 We have kind of a small crowd, because it's early this morning, but I wanna welcome you to the last day of DevCon. Thank you all for being here. We're starting off with a panel on Web3 Adoption Africa, and we have a great crew here today. The panel is being moderated by Yosef, and he is being joined by Themes, Tony, Benson, and Anda. Please welcome them. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for making it out. So welcome to this panel conversation about Web3 Adoption on the African continent. How many of you have been to anywhere in Africa here before? Awesome. How many of you are working with anyone from the continent? Fantastic. How many of you are just curious to know about the continent? Awesome. So we'll try to do justice today to give you a little bit of a snippet of the exciting things, the challenges, the perspectives from the ground. And one of the reasons why we actually wanted to do this is many events that at least I've been to around the world. We hear about Africa from people who are looking from the outside in, as opposed to people who are actually building things on the ground. So I think it would be really amazing for us to really understand this beautiful, amazing continent that has so much potential that we don't even understand what that potential is. To give you an example, and I don't know how many of you might be aware, but Africa right now is 1.4 billion people. And we have the fastest growing population, the youngest population. The median age is 18.8 years. So very, very, very young. And we're expected to get between 2.4 to 2.8 billion people by 2050. Just to give you, like, put that in context, we're gonna have twice as many young people as all the young people in China in the next 18 years. 50% more than all the young people in India. And our young people are gonna be almost three times as many young people in the US and Europe combined. So if you're kind of thinking about youth age, workforce, talent base, a lot is developing in the continent of Africa. And the economy is growing really fast as well. We talk about finance, about 500 plus million Africans have access to banking infrastructure. Similar number of people who have access to internet, mostly through mobile phones. Internet money is huge on the continent. The economy growth is expected to reach about 6.7 trillion dollars of consumer and retail and business spending by 2030. So there's a lot of capital. It's not just, you know, sometimes we look at Africa as the population to help and support. But it's actually real talent base, really economic activity, real access is not enough. There's a lot more to build, but at least that kind of sets the core foundation of how we can think about the continent and the opportunities there. So that's a bit of an overview. And Afrobeats is actually gonna take over the world. Yeah, Afrobeats is gonna take over the world. And I'm a piano. And I'm a piano. And I'm a piano. Do you guys have any other genre? Bongo flavor, no? Yeah, so let's just do brief introductions of ourselves here. Maybe Tony, could you kick us off? Yeah, hi everyone. My name is Tony Orlando. Been a software engineer for about 10 years. I currently work at Polygon as the senior education solutions architect with responsibility for zero knowledge technology. I am a early member of developer DAO. I worked at Coordinape and I'm really excited about education opportunities in Africa. And that's why I'm involved with Web3Africa and Afrofuture, which has the premier NFT artists across Africa, and we have fellowships and drops that we do where we work with a lot of African artists. Hi everyone, I'm Andan Naba. I serve as Chief of Operations at the University of Cape Town Financial Innovation up in South Africa. There we essentially translate academic research into novel blockchain applications. So we'll work with masters, PhD and postdoc students to convert their thesis ideas and topics into an actual blockchain application, ranging from everything from offline payments to NFTs for content collaborations to privacy preserving to wallets. Great, thanks Abiyah. Hi, my name is Femes. I'm a DAO governance engineer and researcher helping DAOs and protocols build better governance. I'm also the co-founder of the DAO governance education sessions, which is basically a community of almost close to 100 people of DAO governance operators and enthusiasts so that we can learn different models and tactics to build better together. Good morning everyone. My name is Benson Joguna. I come from Kenya. I work with the Ethereum Foundation as a fellow to promote the next billion use cases from Africa. I'm also a founder of Safari DAO, an East Kenya community and contributor in Africa DeFi Alliance, and also working with Small Holder Farmers to de-risks them from effects of climate change. Glad to be here. Expecting good conversations, thank you. Awesome. And my name is Yosef Ayela. I am from Ethiopia, grew up in Tanzania and Kenya, and a huge part of my passion right now is increasing the level of education around WebTree across the continent, seeing a lot more protocols and projects that are building the future economic infrastructures in the continent coming out, and also helping develop a new narrative of the continent, which is so far we've been talking about Africa needing crypto to develop and bank the unbanked and all of that, but actually the deeper I go, the more I see that actually here, the WebTree community really needs Africa to fulfill its potential and reach the stage where we have mass adoption and billions of people using the technologies that we're building as their plan A, as opposed to an option to something that's already working. So, and we're supposed to have actually so many more African builders here with us to share these