Original title: "Leaving Africa and Entering the Seventh Year of Crypto, We're Still Talking About Faith"
Original author: Athena
A few months ago, I set foot on the hot land of Africa again, and the pickup truck sped through the raised loess, allowing the sunset to outline the strange and familiar impression of the African continent. Staying out of the equation will leave me with enough space to take on the role of a "global citizen" and think about who I am, what I do, or how my crypto industry relates to the world.
After really going deeper, you will find that what Crypto can give to the less developed countries in Africa is a chance to be at the same frequency with the world again. From the belief and determination of Crypto in these countries, we can see that they are no longer satisfied with the compromise with the old system and the old system, and instead of struggling and being dominated in the mud, why not fully embrace Crypto and run towards a bright future.
In 2049, we had the opportunity to sit down with Athena (X: @Athenaweb33) and talk about what she has believed in since she stepped into Africa and then into Crypto. She will continue her entrepreneurial journey in Wello.tech, and she will also go deep into Africa, following her unpretentious beliefs that may be little understood in a chaotic society.
以下转自 Athena (X: @Athenaweb33) 的推文，Enjoy：
At the end of Token2049, with the deep social interaction with some colleagues these days, and the negativity flying all over the sky, there is a lot of talk about "Is the crypto industry finished?" A little thing that comes to mind from a few weeks ago:
It's been two years since I moved to Paris. One day, I was working remotely at a small café in front of my house, when I suddenly received a call from Uganda on WeChat. After a mixture of surprise, surprise and confusion, I crossed my fingers and realized that it had been 7 years since I left my traditional industry in Africa to join Crypto.
The caller was a senior adviser to the Ugandan government, who had traveled to China with the president on a business trip to the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). During my years in Africa, I worked for state-owned enterprises and the UN International Development System, which aimed to promote industrialization and financial inclusion in Africa. With his help, he has cooperated with Sino-Ugandan cooperation in attracting investment, and promoting women's handicrafts in Uganda, and has formed friendships.
The pressure of those years of life in Africa can actually be blown for half a lifetime, some high-level, such as talking and laughing with the president of Senegal at his home, and some narrowly escaped death, such as the boyfriend of a good friend who was tragically killed in a terrorist attack in the business district of the capital of Kenya that we must go to every time, and avoided the worst air crash in Ethiopian aviation history due to a temporary mistake, but my high school classmates, colleagues and colleagues of friends and several other acquaintances within the three-degree network unfortunately lost their lives. But the decision to leave Africa was also resolute and firm.
That starts with an unexpected encounter with Crypto. It's interesting to note that seven years later, when I sit in a café and chat with my new and old Crypto friends, the story of Africa is a topic of interest to everyone, as if it were a utopia to escape the difficult status quo, a kind of psychological sustenance that romanticizes exotic adventures.
However, I think that these soul-torturing questions and answers about the application value of Crypto are actually in those seemingly ethereal stories.
Transfer of value – where is the money and how is it spent? Where to spend?
You may all know Binance's resounding vision: to increase the freedom of money. Thinking about whether the Crypto industry is over, let's first hold it high and see how the transfer of several global value chains in history has occurred, where we are in the historical development, 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", which originated from the invention of the steam engine in United Kingdom, greatly increased productivity, and small-scale handicraft textile workshop production could be industrialized on a large scale; In the "electric revolution", Britain, the United States, Germany and France have all achieved breakthroughs in the fields of electric power, chemical industry, heavy industry, etc., and the industrial system of the whole of Europe has developed perfectly, and the third revolution is the "information revolution" that we are familiar with. The pumping of information technology, computer, electronics industry, automation and other industries has promoted United States, Japan and other countries to become important participating forces in the world economy. The "Asian Tigers" (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) also industrialized rapidly in the second half of the 20th century, developing advanced manufacturing and financial industries, and integrating into the world value chain system.
