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Business

Binance CEO Visits West Africa

Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the founder and CEO of Binance, the world’s leading crypto exchange, recently embarked on a policy visit to West Africa. He visited Ivory Coast and Senegal as part of his global tour to connect and collaborate with policymakers.

In talks with Presidents Alassane Ouattara of the Ivory Coast and Macky Sall of Senegal during the tour, CZ reaffirmed the exchange’s commitment to working with African officials and emphasized the importance of blockchain to the financial sector.

“Africa is primed for crypto adoption as blockchain provides financial accessibility not currently available to lots of Africans,” CZ said. 

The visit comes after Binance’s partnership with Italian-Senegalese Tiktok content creator Khaby Lame and its sponsorship announcement for the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) tournaments.

Additionally, CZ disclosed Binance’s collaboration with JokkoLabs, one of Africa’s first social impact hubs in Senegal. Through this partnership,  Binance will also introduce a blockchain awareness and education initiative in Francophone Africa’s communities.

According to Binance, which recently raised $500m to fund cryptocurrency and third-generation web projects, the collaboration will include monetary donations for community education workshops. These workshops will be designed to increase blockchain literacy and skills in the region.

“Binance aims to build the fintech community across the Francophone Africa region, ensuring enthusiasts are empowered to build blockchain solutions and solve real-world problems,” CZ explained.

This move emphasizes Binance’s commitment to encouraging crypto and blockchain adoption in Africa.

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Business

Kenya seizes $56.7 million from Flutterwave

The financial assets of Pan-African payment solutions firm Flutterwave have been frozen by Kenyan authorities after the latter filed an indictment against it. The company was charged with carrying out suspicious activities and breaching Kenyan financial laws. According to Nairobi-based news sources, Flutterwave was the largest  of the seven companies included in the indictment on Wednesday with its frozen accounts to the tune of $56.7 million (6.7 billion Kenyan shillings) by the country’s Asset Recovery Agency.

Prosecutors said that investigations revealed unusual and suspicious activity in the bank account operations  from specific foreign entities . The funds from these foreign entities would be transferred to related accounts as opposed to settlement to merchants.

Authorities issued warrants to confiscate Flutterwave’s accounts in April after launching investigations into the company some months earlier. According to The Star, a 90-day provisional seizure authorization has been issued, and the case will be heard on November 7.

These allegations coincide with  a report by a Nigerian journalist David Hundeyin who exposed allegations of un-ethical, criminal and financial offenses by Flutterwave and its CEO Olugbenga Agboola. In that report  which was published in April this year, Agboola is alleged to have created a phantom ‘co-founder’ identity to give himself more shares in the company’s early days. He was reported to have offered some of his employees shares in the company upon employment which he would later on (upon the employees’ exit) indirectly buy through an investment vehicle he controlled at extremely undervalued prices set by himself. Secondly, it was alleged that he did not disclose to Access Bank, his then employer, that he was simultaneously working for them and Flutterwave for about two years whereby he took unfair advantage of his position and assets at the bank in a series of dubious transactions which amounted to illegal insider trading. 

Despite denying the accusations made by Mr. Hundeyin, Mr. Agboola promised to modify the way the company is managed moving forward.

However, according to the indictment issued yesterday, Mr. Agboola carried out questionable transactions totaling $101 million ($12 billion in Kenyan shillings) before authorities became aware of his activities.

The Kenyan Daily also reported that Mr. Agboola and his associates in Nairobi operated covertly to take advantage of the nation’s banking system, making roughly 185 online card payments using the same identifying number.

Several other suspicious transactions were also flagged by anti-money laundering detectives, including another instance in which Mr Agboola allegedly connived with another Nigerian national to launder cash through the Kenyan banking system.

“If indeed Flutterwave was providing merchant services, there was no evidence of retail transactions from customers paying for goods and services. Further, there is no evidence of settlements to the alleged merchants,” Kenyan prosecutors added.

Flutterwave has grown significantly as an African success story in offering cutting-edge solutions to the undeveloped financial services sector on the continent.

Tiger Global and other major players in the international financial markets have contributed to the firm’s funding efforts. However, a number of allegations of fraud and unethical behavior have left the corporation facing its most trying year to date.

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Technology

Congo-based Startup Jambo Deploying App to Help Unbanked African Population

While digital trends, payments and currencies are taking over at a fast rate globally, breaking down barriers and improving access to goods and services without the need for cash, we are seeing a great number of people excluded from our existing financial systems.

According to GSMA, the rapid growth of digital payments in Africa has left 65% of adults across sub-Saharan Africa unbanked. However, as the crypto industry simultaneously sees market growth across Africa, there is an opportunity to merge it into our financial systems to further increase financial inclusion. 