perspectives, but because of the visa challenges, many African builders couldn't be here, which is kind of a case in point that a huge part of the world is closed off for Africans at the moment, and so we need to have DEF CON and many events happening on the continent so that many of you can come and experience the full potential and opportunity on the continent. Yeah, and to actually put a number to that, we had about eight builders. These are people who are building stuff on the ground in Africa who couldn't get Colombian visa, so yeah. Yeah, so DEF CON in Africa sometime very soon, let's make it happen. Yeah. Awesome, so we have a number of themes to unpack here today and I guess the biggest one that many of us are really excited about is around the talent base and what that really looks like in the context of Web3. And I love to just ask themes just to share with us a little bit of what are the aspects of African talent that is really not understood and what are the biggest opportunities that you see when it comes to Web3 and African talent? Yeah, I think many things that are misunderstood around the talent in Africa is that we have close to one of the largest numbers of entrepreneurs in the region. You know, there is this continual narrative of helping the unbanked, but there's an opportunity also to engage those in mid or senior level positions to transition their skill sets into the ecosystem. So I think that there's a huge potential, particularly since the majority of the population is under the age of 35. So we have an opportunity to grow to build together and the adoption when it comes to the internet or DeFi will be growing rapidly, but it should be led by Africans for Africans. Yeah, maybe to contribute in what I've seen. Web2 developers, very talented. We have most high number of developers working for international organizations remotely. Others have moved out. So we see a lot of interests for Web2 developers to move to Web3. So in fact, one of the barriers that we are solving is the education bit, because most of the Web2 will ask you, why should I move from Web2 to Web3? Then you realize it's a capacity building issue because of the benefits Web3 offers. So a lot of work being done by Polygon to move people from Web2 to Web3. And yeah, that has been mentioned as one of the challenges, but we need to continually close that gap. I guess from my side as well, we partnered with Polygon and Impact Plus to do a Web2 to Web3 bootcamp for developers about two weeks ago, and we intend on doing their monthly now, focusing primarily on people at the university doing computer science, we're now trying to transfer over. And we're seeing so much interest. Our list was oversubscriber, people who wanted to attend, and that just shows you how interested people are. We also have the first master's in fintech in blockchain at the University of Cape Town. Every year oversubscribed 55% women this year, 90% black Africans. It's amazing to see, and yeah. Thank you. Yeah, so for me, I think I see a lot of potential inside of the education space, specifically because, I mean, I was there before Google or Amazon or Facebook had presence in Africa, and so a lot of my friends, we were just like regular developers. And Google eventually came and set up shop, Microsoft came and set up shop, Facebook came through Andela, and we saw like a surge in terms of just income and just impact and just quality, even of like engineering. And I think Web2 understands the potential of Africa. And I think I'm not seeing protocols fully understanding the full potential of Africa inside of Web3. A lot of what I'm seeing currently like extractive initiatives where it's basically shilling. So I am ex-protocol, I'm actually gonna come and set up, and the whole goal is for me to actually get you to use my platform. I don't really care about you as a developer. And I think one of the biggest challenges with that is that inside of Web2 incentives are really clear. I am here to do a job, you are here to pay me. In Web3, I think it should be slightly different. And so how we motivate and how we educate existing engineering talent in Africa really, really matters. At the level of just base interest, I think the announcement of the Polygon Africa Bootcamp, the blog post was the best performing blog post in the history of the Polygon blog. So the interest is massive and is huge, but if we don't have education initiatives that are centering around empowering the actual developers, then you will actually shill. And the developers are getting smarter. So they know that your protocol will offer swag and will offer bounties and will offer this and that. Fine, I'll take the money. And then I'll move on from this to that to that. But so the main thing that I would like to see really is like the very sober consideration in terms of what is the level of education impact that I want to have. And then I think anybody who thinks like that would have a massive ROI because you will be building community, you'll be building the next wave of African developers. One of the things that is a little different from many other markets that is hardly understood is actually most devs, if you just even look at developers, most devs are self-taught or learning how to do development on the job. So recently Google and IFC did a study and they found actually it's only a third of developers that learned the skills through formal education. The rest are basically self-taught. And actually when I'm on the ground and chatting with a bunch of people at community events and so on, most people I'm coming across, they taught themselves solidity on YouTube without anyone hand-holding them. And so when you think about education, yeah you can have programs and structures and all of that but also understand