It can be seen that every round of the industrial revolution is a change in the productive forces that brings about a change in the relations of production, thus pushing some countries to use their "comparative advantage" to participate in the world value distribution system. China benefited from the reform and opening up that began in 1978, learned from the advantages of the rise of other Asian tigers such as Singapore, and through the construction of concession economic zones and industrial parks in developed coastal areas, taking advantage of China's "comparative advantages" of low labor costs, large bases, and hard work, coupled with opening up the market and introducing foreign investment, developed export-oriented manufacturing from some coastal areas, and became the "world factory", establishing and consolidating its indispensable position in the distribution of the world value chain at that time.
The details of several grand industrial revolutions spanning a hundred years can be mentioned here, but it is worth mentioning that every industrial revolution is also a process of wealth redistribution. Africa, on the other hand, has not been involved in this process of "sharing the cake" due to the special historical background of long-term colonization, as well as various complex industrial policies and international political factors.
So is Africa really poor? Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, has the highest density of private jets in the world. After the exchange launched a local payment channel in Africa, the per capita transaction volume in Africa far exceeded that of European and Asian countries. Africa's wealthy people are richer than we generally know and think. Due to Africa's abundant resources, especially oil resources and agricultural resources, the upper class in Africa can live without worrying about food and clothing for several lifetimes. Ordinary people are forced to get a little bit of food and clothing in the tertiary industry, the service industry. Manufacturing is vacant across the continent, the financial sector is monopolized, and due to the lack of infrastructure, the cost of financial services is so high that ordinary people cannot have a bank account or pay for bank transfers. The comically serious gap between rich and poor is one of Africa's most common classes.
During an international organization's research that year, the Djibouti government arranged for us to stay at the Kempinski Hotel, the most luxurious hotel in Djibouti, a small and barren country in East Africa, for $300 a night, which is half a year's income for many locals. I still remember a moment in this hotel, on the beach loungers on the Red Sea, white businessmen smoking cigars talking, black waiters in front of him holding trays, his back straight, white shirt and red vest complement his black skin, he looked at the fog on the Red Sea in the distance, his eyes were full of numbness and confusion.
At that time, we were working with a group of young elites with degrees in economics, finance, sociology, etc., from the world's top universities, to design where and how to spend the aid funds that international organizations gave to Africa to ensure that they were effective. We had a United Kingdom girl who had just graduated from Oxford University and refused to stay in a luxury hotel for $300 a night with tears in her eyes, which she thought was a sarcasm for her subject. However, when she saw the conditions of ordinary people's accommodation, the creaking of a tin-covered house, roasting in the 50-degree heat, she silently withdrew her insistence.
That's around that time when I decided to quit that job. Although what we did seemed compassionate, we talked about industrial transfer, talked about getting Africa to develop manufacturing, integrated into the value chain, let ordinary people into factories, learn from the experience of clothing and footwear in China and Southeast Asia, and I personally spent a month in a Chinese factory in Senegal, interviewing female workers and watching them produce low-grade Adinike sweatpants for export to Europe and the United States. But this is too slow, and in the whole huge system of traditional "aid", I am afraid that the most benefited are not the African women workers who are "taught to fish", but the senior clerks who sit in the London office to write papers and do project audits, as well as those of us who are international organization elites who live in a $300 hotel with travel funds———— and it can also be seen from the data that in the entire chain, up to 70% of the funds are worn out in "proving how the money is spent, where it is spent, and generating audit reports and impact reports" Middle.
I began to see Blockchain, and I saw that Crypto, blockchain technology, and the fourth revolution led by artificial intelligence have become the life of currency, Africa, and the vast number of poor people.
True decentralization, in Kampala's wet market
The son of the Ugandan prime minister set up a Crypto organization a few years ago, and several "second-generation officials" and technology nerds who studied in the United Kingdom and the United States got together to do several small projects related to Crypto, such as being able to transfer Crypto point-to-point with a mobile phone without a smart app in a place where there is no 3G network at all. Africans know Africans better, most of their locals are using the kind of non-smart phones that can only make and receive calls and text messages, because many Africans do not have bank accounts, and are not willing to go to most of the city to find a WesternUnion or a few banks to do transfers and remittances, the local remittance method is simple and crude: USSD technology-based mobile phones, you can send money directly to friends by texting, and everyone's mobile phone number is their "wallet" / account, The balance of the credit is the balance of the account.
