📌 Emerging Onchain This Week #10
This week we bring you African crypto updates & data from countries including Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa
Hello again crypto friend 👋.
-Kenya’s Financial Reporting Centre publishes a Virtual Assets public survey
The Financial Reporting Centre (FRC) is asking Kenyans to take the ‘Public Survey on Virtual Assets (VAs) and Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs)’ before the 8th of September 2023. The 6-page form includes questions about the survey participants’ usage of crypto and what platforms and wallets they use. The FRC claims the information will "only be used to help drive policy decisions”.
The survey comes following Kenya ordering Worldcoin to cease its operations in the country and raises questions about whether Kenya is shifting away from its increasingly friendly stance towards crypto. In recent months Kenya had made moves to tax crypto and considered forming a working group for crypto asset activities & players.
-Sun Exchange brings affordable energy to schools
CVE South Africa (an international renewable energy power producer) is fully funding a ZAR 20 million (USD 1.1 million) solar-plus-battery project that will provide clean power and load-shedding relief to one of South Africa’s largest high schools, HTS Drostdy. The system will provide more than half of the school's power needs through a 470.88 kW solar system with 700 kWh of battery storage.
CVE purchased the 124416 solar cells through the Sun Exchange platform. Sun Exchange is a peer-to-peer solar leasing platform that allows users to purchase solar energy-producing cells via Credit Cards, Bank Transfers or Bitcoin, then build wealth by leasing those cells to power businesses and organisations in developing countries.
-Nigeria to issue National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) Certificates on-chain
The NYSC is a compulsory 1-year program for all able-bodied Nigerian graduates of tertiary institutions, with over 400k youths participating each year.
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) in Nigeria has announced that the first implementation of the National Blockchain Policy passed earlier this year will be using blockchain to generate and validate NYSC certificates. The blockchain-based system is currently being developed by the NITDA and NYSC. NITDA and the Central Bank have said that they plan to use a similar system for other government & bank services, such as the issuance & verification of licenses, training programs and permits.
-Angola to ban crypto mining and regulate crypto
A government statement expressed that crypto-mining activities were a threat to the national electrical system and that Angola’s central bank should be the sole issuer of any digital currencies or tokens.
The oil-producing country had previously been looking into launching its own CBDC ranked low (117) on Chainalysis’ crypto adoption rankings. The bill will bring virtual assets under the supervision of the country’s Capital Market Commission (CMC).
Product Launches
-Momint launches cash voucher payments for retailers
South African based NFT and crypto startup Momint now has a cash voucher option in partnership with crypto e-commerce store Bitrefill, that allows users to purchase said cash vouchers with ETH or USDC, then spend it in over 10k retailers across the country from online commerce stores, department grocery stores, garages, restaurants and a few transportation retailers.
A few of the retailers that accept these vouchers are HiFiCorp, Intercape, Checkers, Woolworths, Engen and Takealot.
-Onboard is part of Base’s Onchain Summer
To celebrate it’s official launch, Base (Coinbase’s layer 2 built on top of Optimism) launched Onchain Summer celebrating onchain activities. Nigerian crypto project Onboard was selected as one of a handful of crypto projects to offer digital collectables to be minted as part of the festivities, alongside the likes of Coca-Cola, OpenSea, FWB and Showtime.
Onboard, a non-custodial wallet with revolutionary non-custodial peer-to-peer on/offramps, is offering audio-visual NFTs from African creatives. Base is also offering over 100 ETH in grants to builders and creators to participate on the Base platform throughout the summer.
-Patricia launches Patricia Plus app
Nigerian exchange Patricia announced the launch of its new app Patricia Plus. The new app mirrors the experiences of a new banking platform, removing previous withdrawal limits.
Patricia also shared it will convert existing users’ Bitcoin and Naira balances to its new Patricia Token (PTK) which has been described as a USD pegged stablecoin. The announcement of PTK was met with some concerns and comes months after Patricia shared that it had been victim to a breach that compromised Bitcoin and Naira assets.
-Visa tests the possibility of gas fee payments via card
Visa could allow users to pay for gas fees on their transactions with their visa card, versus having to have another token in the associated crypto wallet to pay gas fees; this would be done using account abstraction through their paymaster smart contract. When a user wants to pay a gas fee, they initiate a blockchain transaction as usual but select the "pay with card" option. The paymaster smart contract then verifies the user's credit/debit card information and pays the gas fee on their behalf.
According to this technical article by visa, the paymaster’s role is to abstract away the complexities of the gas fee mechanism while offering alternative ways for fee funding, in other words, it makes the process simple for the user.
-Paypal launches stablecoin, PYUSD
Paypal, the online payment system with over 435 million accounts, launched its US dollar backed stablecoin, Paypal USD (PYUSD), on the 7th of August, making them the first major financial institution to launch one. The Paxos Trust Company issued ERC-20 stablecoin is designed to be a user friendly alternative to other more common cryptocurrencies.
The launch of this stablecoin makes it easier for Paypal users who are both crypto adjacent and those who aren’t to settle their payments using their on-chain funds, as seamlessly as with card. PYUSD is currently only available to select US Paypal Balance accounts.
-Mastercard to launch a CBDC Partner Program
Mastercard plans to help governments and institutions adopt & understand CBDC by creating a group of leading blockchain technology and payment service providers including Ripple, Consensys and Fluency.
Mastercard has been working with the likes of Hong Kong on their CBDC pilot, The Bank of England on how APIs can facilitate CBDC payments as well as with the Central Bank of Brazil and the Central Bank of Australia. In 2020 Mastercard launched a virtual asset platform to help central banks test and explore CBDCs.
Rating by industry, crypto comes out on top as the industry with the highest average rate of biometric fraud. This is of course based on recorded data, discounting the instances of fraud where the method used is unclear or not biometric.
This data is according to the The State of KYC in Africa Mid-year report 2023
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:
First ETHAccra event to take place on 7th - 9th September 2023
Visa’s technical research paper on account abstraction for ease of payment
Duplo’s ‘Exploring the State of B2B Payments in Africa Report 2023’
Bukola Oyeboade’s comments on the Central Bank of Nigeria’s past financials
‘AI & Crypto’ episode on the Web3 with a16z podcast, from deep fakes to MEVs
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