that it's a very determined, hungry, self-driven community that you're working with. And I think that really sets African talent very different from global talent because there's less entitlement, less of a position of hey, I have 15 things I can work on, I might show up, I might not show up. It's, the world really means a lot to people and they're building and investing their time and energy to actually build a career and get involved in this space. And actually talking about web two and web three, when I talk to people who are transitioning from web two to web three, this narrative and this idea that there's no one basically creating a ceiling for you. You're not moving, you're not moving upward at a rate that your manager sets for you. You're not being told what you can work, what you cannot work on in a way that actually boxes your potential. I think web three and getting into this space means freedom, means self-determination. And that really speaks to that sort of individual driven surf learning mentality. Yeah, I've also seen, apart from web two or the developer talent, we have other talents like community builders. People were really good in mobilization, really good in online, social media communication, doing a good job because at the end of the day, developers get to learn of things going on through such people. And yeah, it's still a space that we feel needs more and more people. We see chains, EVM one chains, hiring, relationship managers, community builders, ambassadors, which is a really good thing since it helps push even the benefits of web three into the market. Outside of a focus of development, like my background is in public policy and information sciences. So there's a lot of opportunity for people to actually participate in this ecosystem. I think what also sets Africa apart is that we're solving problems for today and not 10 years from now. And so I think that we have the opportunity to support this entrepreneurial spirit that already exists there to actually not only help the continent but to help globally as well because many people don't have the luxury to wait for 10 years for something to get better. We have to build better systems but we also have to build bridges so that we can actually leverage the talent that is already there to build a better ecosystem. I completely agree. A lot of the work we do at the university, there'll be lines of people trying to get into our hub. When people found out there was a blockchain-based hub at the University of Cape Town, they thought it was a lie. So people would always come knocking our door back. Is this really for web three stuff? And they were like, yes it is. And we've really centered ourselves around solving African problems. It's uniquely African problems because we see the power of web three and blockchain and what it can do. And on your point, I feel like this community needs us more than we need them. And when you're on the ground, you really get to see that. So it's quite telling. I have one hypothesis and it'd be great to hear if it's true or not and what you all think about it. So one pattern that I'm observing is especially younger talent gets into web three. Initially it's all about how can I increase my earning capacity? How can I earn global income and stay at home? And then once people get to a certain level of comfort and say, hey, I'm out of survival mindset, let me actually think about what I can build. What sort of problems can we solve together? Is that something that you guys are seeing from across the continent? Yes, that's for sure. I can give you a story of myself. When I finished campus where, in fact, education in campus, I did computer science but it was only 20% programming. You do the rest on your own. Self-training, all developers, not one has learnt everything from school. You do it by self-training. Now, after I finished, I started a startup. In fact, I was selected among the 20 budding entrepreneurs. But then you have to pay bills, you have to move from the village to the city. You have to pay rent, you have to eat. So without, for example, funding and you're starting such a startup, your mindset is, hey, let me stop trying to build this, let me start surviving, let me start paying for my rent, let me look for food, and then I'll come back later. So actually, I stopped building the startup and moved on to former employment for a while to save up. But actually, it's a real thing, yes. I think on the funding point, there's definitely a shortage. But we're now seeing interest like CVVC from Zuchin, Switzerland, just open offices in Cape Town. They're raising a $20 million fund, trying to invest in, I think, over 100 startups all blaze in blockchain. And a lot of other VCs now, based on the continent, are now looking to Web3. So I'm hoping the funding gap can be filled. But I think it's not just VCs I need to come to the table. It's also the protocols as well that need to fund these projects at an early stage, kind of like what UNICEF is also doing with their venture fund. Someone has to take the risk first, unfortunately, or fortunately, and I'm hoping to see more of that. Yeah, and I think that's a really important point, because there's a lot of aversion, even when I talk to protocols about doing something in Africa, one of the biggest questions I have is we want to see something you've done before. We want to see something that looks basically, they want to see a model, a European model that applies to something that they've seen before, before they want to invest in Africa. And it's usually a really frustrating conversation for me, because I'm like, if you're looking for something that is European, then please go and build there. But specifically for me, and I'm sorry, I just won't have a filter, because I'm so tired of all