Jambo, a Congo-based startup is helping the unbanked individuals in Africa through its Web3 application. The startup recently raised $7.5 million in seed funding from an array of prominent backers in the crypto industry, including Delphi Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Three Arrows Capital. It also raised a $30 million series A funding round led by crypto-focused venture firm Paradigm.

The startup’s super app is a one-stop mobile application for multiple services such as ride-hailing, banking, communication, and food delivery. Examples include China’s WeChat, India’s Paytm, and Southeast Asia’s Grab which was valued at $40 billion ahead of its U.S. share-listing last year.

Through the app, Jambo wants to introduce young Africans to Web 3 financial ecosystems through play-to-earn gaming and decentralized finance (DeFi) services including currency exchanges and remittances.

“We are looking at bringing the best Web3 services to Africa. Africa is like 1% super-rich and 99% different. There is not as much of a middle class as there would be in any other emerging market in the world, 80% of the population is unbanked. Jambo is improving this by supporting the unbanked.” said James Zhang, Co-founder, and CEO of Jambo.

Africa has been a fast adopter of crypto.  The continent’s crypto market grew by over $100 billion between July 2020 and June 2021, according to the World Economic Forum, which translates into value growth of about 1,200%. Although that may be the case, James emphasizes that educating the African audience is very important so that  Jambo is able to introduce them to the financial opportunities within Web3.
“Think of us as a new bank where you can earn capital. However, most importantly we are here to educate the market on the opportunities in Web3.” he adds.

James Zhang grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and lived through two civil wars. His appreciation for cryptocurrency is based on his experience of that kind of instability.

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Opinions

Cryptocurrency Requires Tougher Regulations, says Bank of England

According to the Bank of England (BOE), a US$2 trillion decline in the value of cryptocurrency assets highlights market vulnerabilities and emphasizes the need for more stringent cryptocurrency regulation and law enforcement.

According to the Financial Policy Committee of the BOE, the market capitalization of digital assets has decreased to roughly US$900 billion from a peak of almost US$3 trillion in late 2021.

Recent instances of “extreme volatility” have exposed market weaknesses, such as liquidity mismatches that have triggered fire sales and participants’ unwinding leveraged positions. According to the Central Bank, those market characteristics could aggravate additional price declines.

Regulators in the UK and Europe have stepped up their criticism of the sector, claiming they are worried that a ripple effect from the cryptocurrency market might harm the larger financial system.

According to the BOE, at the moment, the recent volatility in the cryptocurrency markets isn’t endangering the system as a whole. However, if the activity surrounding crypto assets and its links to banks and other markets continues to expand, systemic dangers could develop if nothing is done.

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Business

Celo Announces Web3 Fund for African Startups Looking to Transition From Web2

Together with multiple partners including Unicorn Growth Capital, Ape Unit, Echo VC, Uncovered Fund, and Flori Ventures, mobile blockchain ecosystem Celo has launched a Web 3 Fund program that calls for Web2 founders to apply for the Celo Africa Web3 Fund by July 15, 2022.

The program will support African startups in payments, remittances, digital assets, crypto, savings and lending, and any other related financial services. With this program, Celo seeks to foster an inclusive financial system that promotes prosperity for everyone.

According to Umar Sebyala, the Ecosystem Lead, Celo, Uganda, startups in Web2 that will participate in the program  will be able to advance to Web3 and better yet access better business opportunities such as strategy, investment, and mentorship that can help scale their businesses.

“We are running this Web3 fund to help founders in Web2 with a desire to have capabilities in the Web3 and blockchain space such that they are able to tap into the opportunities therein. Ugandan startups looking at building on the blockchain can expect to benefit from an in-person workshop with a product and fund strategy component along with access to funding from partner Venture Capital (VC) firms,” he said.

Umar also added that blockchain is becoming a popular element in innovative solutions being presented recently therefore the best way to introduce blockchain to people is through startups that are launching these solutions every day.

“We are interested in bringing the benefits of blockchain to more people and one way to do that is through startups with products used by the masses for use cases like savings, remittances, lending, payments, etc,” Umar said.

Through its VC partners, the Celo Africa Web3 Fund will contribute to financial investments. It will also provide technical assistance to startups through the Celo Developer Guild and its technical partners, including Tatum and Ape Unit.  This will enable Web2 founders across Africa to adopt a strategy and scale their businesses to achieve deeper financial inclusion, lower transaction costs, and more affordable credit.

The Celo Africa Web3 Fund will include an in-person workshop across 5 African countries that is, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa.

The first workshop will be hosted on July 26 in Nairobi, Kenya, Nigeria will follow hosting in August, Ghana in September, Uganda in October, and South Africa in November.