I followed my friends from this organization to experience the silky smooth process of "registration and account opening, KYC, and transfer": I bought a $50 mobile phone from a telecom operator next to the Kampala vegetable market, queued up, and the counter staff had operated the KYC process tens of thousands of times, and the whole process was completed in 3 minutes, and the staff helped me recharge the "phone bill" with cash; There are a large number of fixed and mobile official/unofficial kiosks in the village, and when you want to "withdraw cash", go to the "villager representative" on duty at the kiosk, send him a text message to transfer money, and he will give you cash. "Top-up" is the other way around. The whole process experience is silky smooth, and it is all point-to-point, with no third parties and no trust issues at all. This product and process is not only in the capital, but has been rolled out in the vast rural areas.
Later, I joined Binance, and in the first year, in response to CZ's vision of "mass adoption", I laid a truly completely blockchain- and Crypto-based network in Africa, starting with the most simple charity projects, Binance charity came into being, the world's first completely "transparent" peer-to-peer donation platform, due to the characteristics of blockchain, every melon-eating crowd on the Internet can supervise every crypto The donation went directly to the wallet address of the Ugandan villagers without going through any third party. The villagers also used Crypto to buy potatoes and cabbage from vegetable farmers who accepted crypto, without the involvement of fiat currency. When vegetable farmers need fiat currency, they will regularly exchange Crypto for local fiat currency through local exchanges or OTC.
Later, we also issued the world's first (and probably the only one) "value stablecoin" on Binance Smart Chain (now BNB chain): Pink Care Token, which, unlike other stablecoins, is not pegged to the "price" of any fiat currency, but to the value of the item: each pink coin is pegged to the "value" of a sanitary napkin that a girl has used in Uganda for a year. The origin of this project is because when the local potato cabbage was distributed, 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 because sanitary napkins are expensive and difficult to buy, the sanitary napkins are replaced with leaf turf during menstruation, causing serious gynecological problems, and many girls are going to get married and have children at the age of 14, and premature pregnancy is worse, which directly causes many girls to die of infection during childbirth. Girls who get pink coins can go to the eco-friendly sanitary napkin supplier we work with to "exchange" a year's worth of sanitary napkins.
To this day, I am still very touched that the Pink Coin project received donations and personal support from almost all the real bigwigs in the currency circle at that time, and the first sister personally served as the project Ambassador, calling on all industry exchanges, VCs and other participants to raise funds and publicize, and established the "Pink Coin Alliance". At that time, the industry was in a deep state of self-criticism and self-doubt, but the concept of value stablecoins, as well as the complete transparency and efficiency of the whole process based on blockchain, and the practice of removing third parties, was 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 more and more troubled by the increasingly complex business model and the narrative full of advanced theories, and when the industry is now in trouble, I will think about this Ugandan vegetable market full of stories, and always sigh at the clean, pure, and simple Crypto application, which is so unpretentious and rewarding. For example, the vegetable farmers in Kampala, who were willing to accept the challenge of being at the forefront of the crypto revolution, received only 6 yuan in BNB at the time. Maybe they're people who really have a strong belief in crypto.
PayFi 还是 FiFi
Back in the hustle and bustle of Singapore, PayFi has become a new hotspot at this year's 2049 venue. The new narrative of Payment+Finance has revitalized many desperate capital and projects. It doesn't really matter how the narrative is translated, especially when another big guy jokes that PayFi can actually be called FiFi, because Payment itself is finance. What's really interesting and meaningful is that after a big detour, we're starting to return to this fundamental payment-related property of crypto beyond 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 small product to a track and industry, what really lasts for a long time is the product that really generates positive value for the society.
I really hope that after going around for so many years, I can look at the girls who buy sanitary napkins with stablecoins, and the vegetable farmers who use BNB to make payments, and the original intention of Crypto may be as simple as that.