these conversations, and people have the passion. And every time they say, yeah, we have a passion for Africa, we care about diversity and inclusion, but nobody wants to put their money where their mouth is. But specifically to your particular question, that is my own experience, but also that is the experience of very many people, in terms of because of the socioeconomic status of Africa, most of our developers have that initial need for like a UBI that enables them to actually think and ideate and just be at peace. And so which is why I think some of those learn-to-earn models would actually be really, really successful. Because once it is, I don't have to think about meals and all of these things and making my rent, and I could just focus on building. It becomes something that is actually really, really powerful. I remember I was in a boot camp, and a bunch of the people I was in, this was like a global boot camp, and a bunch of the people I was in, I was with were from different parts of the world, and they said that they actually quit their jobs to be a part of the boot camp. And I at the time just could not afford to actually do that because of the socioeconomic status, but over time we have to start to invest more and more, and I think some of those learn-to-earn models would be really impactful for protocols to begin to consider. And just one thing I want to present that Femes touched upon is that at the moment we're talking a lot about devs, but there's so much other type of talent that exists there. And I think one of the most exciting patterns that I've also seen as an entry point is writers. People coming in and doing technical writing, and it's an incredible amount of talent, and using that to actually help translate what this space is about to a broader audience, which is really important, is really valuable. And there's Bankless Africa, also like a growing community that's built on top of the Bankless Dow. I don't know, do you guys follow the Bankless Dow newsletter? Pretty much every newsletter that I'm receiving, somewhere on top, is an update from Bankless Africa. So that's a group that's got their stuff together. Yeah, I think the thing is, is that I don't want to... Like there's a continued narrative that all Africans are poor and rely on a scarcity mindset. And I think that that's what it's really important to really engage those in the middle and senior level positions, because although they are in a mid or senior level positions, when they apply for jobs in the United States or accounts in the United States, they say that they don't have American experience. And so for me, working in Dow provides me an access not only to network, but opportunity to actually build things and build my credibility within it too. And so I think that it's really important to make those connections. So devs transitioning to Web 3, that's easy, right? And so you bring in more writers, you bring in more researchers, you bring in more brand strategists. And there we're actually going to be providing an opportunity, not only for them to develop funding, but also build reputation, which is acceptable in the globalized perspective. And so I think that what we really should be focusing on is like our lowest hanging fruits, and that's really the mid to senior level, because when you act on a scarcity mindset, you're not going to be able or have the ability to take advantage of the networks or opportunities or take risks within those ecosystems. And so for me, I think like Dow's are an opportunity for you to actually build products, test it out and also build a network so that you can grow not only regionally, but internationally as well. Yeah, and just my own personal hypothesis is Dow's are just digital tribes. And so basically the Dow model inside of Africa would have particular success and different kind of like application, just simply because of the whole notion of community and people working together towards a common good and people having that kind of philosophy, I think is something that could be explored really powerfully. I know in South Africa we have the saying, I am because we are. And I feel like Dow's really embody that. It goes beyond you as an individual. And I think, yeah, the uptake in Dow's in Africa, I think will be high based on just our culture and how we look at working together. Individuality's not really a thing there. It's all about teams and communities and tribes. One really cool project that I've been building a good relationship with so far that many of us know is called WebTree Bridge. It's based in Nigeria and they've been around since 2019. And I find them like to do such a cool mix between community building, hands-on skills education, as well as providing the values based foundation so that people are getting to this space really know, first, why does WebTree even matter? What are the values of decentralization? Why does it make sense? And it's one of the projects that is basically like having people stay there full-time in person, being fed, being housed, learning, building together, doing hackathons, doing challenges, building the online profile, getting the GitHub pages populated and the credentials online. And participating in an economy where actually no one really cares what your name is, where you live, where you're from, how old you are. If you know how to execute, if you know how to build, you've got a track record. People will work with you. And I think that's such a game-changer for a huge part of the continent where people try to apply for jobs and all of that. And it's hard. It's hard and there's a bias against, you're from Africa, people don't know what to trust. But if you move to a much more meritocratic environment, actually like your work speaks for itself. And I think that's such