 Morning DevCon. How's everybody doing today? So today we're going to talk about Africa, part of the world that we all know but oftentimes overlooked. But before we start I want to ask you how many of you here are from Africa? Awesome. How many of you have been to the continent before? How many of you have worked with people, collaborated, invested in? How many of you are Africa curious? Awesome. So we're here to talk about you know a beautiful continent that means a lot to me. A little bit about myself. I'm from Ethiopia, grew up in Kenya and Tanzania, lived in Nigeria and when I was growing up the predominant narrative is that you are at the bottom of the pyramid and if you want to do big things in the world you got to leave. The best building was the airport, the best road was the road to the airport. And so I followed that narrative, moved to the west. For about eight years I worked in experimenting with immigration systems to find holes within the gated world so that we can have a global talent base and a borderless vision. And then I discovered Web 3 and where Web 3 made sense to me was actually through the Africa lens and that's a vision I want to share with you today. So the predominant narrative we've been using so far is that African need is crypto, right? Let's bank down banked. That's been the narrative from day one. Let's pull people out of poverty. Let's develop a developing nation. Let's make a real impact. Let's fight corruption and create financial inclusion and there's a lot of sort of moral based narratives that we've been using so far and all of these make a lot of sense. But there's a different narrative I think it's important for us to really explore and that is what if it is actually Web 3 that needs Africa to fulfill its full potential. And for the last 10 years plus we've been talking about mass adoption, we've been talking about bringing a billion people into the space to get people who actually use the technologies that we're building for daily things that people rely on. We want Web 3 to be plan A, not plan B. And I believe that's where Africa plays a role and that's the narrative that we're going to unpack today. But before we do that I want to kind of do a bit of a high level overview around the demographics and really understand where the continent is right now. So let's look at demographics. Africa has 1.4 billion people. 75% of us are under 35. The median age is about 19 years old. We're the youngest population and the fastest growing and also the fastest population that's urbanizing. But that's not just the picture. The other part of it is that we're growing really, really, really fast. By 2050 we're expected to be almost 2.8 billion people. 50% of that population is concentrated in just seven countries. And we're going to expect about a third of the world's young people are going to be in Africa. Just to put that in perspective, just in the next 18 years, there's going to be twice as many young people in Africa as in China, 50% more than in India, and three times as many young people in Africa as Europe and the US combined. So if we're talking about users, if we're talking about talent-based, if we're talking about the future workforce of the world, that's going to be in Africa. The other bit is around the economy, and this is a mixed image here. So about 457 million sub-Saharan Africans actually have a bank account, and 370 million adults don't. There's a lot of statistics around unemployment. About a third is considered unemployed, but I believe it's a bigger number than that. And we expect about 350 million Africans today are considered middle class. And the definition of middle class kind of varies. At the moment, cost of living is really going up, and so you might be considered middle class, but you're not thriving. 43% of the population is expected to be middle class by 2030. But if we look at aggregate numbers, there's actually a huge amount of capital Africans are spending, $6.3 trillion of consumer and business spending expected by 2030, and $4.2 billion of that is B2B. So Africa is not just poor population that the world needs to go save, it's population made of people who actually have an ability to create and spend. The other part of the narrative, like understanding is around technology, and this is also very mixed. We have 590 million Africans who have access to the internet. A lot of that is coming from mobile use, and we're expecting 6% mobile adoption year on over a year. And the other bit is mobile money is huge, and that's concentrated in very specific countries. So we have 448 million Africans actually registered to use mobile money, but only 18% of them are active on a monthly basis. We see a huge concentration of that in countries like Kenya, where more than 70% of the population is using MPSA. And I was quite kind of confused when I found that there's $250 billion being transacted through MPSA in Kenya, but the GDP of the country is only $110 billion. So it kind of shows you how the economy is very dynamic and a little different from how we think about it. Crypto. We have last year $105 billion transacted, which is a very small amount of the global total volume transacted. It makes about 2%, but we're seeing 1,200% growth. And Kucoin expects 2,500 growth of users since last year. But the interesting bit here is actually the majority of it, 88% of the money that's transacted is for cross-border transfers. And a lot of the transfers are happening at a peer-to-peer level, and under $1,000 transaction makes up a huge part of the volume. So we're seeing a lot of