 To apply for the Web3 Fund program, please visit Celo Africa Web3 Fund (hs-sites.com)

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Business

Singapore is considering new regulations for cryptocurrency trading

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has informed the Singaporean Parliament that the Central Bank is considering imposing additional restrictions on cryptocurrency trading. Placing limits on retail participation and regulations on the use and transacting in cryptocurrencies are some of the proposed restrictions.

The discussion started after Murali Pillai, a Member of the Singaporean Parliament, questioned whether the MAS intended to impose additional limitations on cryptocurrency trading platforms in order to prevent less experienced people from engaging in such highly dangerous trades.

Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the Minister in charge of the MAS, answered by explaining that since 2017, the Central Bank has consistently warned that cryptocurrencies are not suitable investments for the retail public.

He detailed that in January, the Singaporean Central Bank restricted the marketing and advertising of cryptocurrency services in public areas and disallowed cryptocurrency trading from being portrayed in a manner that trivializes its risks. Since then digital payment token (DPT) service providers in the country have taken actions to meet the Central Bank’s rules, including removing cryptocurrency ATMs from public areas and taking down advertisements from public transport venues.

The Minister further revealed:

“MAS has been carefully considering the introduction of additional consumer protection safeguards. These may include placing limits on retail participation, and rules on the use of leverage when transacting in cryptocurrencies.”

Minister Shanmugaratnam opined, “Given the borderless nature of cryptocurrency markets, however, there is a need for regulatory coordination and cooperation globally. These issues are being discussed at various international standard-setting bodies where MAS actively participates.”

The MAS reiterated the crypto warning saying:

“Cryptocurrencies are highly risky and are not suitable for the retail public. People can lose most of the money they have invested, or more if they borrow to purchase cryptocurrencies.”

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Business

TRON Breaks the 100 Million Users Mark As It Celebrates Mainnet’s 4th Anniversary

According to data from the blockchain browser TRONSCAN, as of June 25, TRON user accounts officially surpassed the 100 million mark reaching 100,048,526. The TRON Mainnet celebrated its 4-year anniversary of network independence on the same day.

TRON, one of the top three public chains in the world since its May 2018 launch is still committed to building the infrastructure for the decentralized internet. TRON has consequently grown to be one of the biggest and most established blockchain platforms in the world.

TRON integrated BitTorrent into its ecosystem in July 2018, a pioneer in peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol and Web3 services. Its distributed technology allows creators and consumers to have autonomous control over their content and data while being innovative and highly scalable with more than 170 million monthly active users.

TRON has substantially grown its presence in the NFT sector. In March 2021, the TRON-based TRC-721 NFT standard was established, which helped improve one of the world’s largest distributed storage systems, BitTorrent File System (BTFS), which supports NFTs and blockchain-based assets. 

The community has also built a comprehensive infrastructure and partnered with GameFi and NFTFi projects deploying on the TRON blockchain such as APENFT Marketplace and WIN NFT Horse.

TRON dApps has grown significantly over the past few years. TRON now has one of the biggest decentralized application ecosystems in the world and holds the top spot in a number of industries, including distributed storage, stablecoins, DeFi, and NFT.

Currently, the total number of transactions on TRON has exceeded 3.4 billion, the daily transfer volume of stablecoins has surpassed $10 billion worth of U.S. dollars on multiple occasions and the daily settlement stands at least five times that of PayPal. More recently, the TRON DAO Reserve was founded in May 2022 guiding the world’s first over-collateralized decentralized stablecoin USDD and providing 24/7 transparency on real-time collateralization.

Despite the volatile market, the company is steadily scaling and further expanding.

“After four years of sustained growth, TRON DAO is also thrilled to announce that our team is further expanding, offering a unique opportunity to work directly with a Layer 1 Blockchain and touch every corner of our industry. The company has a fun, diverse, and challenging work environment that fosters creativity, efficiency, and teamwork,” the company stated in a press statement.

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Business

Nigerian Fintech Startup, Kora, Expands to the UK

Kora, a Nigerian-based payment infrastructure firm has partnered with the Government of Birmingham through the West Midlands Growth Company, an organization responsible for driving regional investment promotion and economic development.

Kora offers payment API for payment collections and disbursements and has now launched its first UK office.

According to the Chief Operating Officer at Kora, Gideon Oroywiroro, the ambition for Kora since day one has been to make Africa open from a financial standpoint and this new office is an important step for the startup.

Birmingham, which is at the center of the UK’s technology-fastest-growing region, was selected as Kora’s first UK office due to its strong infrastructure and easy access to talent.

With this partnership, the West Midlands Growth Company will support Kora’s ambition to provide the infrastructure that allows local African businesses to go global and global companies to go local in Africa.

“We are excited to have a partner in the West Midlands Growth Company whose ambition is aligned with ours; to remove barriers for local and global commerce,” Gideon Oroywiroro said.