a powerful aspect of what's being built here. Yeah, and please don't do location-based pay. Please. Because it's not fair. It's not fair that a developer who has a similar output, a African developer who has a similar output to an SF developer deserves to get paid the same amount. And I think we need to actually correct that. It's actually, it's not even just don't do it, it's the other way around. Like people I know who are being paid a fraction of what their counterparts in other worlds are paying. A fifth. A fifth, yeah. They're basically saying, yeah, I'm just here to do what I need to do, but as soon as I find something better, I'm gonna leave. So actually, you're not getting someone who'll stick with you for a long time because this is an open ecosystem. So you'll have more to lose in the long term if you start taking shortcuts, the same way as layer ones in protocols are coming during education as marketing. You're breeding mercenaries and people will leave you right away. People are smart. So if you align your success with the success of people, you will be the really solid infrastructure and solid users, solid team members. Well, I think the important thing about Web 3.0 too is that it has an opportunity for personal branding, right? And so independent of what location you live in, if you do really good work and you promote yourself and you produce something that has a product market fit and generates revenue, then you have that opportunity. And so just to add with DAOs though, so DAOs are not necessarily places for people to just buy or develop a community. It's a potential for you to develop a revenue-generating model that aligns not only on value and purpose but actually output as well. So for me, DAOs are not a place for me to necessarily build things, but it's a place for me to actually network, upscale, and then build things outside of it. Yeah. I like to just shift the gear, conscious of time towards financial services and access to finance because that's a huge part of this conversation and a low hanging fruit as well. Maybe come to your Benson just to let us give us a little bit of a perspective from the lens you look at in terms of how Web3, crypto, and financial services are sort of working together. Thank you. In terms of financial services, when it comes to peer-to-peer transactions, Africa is leading. That shows a huge need. We feel the problems of outright leading in financial services is some of the countries, the regulations are not outright saying, we support this, we're just saying, use it at your own peril, use it at your own risk. Others are saying, we completely burn it, others are quiet, but in the ground, people actually trading peer-to-peer exchange and the statistics show Africa is leading globally. Now, on the other end in Web2, in terms of mobile money, we see also the highest number of transactions coming from Africa. Where the penetration of mobile, particularly I talk about Kenya, is very high, which is over 98%. And that means people are actually using digital money. It's digital because they move to a shop, give out fiat currency and receive it as a text message on their phone and they're able to exchange for goods and services. So what this shows is the digital education. People are ready, the curve for digital is not as high. It's very easy to train anybody because of the experiences of using mobile money. Just one example on that. So every time I'm traveling in Kenya, Ethiopia and Nigeria, I'm not using my card, I'm not using fiat, I'm only using peer-to-peer, moving a stablecoin to local currency either through online banking or through M-Pesa. And basically pray for every single bill, even small little shop to get a candy to the boat ride in the middle of a village or whatever using that. So some of the infrastructure actually is way more sophisticated than what you have in the West in terms of payment systems and all of that. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah, so the infrastructure is good, the internet needs can be better, but now we have challenges in still the same, the transaction fees, the loan interest rates, such things which we think need to be sold. So what's the biggest need then? If we have some of those things, what is the biggest need? So the biggest need I feel is the, for my own perspective, is the credit gap. So more people need to access credit that can help them in their enterprises. But then these people, yes, they're using mobile money, but then there's what we call credit scoring. We are glad the new president of Kenya is saying we need to remove people from the blacklist because most people who've done mobile money borrowing and they were not able to pay are in some blacklist and they cannot borrow again. So we feel we need to open access to credit and in a way build economic identities through their transactions, which now we can help them access cheaper loans here. I just wanted to add in the areas of remittance as well is what the benefits. So remittance, if not everybody knows, is when you send money from two back to your home country. And so those also have like a middle cost as well. And then the efficiency of sending cryptocurrency and the immediateness of it as well as a benefit. And that's like a billion dollar industry right there. So I think that we have an opportunity really because they're already using peer-to-peer to kind of merge that and also get paid in crypto. So if you get paid in your stable coins or particular, like it's not location-based payment. 88% of all crypto transactions are cross-border transactions. So the remittance part is actually really huge and a huge part of it has been driven by shortage of foreign currency is really, really hard to access dollars. And a big part of it is we're just not exporting enough because we're importing and some countries keep part of their foreign currency reserve in the French treasury. So just to give you some education here, there's this thing called the CFA which stands for French Colonies of Africa. 