📌 Emerging Onchain This Week #8
This week, we bring you African crypto updates & data from countries including Algeria, Tanzania, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria
Welcome back crypto friend 👋.
Bundle Africa ceases its operation as an exchange
Bundle Africa, is shutting down its exchange to focus on its Cashlink payment services. Bundle is part of the Binance ecosystem and grew to over 50,000 MAUs and $50mill in monthly volumes with a presence in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Francophone Africa.
Bundle points to stifling regulations preventing proper growth and innovation as the key reason for the shift. Cashlink is a decentralised peer-to-peer payments network, that now focuses on helping businesses send money in and out of any platform in their local currency.
Marigold partners with MawaHub, an Algerian crypto hub
Launched earlier this year, MawaHub is an incubator by the French Institute of Algeria focused on fostering the adoption of Web3 in artistic and tech projects in Algeria. The first cohort began back in May offering companies 400+hours of mentoring by 20+ experts.
With the partnership, Marigold (which tests and develops upgrades of the Tezos Protocol) will offer 8 teams blockchain strategic consulting services.
Only 1.7% of Tanzanias invest in crypto
The FinScope Tanzania survey found that whilst 9.7% of Tanzanian adults are aware of crypto, only 1.7% (~1mill) of the adult population had invested in crypto. It also found that when it came to using crypto to purchase goods and services, 0.4% of the adult population had done so in the last month and 1% had in their lifetime.
Africa’s 5th most populous country, Tanzania has a population of over 67 million with a median age of 17 years.
Ghana says crypto is still banned
Ghana’s Minister of State at the Ministry of Finance reiterated that cryptocurrency transactions are still banned in Ghana. Since March 2022 all institutions licensed by the Bank of Ghana (BoG) have been prohibited from facilitating cryptocurrency transactions. Interestingly, in September 2022 the BoG’s Head of Fintech and Innovation stated that they were open to dialogue with those in the crypto scene.
In comparison, a number of African countries have softened their anti-crypto stance with Namibia and South Africa introducing new regulation and licenses for crypto companies, Kenya planning to tax crypto companies and Uganda opening its regulatory sandbox to crypto companies
Save the Children Rwanda partners with Cardano
Save the Children Rwanda now accepts donations in Cardano’s cryptocurrency ADA with over 22,000 ADA being donated within hours of its launch. This partnership comes following Save the Children Rwanda’s launch of Kumwe Hub. Kumwe Hub aims to connect (blockchain) innovation with impact investment across Africa with digital IDs for refugees, and lending mechanisms for the financially excluded all in the pipeline.
Product Launch
HoneyCoin partners with MoneyGram to launch USDC cash-in/out services
With this partnership, HoneyCoin users can convert their physical cash into USDC, and vice verse without needing a bank account or a credit card. Users simply have to visit a MoneyGram location in any of the 140 countries it supports to access this service.
HoneyCoin is one of the few African wallets to integrate this new feature from MoneyGram. MoneyGram has partnered with Stellar to offer this service to fintechs and crypto companies through one simple API.
Web3nk to launch beta
South Africa’s RainFin and Block Markets Africa have come together to launch Web3nk which aims to transform ecommerce and the financial ecosystem through the creation of regulated tokens. Their XCAP platform enables licensed financial service providers to package their real-world asset portfolios as tokenised instruments available for both businesses and customers to invest in.
RainFin has been tokenising and fractionalising real-world assets since 2012. Block Markets Africa has been helping central and commercial banks unlock the benefits of DLT for businesses and Consumers across the globe.
6 countries accounted for over 90% of all web views related to crypto in Africa according to CoinGecko.
Knowledge list
Here are a few resources we are reading to catch up with the emerging trends affecting the Crypto space and Africa more broadly
Zimbabwe accused of derailing its own carbon credit ambitions
MercyCorps overview of the crypto for good landscape in emerging markets
Thank you for reading this edition of Emerging Onchain This Week.
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