In order to facilitate remittances to Africa by Africans living abroad, Kora launched operations in Nigeria in 2018. Since then, it has developed into an African payment infrastructure that enables multinational corporations to quickly expand across Africa. Businesses can collect pay-ins, and payouts, and settle across popular payment channels with only one connection while using Kora. Its cross-border product is accessible to companies in 25 different African nations.

The Central Bank of Nigeria granted Kora its commercial PSSP license earlier this year, further enabling the business to advance its goal of establishing open standards for payments throughout Africa.

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Business

Meet Flutterwave, a Fintech company creating endless possibilities for businesses through seamless payments

Flutterwave was founded in 2016 in Nigeria as a Fintech company that provides a payment infrastructure for global merchants and payment service providers. The company provides a one-stop platform for businesses to be able to receive and make payments through various avenues such as mobile money and debit or credit cards. 

Since 2016, Flutterwave has expanded into a multinational fintech company that offers an open payment infrastructure to international retailers and payment service providers.  Flutterwave reportedly conducted transactions totaling more than $16 billion in dozens of African countries, according to an Aljazeera report.

Additionally, in 2021, the Fintech company received worldwide recognition for becoming an African fintech unicorn. By definition, a unicorn company is a startup with a valuation of over $1 billion.

Arnold Kwesiga, the Flutterwave Country Operations and Partnerships Manager for Uganda explains that since the company’s inception, Flutterwave has processed over 200 million transactions worth over $16 billion to date and serves more than 900,000 businesses including customers like Uber, Netflix, Flywire, booking.com among others. He adds that Uganda contributes to these numbers as it’s a key market for Flutterwave and as a company, they are working to ensure that they support more businesses in the country including those expanding to Uganda.

As a way of enhancing women’s financial inclusion, the company works with partners like the UNCDF and most recently ​​Women In Technology Uganda (WITU) to drive initiatives that strengthen women’s financial and digital literacy. Through its products, the company has also focused on ensuring more access to digital financial services for women to drive their businesses and growth.

According to Arnold,  Uganda ranks 172nd on Gross National Income (GNI) and 116th on the Network Readiness Index (NRI) according to the World Bank and the Portulans Institute respectively. The main driver of this is influenced by the 49 percent mobile penetration and 16 percent smartphone adoption which is higher than that of Rwanda and or South Africa.

He adds that a key driver for Uganda’s inclusion in the digital economy is mobile money which unlike other digital economies does not require smartphone penetration. As such,  fintechs due to their agility are making strides towards increasing this digital transformation scope knowing full well the perceptions of their target audience but without compromising on the need to harness the potential to do the futuristic stuff. 

Arnold also emphasizes that the KYC process remains a big challenge for fintechs and that the Government has an opportunity to use the national registries to provide data points for fintechs to carry out KYC checks that will match the generally accepted standards without compromising the ease of onboarding for the day-to-day customer.

Flutterwave was recently interviewed in the third edition of 40 Days 40 Fintechs which is organized by HiPipo in partnership with Level One Project, Mojaloop, ModusBox, and Crosslake Technologies and generously supported by the Gates Foundation. The initiative that aims at enabling people to join the digital economy space, offers participants useful tools and an introduction to the industry’s emerging technologies, such as Mojaloop open source software, and guidance from Level One Project foundational material. The skills gained from this initiative cover Level One Project principles, instant and inclusive payment systems (IIPS), inclusive finance, and finTech in general.

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Business

Celsius Network Pays off $50 Million And $64 Million Bitcoin Loans, Liquidation price drops to under $5000.

After a month of hurdles, Celsius seems to be on its way to recovery from looming insolvency. Celsius is now paying back its Bitcoin (BTC) loans. The company has so far repaid a $64 million and a $50 million BTC loan and before that, Celsius sent $72 million worth of Ether earlier to a designated wallet. 

This has further decreased Celsius’ liquidation price to below $5000. The flurry of financial activity has already whipped Crypto Twitter into a state of excitement.

The crypto lending platform seems to have been caught up in cooling the speculation as it is easing the worries of investors by clearing over $114 million of its bitcoin debt.

It has been just over three weeks since the lending crypto network confirmed it would be ‘pausing’ all withdrawals. On June 13 the lender announced that “extreme market conditions,” had precipitated the decision and that over time it hoped to be “in a better position to honor its withdrawal obligations.”

Since that date, there have been a significant number of twists and turns to the tale, with first Nexo and then FTX offering to bail the company out. FTX is said to have walked away from any deal after allegedly finding a $2 billion black hole in the company’s finances. 

Celsius swiftly hired Citigroup and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP to help it restructure its finances as the lender sought to find a route out of insolvency proceedings.

There was so much concern and worry raised from the ongoing troubles from customers and investors. For now, we are seeing that they are hoping for a break in the clouds. As of now, it is unclear as to when Celsius activities will resume.