch in Kenya and Nigeria before expanding to other African countries.
MARA will find itself competing for market share with wealthy holders like Digital Currency Group’s Binance and Luno, as well as local players like Yellow Card, Quidax, Buycoins and Busha. Many existing exchanges will offer almost everything you need to use crypto in Africa. Many of them have had to innovate around strict regulatory realities to continue offering crypto on the continent.
For example, many African countries prohibit local money establishments from doing business with cryptocurrency companies, making it difficult to create and publish responses on local payment rails. other purposes. Others use means of choice, such as gift cards, to help users get in and out of cryptocurrencies.
MARA co-founder and CEO Chi Nnadi said his company is trying to establish itself by working heavily with regulators as part of its product development process.
According to Nnadi:
“Creating a cryptocurrency exchange is about interacting with regulators, who are at a critical point where they want to perceive how to adopt cryptocurrencies and how they will do so. One of my core competencies is to sit with them, perceive their pain points, and perceive how their lives have been drastically replaced over the past 20 years with the adoption of technology. So, we align ourselves as an educational point for them [the regulators]. He wants to teach regulators in the same way he teaches the masses about the benefits of blockchain technology. “
He believes a pan-African exchange is best placed to work with regulators to bring multiple instances of blockchain use to life in a scalable way.
He gave an example of how MARA intends to work with governments to drive the adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain:
“We run hackathons on top of virtual ownership of patient records. These are the kind of answers a 25-year-old blockchain engineer can create. But if there’s rarely that kind of hotline or bridge to government for health care organizations, it’s harder for those who use instances to scale. That’s the vital thing about MARA’s lifestyles, closing this hole between the young population and the regulators, who are sitting there, somewhat held back through twentieth-century structures, hunting down those new technologies and how they have to build new structures with them. “
Nnadi was shy about MARA’s talks with African regulators, saying countries were in other stages of adding and regulating cryptocurrencies. However, he acknowledged that his company is in talks with Kenya, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and the Central African Republic (CAR).
The company also announced that it is working with the CAR to make Bitcoin a legal tender.
“We come to advise them [CAR] on the adoption of cryptography. There are basic things that you want to do in the country, as would be the case in many African countries, is to generalize the adoption of cryptography,” he said. . . ” We introduced a national ID reader so they can [perform] KYC/AML on other people before they enter Web 3. [They should] also increase penetration on the web so that other people can crypto and the world. crypto-economy. “
Before launching MARA, Nnadi had created a non-profit organization called Sustainability International. Building on his parents’ works as environmental engineers committed to environmental sustainability in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region, Chi Nnadi sought to use blockchain generation to financially incentivize a cleanup of netpaintings from oil spills. His nonprofit built a smart contract in partnership with ConsenSys that used a combination of a set of computer vision rules that analyzes satellite imagery and images taken by local farmers to know when a pond that is cleaned replaces color and becomes cleaner. After confirmation of successful cleaning, the smart contract will pay the participants in Stelar Lumens.
The draft contract was intended to solve the challenge of accountability and transparency that has seen that the burdens of millions of dollars spent in the region produce little effect in terms of actual oil cleanup.
“I saw the effects before and after capital didn’t disperse, and that irritated other people. And that was the concept. I thought, well, I can [identify] with the villager here, the boss, the head of Shell and the governor of the state, but not all those other people are gathered in the same room,” Nnadi said. “So the concept was, how can you move them to a virtual playground?wise contracts as a way to bring them all together in one room, necessarily seeing myself as an unreliable node that can even move within all those other people. “
Although it is a noble undertaking, the wise assignment of the contract has not completely taken off due to the limitations of the cryptography (UX) user experience and literacy issues among members of the local community.
“At that time, stablecoins didn’t exist, exchanges didn’t exist, and we still had to make money on and off the ramp for everyone. It just wasn’t scalable, knowing that infrastructure needs to be built, and everyone here has to have a wallet,” Nnadi added.
Now that crypto UX has evolved, Nnadi heralds a similar progression in the Mara ecosystem.
Other members of the startup’s control team are: Lucas Llinás Múnera, Dearg OBartuin and Kate Kallot.