small retail users getting into crypto. There's a new exchange that's launching soon, and they haven't even launched it. It's been a few months since they put this out, but they already have 2.3 million people on the wait list for the download. So if you're thinking about volume of people getting into this space, there's a lot of that happening in Africa. But the interesting bit is the biggest entry point and the biggest part of the conversation there is speculation and gambling. And there are big events, bigger events than DEF CON that are happening very regularly to get people on boarded, but it's primarily around trading and just making quick bucks. But there's a huge population that's actually curious about what it means to work in this space. A couple of weeks ago, I met the guy who leads the largest DEF community in Kenya, and he said basically his entire community is really curious about this space, but they're trying to figure out what the hell is Web 3. So why are with all of these aspects, why is Africa unique from everyone else? Like why should we think about Africa as the main thing that Web 3 needs to achieve its full potential? And to do that, I think we really need to understand why the current paradigm is not working for Africans. If you see the world as a food chain, Africa is really at the bottom of that food chain. And the current geopolitical economic structures lock the continent in that position. And so basically the only option many people have to get out of there to get into this place of emancipation is through Web 3. Let me give you a few examples of why this current paradigm is not working. First, we actually don't control our money. 40 out of 54 African countries prints the money overseas. It is England, Germany, and France that do most of it. And they take 6% of the entire currency that's been printed as a fee. And there are a lot of stories about money being lost in shipments and all of that. That's not only the part of the equation. So in 2011, the United Kingdom actually withheld about a billion pounds of money that was supposed to be shipped to Libya for political reasons. So once that president has been said, you actually don't control your money. The other interesting thing that I've been learning is that 14 African countries are part of this thing called the CFA. It still stands. It's called the French Colonies of Africa, where they basically created a euro pegged currency. And in order to use that in parallel with their local currencies, they have to deposit 50% of their reserves in French treasuries. And what that also means is basically there's been devaluations that have happened and depegging that actually the French government has created as a result of what's happening in Europe. And these countries basically don't control their money. How many of us have heard of the Central African Republic that made Bitcoin part of a legal tender? That was an act of desperation. Basically saying, hey, if we don't control our money, we have nothing to lose. Global trade is very expensive and pretty much impossible. There's huge currency devaluation in many African countries, and there's chronic forex shortage. Just to give you an example, just in Nigeria and Ethiopia, in Nigeria, there's $500 a month limit of how many dollars you can get out on a monthly basis. In Ethiopia, you have to sign up on a line and wait up to six months just to get dollars out. If you're doing a small business, how on earth can you actually import, export, do basic things if you don't have access to dollars in trade with the rest of the world? That image, I took it last week, I was in Lagos, Nigeria, and I tried to change a $100 dollar bill, and that was the stack of Nigeria and Naira that we received. And so you're walking around the bulge pocket of a lot of dollar bills. Close to 10%, we pay about 10% bank fees to transfer any money in and out of the continent. And sadly, as a continent, only 15% of our trade is within ourselves, the rest is with the rest of the world. And that's a lot of like trade issues and all of that. And we spent about five to ten billion dollars in Swift fees, which is massive. And many people are locked out of Web2 Economy because they don't have a credit card. When I was in Ethiopia playing for college, I had to borrow credit card from people to actually submit applications. And so many people still don't have international credit cards. And because of that, now, the world will not take African money. Beakville cannot participate in the global economy that way. The world is guided for Africans. Borders are closed for Africans. There's supposed to be so many builders that were planned to be here that couldn't get visas to be here. African passports are the worst in the world to carry around. When I was traveling around in my Ethiopian passport, I used to wear a big cross on my neck, just so that border control doesn't confuse me with a terrorist. And you talk to many Africans who are traveling around the world. There's this thing called immigrant anxiety. That's because for whatever reason, doesn't matter who you are, what you're doing, the world is shut for you. Many Africans make the bottom of the list in applications, job applications and all of that. It's the least trusted population for employment. And Africans make the least money in technology. And I'm a little sad to see that also happening in web three, where dozens of builders that I've been speaking with, they're earning about $15,000 to $40,000 a year compared to global counterparts who are doing the same work or earning a lot