African Bitcoin Startup Wins Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grant, Launches Blockchain Event Series in Nairobi
Bitcoin startup Bitsoko announced that it soon will begin sponsoring a Blockchain Event Series in Nairobi, Kenya. The events, held monthly at the iHub innovation hub, will focus on Blockchain education and networking, and offer opportunities for local startups to pitch. The Bitsoko team, which is spread across Africa with a presence in Ghana, Zimbabwe,....
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Blockchain-based company Factom has announced it will soon secure medical records on its platform. The firm received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to provide immutable and easily accessible records. Gates Foundation Grant to Produce Distributed Medical Database. Factom, the blockchain as-a-service (BaaS) technology company, has....
Last month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded bitcoin startup Bitsoko $100,000 to help troubleshoot Africa's now-ubiquitous mobile money systems. The news, which followed a long application process beginning last September, came as a surprise to the team of six, not least because Bill Gates has been publicly skeptical about the future of the payment technology in the developing world. "They [the foundation] had not worked with any other bitcoin startups to our knowledge, so we were really not too sure if they would want to come on and us be their first," Daniel Bloch, Bitsoko's....
Last month, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has funded Ghana based blockchain startup Bitsoko in a startup competition called Gran Challenges Explorations, which focused on promoting wide spread acceptance of mobile money by small merchants. Bitsoko received a research grant of US$100,000, and with it, Bitsoko aims to expand its bitcoin merchant payment processing and bitcoin wallet services to Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone. The project is entitled “Enable Universal Acceptance of Mobile Money Payments,” and if the project is successful, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will offer another....
Bitsoko is a Nairobi-based Android digital currency wallet, funded by Bill & Melinda Gates foundation that aims to integrate the Blockchain technology to the mobile payment market in Africa. The startup enables people to send money from a smartphone for a 0.1% transaction fee. The company's mission is to bring digital currency to African people and to facilitate money transfers to Kenya. Bitsoko, today announced plans to sponsor a series of educational events in Nairobi, Kenya, on the Blockchain. This will be 6 events held monthly at the iHub innovation hub that will focus on Blockchain....
Bill and Melinda Gates at Lee High School in Houston, Texas. Source: gatesfoundation.org. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft an co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation did an 'AMA' (ask-me-anything) today on Reddit.com, and interestingly, the most-voted question to be answered related to digital currency. Asked by user 'shiruken': "What are you thoughts about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin?" An hour later, Mr. Gates responded with the following (bold emphasis ours): The foundation is involved in digital money but unlike Bitcoin it would not be anonymous digital money. In Kenya M-pesa....