14 countries are on it, it's Saturday, 1945. What that basically means is they have a second currency called CFA in relation to their local currency and in return, they have to deposit 50% of their foreign currency reserve in the French treasury. And the French government also determines sort of how much you can borrow, land and all of that as a nation. And basically you're earning income but half of it you don't get to bring it to your country. And that basically is, and some parts like it's, some people say it's helping create lower inflation compared to other countries, but you don't have autonomy over your money and it creates such a huge need. And so you go to Ethiopia, for example, there's 100% premium for accessing dollars and stable coins. So you basically paying twice as much for $1 as the bank rate is. You got in Nigeria last week, it was 70% premium compared to the bank rate because there's such high demand for foreign currency and people are basically overriding that and using peer-to-peer stable coin to basically buy things from overseas in order to sell. Like how can you do any type of commerce if our global economy is highly interconnected? So the remittance part is actually, to me it's like more than a trillion billion dollar industry across the continent and we still haven't fully cracked it. I also think when we speak about banking and banked financial services in Africa, it's not one sort of structure. There's so many countries. Africa's financial services system is completely different from Kenya's and the solutions we might need are very different. Maybe we share similarities with sort of alternative sources of credit but in terms of peer-to-peer tranches or something, it's fundamentally different. So I think when you guys and anyone speaks about it, don't speak about it as one monolith idea. There's so many different countries and cultures and solutions that can be built. Yeah. Yeah, so I think one of the most impactful areas, I live in Trinidad and Tobago and my mother lives in Kenya and during COVID I had to send money to her. And I think the payment rails that were available at the time, there's virtually no way for me to send money from my Trinidadian bank to her Kenyan bank, none. So I have to go through PayPal and not my PayPal, but my close friend who lives in the US. I kind of have to use his account and then he then settles directly to Empesa and I think it costs me about 40% in transaction fees. I got her onto crypto and life is a lot easier now. So I just wanna shout out some of those practical examples and I know there's an ETH conference but BitNob is using the Bitcoin Lightning Network right now and they launched and you could actually trade and send like do foreign remittances directly to Empesa using the Bitcoin Lightning Network. And those are some of the like interesting applications that we need, but specifically one of the areas that I think would be is actually severely constrained is like on-ramps and off-ramps and I don't wanna preempt the Nest conversation which is like regulation, but on-ramps and off-ramps continue to be like a bit of a constraint. And so right now we have a lot of peer-to-peer mechanisms that allow people to exchange fiat for crypto and there's need for some level of just base innovation and regulatory support so that we could actually have sufficient, well, clear, clear, clear, specifically on-ramps because regulators realize that they could actually stop crypto on-ramps and that helps keep the foreign currency within their area. But I did want to also talk about this not just in the context of foreign remittances and Africans need money and send us a dollar a day, but specific innovation on, I was hoping Ben could give us like a TLDR of what he does and the specific innovation that he's doing side of the DeFi space and specifically with insurance. So Ben, could you just give us like an overview of what you do? Because I think it's one of the most innovative concepts I've heard. Thank you, thank you very much. So for us, we endeavor to solve the insurance penetration problem. So there was only 2% penetration of insurance for the agri sector. So the target was enterprising individuals who were able to generate some small income. How can we ensure they're able to generate this consistently and it can help them grow and eventually without any help from outside, they can build themselves. So because we realized one event like One Drought wipes out their savings, wipes out their money to use for next season money to pay for school fees. So we went, so we started with the farmers and we actually realized the lack of participation in insurance is the lack of trust. So they would receive insurance somebody. So the problem, traditional insurance companies came in, brought in agents who sold, but then they disappeared. You don't see them after six months again when the next season comes, it's when they come. Then when it comes to payouts, we don't know how much, when, how it's all a black box, it's a very opaque. So with that problem, we now put this on blockchain. Where now we're able to put up the triggers. So we are paying its parametric insurance. So if there's rainfall below a certain parameter, then we trigger a payout. That list is generated and connected to mobile money, which now using a smart contract, it's able to constantly check the existing weather conditions. And then after a period of time, it can say now pay out this amount of money to this person. The second thing using USSD, that's where you dial the 800 hash ETC. The farmers