more for the same work. So I think that's something we've got to change. Now, there are being small steps to improve this paradigm. There's a Pan-African single trade zone that's developing. Their internal payment systems, banks are creating in order to reduce dependence on foreign currencies. And there are CBDCs growing like in Ira. But these are very small steps. Now, my biggest issue with some of this is that even though we're trying here, that we're not, the institutions are not really set up to meet the needs of the young people. You go and meet a lot of young people, they're very hungry, they're driven. They want to thrive, they don't want to just survive. They want to have a piece of this world just like the rest of us. They want to do real things. They want to maximize the creative potential. And basically, institutions, as we know them, are not set up to meet that need. So what do we do? Well, in order to, instead of just trying to fix this paradigm from within, the answer to me is transcending the current paradigm. And part of that is building what I believe to be a borderless economy and a borderless society. To me, what that means is actually emancipation, path to self-determination. And when I talk to a lot of young people on the continent and say, wait a minute, you can participate in a global economy, no one really cares who you are, where you're from. You can work, you can earn global income by paying local salary, you can collaborate with people from all over the world, you can build communities, you can own part of the internet, you can have part of this space and actually build tools and protocols to build a future economic infrastructure of your continent, people's eyes light up. Because this means freedom, this means moving out of the consuppressing infrastructure that we have there. So I want to give you a few examples of what this borderless economy could look like. One of the areas is talent. I'll give you a few stories and examples of people I've been meeting recently. One of them is Ken. He's a student at Lagos University. The school has been in huge strikes so far and he got into crypto through the blockchain association in the university. And then he kind of started figuring the space out and within one year he learned about DeFi, all the primitives and really started getting involved in a lot of protocols. And now he's part of top meta governance DAO and we're collaborating and he's one of the best performers that we have in the DAO. And there was no one who held his hand in learning about this whole space from scratch. Another person is Victor who I made recently as well from Kenya. He's an architect and he discovered crypto just speculation and then he said, wait a minute, if I'm trying to build a career in architecture it's going to take me 20 plus years to even get to somewhere decent. What about teaching myself the rails of crypto? And then he taught himself solidity on YouTube again without anyone holding his hand and figured his way around a lot of DeFi protocols and DAOs and now he's doing smart contracts, he's working on smart contract solutions for a major DeFi protocol and he's doing all of that anonymously so no one even knows he's a Kenyan guy. There's a lady called Sherry, she's a photographer in Kenya as well and she's been struggling to feed herself and look after herself and she discovered NFT space, she locked herself up in her room, learned the whole space in three days, started minting NFTs using her photography and has been earning real income and is now building community of bringing other NFT artists into the space. These are just very few examples and there are so many many more self-taught Africans who are getting themselves into this space working, creating, participating. Many of us know African culture all over the world but it's just now that African creators are being able to capture part of the value from the things that they're building. Another area that's really interesting is trust. Many African countries are very low trust environments meaning there are no trusted intermediaries, there are very few trusted intermediaries that can actually enable economic and various activities between people and that is actually really critical because here in western places we talk about web-tree kind of intermediating our economy, right? But you go to a place like that actually where there are no trusted intermediaries you're building from the bottom up and to me that means basically Africa is where decentralization has found the best product market fit. That is where you can actually build a lot of infrastructures from the ground up. Let's look at finance. We talked about access to forex, right, earlier on. So actually you go to many African countries you can access stablecoins a lot easier and faster you can access dollars and so many people are bypassing banks using stablecoins. Now think about the global remittance industry that is massive and that is really huge and that's where actually we can build borderless finance and really accelerate the growth and development of many communities there. The other bit is looking at DeFi applications that are being built on top of mobile payments. That's a really huge space because access to credit is very, very, very scarce. It's a very small number of people who can actually access debt. The local debt providers charge between 10 to 27 percent interest a month. That's really, really sharky and really terrible so this the space is huge to transform this area. And these are just very few examples and there's so many more ways