From Remittance to Startups, How Bitcoin Is Used in Africa
With the high mobile phone penetration already in place, Africa is set to enable more users to download a Bitcoin wallet on their devices. In an email last year, Werner van Rooyen from Bitx, one of Africa’s biggest Bitcoin exchange firms, wrote that Africa has been waiting for something like BitcoinCT r: 8 for a long time. Why? He said the continent of over a billion people has been underserved by financial institutions for such a long time. Some of the factors he cited in this regard are the high cost of financial infrastructure, high fees compared to the average earnings, high cost of....
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Bitcoin is rising pretty fast in Africa. In fact, the digital currency has been growing exponentially all around the world. This year there has been a substantial growth in investments related to the digital currency and Africa is no exception to this trend. A lot of startups are springing up with innovative applications for Bitcoin in the African context; these innovative applications are disrupting the remittance market and making the cryptocurrency available over SMS. The main Bitcoin startups leading this new revolution in the continent are already widely known within the community:....
International remittance is ostensibly one of the most compelling use cases for bitcoin and digital currencies. Recorded remittances to Africa grew four-fold between 1990 and 2010 and have increased steadily since. The World Bank projects $39bn in remittances to sub-Saharan Africa this year. Yet with the continent's fast-growing middle class and tech-savvy youth population, the high cost of remitting to sub-Saharan Africa, particularly from within Africa, has brought the subject of financial inclusion under new light. Africa has some serious market potential for bitcoin companies;....
The 6th annual Remittance & Mobile Money Expo, held today and tomorrow – Feb. 2 and 3 in Lagos, Nigeria, will address the challenges and opportunities in the emerging African remittance market. Billing itself as the largest gathering of stakeholders in the remittance ecosystem serving Africa, the conference will be at the Lagos Oriental Hotel. The theme of the conference, hosted by MobileMoneyAfrica, a resource for mobile financial inclusion, is “lowering transaction cost.” There will be more than 30 speakers. According to MobileMoneyAfrica, Nigeria is the largest remittance....
When the words Bitcoin and Africa appear in a sentence, the word remittance usually follows. When Bitcoin first hit the mainstream in 2013, its low-cost money transfer feature was hailed as the solution to the overly expensive remittance costs charged by the large money transfer operators (MTOs), Western Union and MoneyGram. This is especially true when it comes to transferring funds to Africa. However, in the eight years since Bitcoin was first launched, bitcoin remittances in Africa have not really taken off. Bitcoin’s Challenges in Kenya. Bitcoin is an industry that regularly likes to....
FastCompany’s report revealed that overseas remittance totaled $429 billion in 2016. Some of the largest Remittance markets include China and the Philippines. Already, bitcoin startups have begun to dominate the remittance markets in the two countries, with the Philippines leading bitcoin remittance innovation. Both domestic and international remittance is a massive market within the Philippines. Companies such as Lhuillier and Palawan operate thousands of branches throughout the country, with deeper market penetration in comparison to international remittance companies such as Western....