can now check the status of their policy. By dialing, they will be told, okay, you have triggered 25%, so by the end of the season, we foresee you will get around 400 Kenyan shillings. So which is really bridging the trust problem and helping more people want now to adopt insurance, especially the farmers, yeah. Yeah, I really like the experimentation around insurance space because as you said, we talk a lot about finance and it's all about sending, receiving money and also just local payment systems. But if you think about all the different sophisticated, economic and financial infrastructures that you need, basically we have some things, but we've got a lot to build and I think what WebTree Rails allow us to do is build them with the right fundamentals and in a way that actually works for the local economic and social political dynamics. And I think that's something that sometimes people from outside coming in saying, hey, this makes a lot of sense, let's just build it for you. Actually, it's not that simple because you're entering a whole economic environment where the dynamics are very, very different from what you're used to. And I think what your example really shows how you can build a bottom-up solution to addressing such a huge market. Let's talk regulation and policy. But before we jump into the specifics, I guess one thing I'd like to mention is a lot of the conversations about crypto policy that have happened so far with policymakers is, hey, how can we legalize this token? How can we buy this crypto? How can we make it easier to sell? And I think some conversations that are really missing is really zooming out and helping educate African policymakers and leaders. Why should we move to a digital economy? Let's have that broader conversation to really help understand why we're in it. And then the token is really the last part of the discussion and walked through the whole journey of why this makes sense for you, why you'll have actually more sovereignty, more income, more stability, and building that narrative. So I just want to kind of point out that's a narrative that's really missing. But I think it is important for us to also talk about the regulatory conversation, specifically to access to financial services. Yeah, so I hail from Kenya and we have one of the most vocal central bank, well, one of the most vocal governors who speaks very negatively about crypto. So he's very team NGMI and we've seen how that has stifled innovation inside of the crypto space because we had startups that would have been much further along. This is five years ago and I won't go into the specifics of all the drama that occurred. But essentially the level of the intervention that is actually required is a lot more education around, well, the education directed towards policymakers and regulators and specifically showing them models of how regulation could actually work inside of this particular space that makes things that basically allows innovation and development to actually occur inside of the ecosystem. And I think a lot of the paradigm that they basically come from is that they see crypto as being like opposed to what they are trying to do and do their existing financial system while it is actually complementary. And so we need a lot more education in actually showing that, there's actual economic impact and value in you creating a favorable regulatory environment for the adoption of crypto. And I think Shidi was telling us a story about how they intervened in Uganda. And the central bank said, we don't want crypto, we don't want to see anybody using crypto. And they went and they had conversations with the regulators and they were able to change. And a few weeks later, there was actual development. We have no such luck in Kenya, but those are the types of conversations that I think we need to have in terms of just exposing the complimentary nature of crypto, hell, even if it's a CBDC, I will take it, but yeah. Yeah, I know what we've done. We've working with the South African Reserve Bank, so our central bank, and they've funded two masters students and a PhD student to do thesis research around financial stability and cryptocurrencies. And they're now coming to the table if you've listened to the South African governor before they were very anti-cryptocurrency, but in the last two months, they're now forcing all the local banks to reopen the accounts of the cryptocurrency exchanges. And this is months of us just going back and forth and speaking to them. Imagine getting master students to write a thesis topic over two years. And they're starting to listen, we think, because you're right, it does stifle innovation a lot in African governments, so I hate to generalize. They want control over everything. And unfortunately, in this game, that's not how it works. So I hope to hear a different... Yeah, when I actually talked to people who are working directly with central banks across African countries, the sentiment that I'm hearing is actually, they're not categorically opposed to this space. So it's not sort of a fundamental like, no, no, no. The challenge that... I don't know about Kenyans, but maybe I'm talking from the Nigerian lens here now. The nurse that I'm hearing is actually that they are trying to get to more financial sovereignty, like themselves, because there's a lot of foreign interference, there's a whole lot of dependence, even for printing your own currency, more than 40 African countries prints their bills overseas, and they pay 6% fee on all the currency that they have shipped to the country to whoever is doing the printing press work. And I think they're interested in central CBDCs. I think they're like, what I'm hearing is, they're building like an internal network across many central banks across the whole