that this borderless economy, borderless society is manifesting in the continent and we should expect basically more Africans getting to this space in masses to work and build, develop and consume. So here in web three we're talking about how to bring the next billion. We need more users and more builders who rely on it for their daily lives. We want this space to be plan A, not a plan B. When we're sitting in our cushy chairs and kind of comfortable environments where the system is kind of working for us but we want to improve it, it's a lot harder to reach mass adoption. But when we're going to places where it's a very low starting point, then actually you have huge momentum, huge growth, huge adoption, huge creation that can happen in this environment. So there's so many ways to build this and we have a very low starting point. What are some of the mountains we can climb in this space? There's a lot to do. I'll share with you some of the mountains that I feel inspired and motivated to climb. First is education and we talk about education in so many ways. There's so many protocols and layer ones for on the continent talking about education but actually it's marketing to onboard a lot of people to use it. Let's talk about education starting from a place of values and why is this important? Well many people and many young people in Africa get into crypto primarily through speculation and they're actually their learning journey is determined by the algorithms of Facebook and Twitter and sorry YouTube and Twitter. So if you land on some coin shilling YouTube page everything else you keep learning is going to be very much related to that. So it's quite a narrow way of entry point and I think there's needs to be a lot of work of actually embedding why are we here? Why is this space actually made for them? And we've got to create infrastructures for people to learn to learn. As I talked about there are a lot of people getting into the space on their own but how do we really accelerate that to hundreds and millions of people to get into the space? And then developing actual core skill sets so that people can come and work in this space. That is already happening but I think we can really do a lot to accelerate that space. The other one is just having more founders solving their continent's problems and we need so much of that they're local founders but we need thousand thousands more founders and the biggest challenge is founders need capital to build and a lot of the capital on the ground is very unsophisticated very few players very short-term and their new entrances to this space that are using the buzzwords of the day to basically create short-term wins and I think in order to do this really well we got to think long-term and long-term means in this case that many builders are creating the roads that they're walking on. In western economies a lot of Web Tree was able to move very fast because we have Web 2, we have something to lean on, we have a lot of core infrastructures to build on top of but when you're going to environments where you got to build that infrastructure from the bottom up you got to think long-term and that's actually where you can accrue a lot of value and and build core economic infrastructures for the continent and the other bit also of and funding space is supporting grassroots activities because that's where a lot of the foundation is being created and that's where public goods plays a big role. There's so many grassroots players using the same value system that we have here helping develop the core infrastructures of mass adoption in this space and that's a huge gap on the continent. The last bit is building community and I'm talking about community with the principles and values of community. That really matters because there's a lot of sort of extractive community conversation that is happening around the continent which is just trying to get as many people to sign up, get big user base, get you know large adoption and you know that's fine but if you actually many protocols go there with the spirit of extraction what you end up doing is raising a generation of mercenaries so actually when I go to a lot of events and I talk to the people there they're like yeah we know what's going on like we we're playing the game so helping you build the numbers but when there's something better everybody leaves and I think that's a big challenge because people are going not to build community but to create the short-term wins in order to look good and have the numbers raise money inflate tokens and all of that and if you actually want to build community you got to think about how do we increase the sphere and then at the end of that we have a bigger pie as a result. If you start looking at Africans as not just consumers but as producers you are able to untap so much of the potential and be part of their success so that's to me like that's really what feels extremely exciting and if you enter these mountains you're finding exciting less jam if you're thinking about climbing other mountains let's figure out how to support that work and accelerate your journey because at the end of the day I think Africa will have a lot more to contribute to this web-tree movement and we're here dreaming thinking building and creating but if we want actually this infrastructure to be used on a daily basis doesn't matter if it's a bull market or bear market if we want this space to be used to actually meet people's needs and people to rely on and to have the space to build on I think Africa is the right answer for me thank you