continent to even be able to do settlement amongst one another without having to go through SWIFT, or without having to go through this major global players and having to use US dollars or Euro and all of that. So those are the problems that they're trying to grapple with. And so I think working with them on a step-by-step basis, I think as you talked about, could potentially yield better results long-term. Yeah, let me load some government institutions because we have others who are really helpful in, for example, the capital markets where they're creating a sandbox. They say, come and experiment with anything that is, looks like a security, which includes crypto. So this is giving people opportunity to apply. Then, for example, the regulator in insurance also has a sandbox, come and experiment some of the solutions. So such, if you see more governments going that direction, to be really helpful because even M-Pesa which is now really huge in the continent began with regulation issues. The central bank could not know where to place it. Is it under the bank side? Is it under the savings side? So it didn't, yeah, but because it was just an innovation they had to adopt. So I feel it's the same thing with crypto as I read a commentary online. It's a host that has been let out of the race. Now it's already out, it's running, you can't block it. So you, yeah, like you see one thing that the governments are also noticing is the capital or the money coming in. For example, in terms of money that came in Africa between mid 2020 and 2021 was 1.105. something billion dollars. So when they see such things, they say, oh, it can actually benefit, it can actually bring in development in the country. So I think more and more of the regulators are changing their stance. You even had some comments from the governor of like the Kenya central bank a weeks ago and you can hear the change of stances or because now they understand crypto and blockchain better. So just to add to that, politicians are motivated by their constituents, right? And so why I got into Dow governance because I was a political scientist as well is that our systems weren't designed for us. So I think community design is really important when you're doing these, but also you can engage people through experiential learning by participating in governance. So they actually show up for those meetings and say, hey, we want this to actually be implemented. And so I think we have an opportunity really to participate and design better systems that we can then replicate into the real world. I meant to that. Just conscious of time here. We have a number of other things to cover with you all but would be amazing just to hear questions that people have. So that we engage a bit more. Does anyone want to ask questions here? How's it going? Really enjoyed the panel. I have a lot of questions, but I'm just gonna ask too. I want to know what are the sentiments of pan-Africanism in light of crypto and how it enables nations to be a lot more collaborative especially on one network like Ethereum? And then second question is just, are you all on Twitter, social media, anything? For me, I can't say I've seen cryptocurrency bringing people want to become one Africa, no. Still a political issue. The economics of it has not really influenced the politics yet, yeah. Gotcha. And my Twitter is benson underscore juguna. Telegram is ben juguna. Juguna starting with an N. N. I think why we're talking about Africa as one thing is because we can collectively design these systems or talk about it in a more greater light. But it is, it has like 52 countries. It's a continent, right? It's very deep, it has histories as well. And so I think that what really aligns us is that we have a huge unemployment rate. We have entrepreneurs and we have opportunities to build the continent better, but that is not devoid of our individual countries or cultures or motivations. And I'm on Twitter, I'm Themes Chat, so F-E-E-M-S, Chats, C-H-A-T-S. I think beyond the pan-African question, it's too early to tell as well. Hopefully this growing youth population, we might see something. We've tried to bring different African central banks together to discuss crypto. We had a conference in Cape Town in April. It wasn't that greatly attended. We're trying to do them sort of year on year and we'll keep you updated there. My Twitter, under, A-N-D-A, N-G-C-A-B-A, underscore. You wish I could. Yeah. What is the question again? What pan-Africanism? Yeah, but so I think we're actually, just to save on time, I think what my other panelists have said is actually sufficient and it gives a really good outlook of where we are and I think we'll get there eventually. I have a slightly different view. Like a lot of the younger people, like 20 and under that I engage with, I don't sense this world view of, hey, I am this identity, you are that identity, therefore like we're in different terms. I think the shared narrative that I hear is, we wanna thrive in this world. We want a piece of this world as much as everyone else has, right? And the aspect of just like this shared experience of Africa in the current geopolitical and economic part, I'm kind of being positioned right at the bottom. This is like that shared experience that's there. So I think there's a commonness of people wanting to live a better life and have much of this world that we enjoy here in Western and other parts of the world is something that I keep noticing. And my Twitter handle is Y-O-S-E-P-H-A-Y-E-L-E. All right, Tony Orlando, T-O-N-Y-O-L-E-N-D-O. Oh, awesome, well, thank you. I hope this is just the beginning of the conversation, and I hope we give you enough sprinkles. Talk to us, come to the continent, let's make DEF CON Africa happen somewhere very soon. And let's do this.