 Welcome to Jalassette News to Get Top Stories and Cryptocurrency and Jalassettes, and break them down to bite-sized pieces. So today, we have really only one story, IOHK is on the brink of securing a massive Cardano government contract in Africa. And this is huge on so many levels, but it's going to be even more apparent as we start to peel back the layers of this onion, take a look at what is going on in sub-Saharan Africa and why they are just ripe for a fintech revolution. So we'll take a look at that. First, let's take a look at what's going on in the market. So today, it is February 8th, 3.30 p.m. of Paso-Sexas time. Beautiful day, 72 degrees, matter of fact. Can't beat this weather. And you can't beat this market. Look at this. Bitcoin's up, Ethereum's up, Tether's up, Tether knows he cares. Cardano, Polkadot, everything's up. And of course, we did a video this morning and we talked about what happened with Elon Musk about how they had said that, yes, they're going to be buying Bitcoin, 1.5 billion worth at minimum, and they're going to be actually doing cryptocurrencies. And I said that's important on so many levels because with Michael Saylor and Michael Stratigius just having that huge conference, they've already lined up a ton of different corporations and now we've got the most popular or the most apparent or the most vocal or the most widely known CEO out there, Elon Musk, and one of the biggest companies. And he's saying, yep, we're going to go into Bitcoin. So all of these different corporations that were in attendance at the Michael Stratigius event are bingo, let's do that. So this should be a pretty interesting time. I will say that. So I'll link that video at the very last end, but I'm sure you've heard all about it because everybody's been covering it. But I just want to talk about something a little bit different today on top of what we talked about already. So let's see, what is going on 24-hour change? What's a big time? 19% for Polkadot, Binance Coin 14%. And Binance Coin, we're going to talk about tokenomics and about Metcalfe's law when we get into the whole African story with Cardano, because it's really going to play a big factor. Anything that really stands out? Aave, decentralized finance, which we need to go over quickly. Actually, you know what? Let's do that right now. Let me just do this. So this is a great little detail, but before we get into what's going on with Cardano, I have to take a step back. Two things I have to take a step back. First of all, you may have noticed that the audio might be a little bit more improved. I've actually been tweaking my settings over the last two days. I've actually checked out like three different mics, and it's just sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, but I think I may have gotten a little bit better on this one. So we will see. Let me know what you think about this as far as like the audio quality. Compare that to yesterday's video. That's all I can tell you. So anyhow, so with this one, we're talking about decentralized finance, and what Charles Hoskins and another team are trying to do is bring digital banking to the vastly unbanked in Sub-Saharan Africa. But here's the thing with DeFi, and I always had an issue with Cardano, IOHK, and what they were doing as far as like how slow they were going because I'm an entrepreneur, they're entrepreneurs at a much bigger level, I might add. But it was interesting to me like, why are they going so slow? Why is it? And of course, as time went on, I appreciate the subtleties that they're doing. And this is just a prime example of where you really shouldn't be running before you can crawl. So this is an article sent to me by a man, Wynn Mullet. Mullet, thank you. And it states DMG price crashes 90% as VMM protocol ceases operation. And what's crazy about this is that just how we talked about, you know, you have to do your own research and take a look behind and who's in the team and who's financing it. Our house people were financing this project, and then went belly up like that, like nothing. So in an unfortunate turn of events, the supporters of DeFi Money Market Foundation, VMM, the token plummeted in value as a team behind it revealed, they ceased all operations due to regulatory concerns. So 2021 is going to be the year of cryptocurrency assets. It's also going to be the year of regulatory clarity. So with the good comes the bad, and that's what it is. Actually, I don't know if that's really bad. I think over regulation is bad, right? I don't mind speed limits. I mean, if I'm going on the interstate, I don't want people going 150. That's just me. But if you're going to make me go flat miles per hour from El Paso to Houston, we got a problem. So again, over regulation, I think is the issue, not regulation. So this was a pretty good DeFi project. It was backed by people like Draper Gorenholm. There was a partnership between Tim Draper, I think we all know that guy, Alex Goren, and Joseph Holm focused on investing in blockchain solutions. Support of their projects for receive the bad news today as a team behind the DM announced, DMM announced, they're going to cease all operations and they state this on their official website. As a result of regulatory inquiries, DMM is shutting down effective immediately. M-token minting is no longer available. M-token redemption will remain available indefinitely. Though the industry on the M tokens will drop to 0% on or about February 10th, 2021. Capital interests are currently available to fund redemption. A ball that's found in M tokens plus the crude interest reads the official site. So right there, when you have problems, and this was actually a problem with regulation and the things that didn't get set in place first. So it wasn't like an issue with the actual protocol. It was an issue with regulation and what they didn't do. So make sure that when you are taking a look at different projects, again, do your research, not a financial advisor. Just make sure that these projects are doing the right things as best you can. Like with Celsius, I know it is a regulated security. They have registered it as a security. So that's one of the reasons why I like to invest in the Celsius. They've talked about Bitcoin, about how it is a, it is not a security, a commodity, Ethereum kind of gets that leeway. So those types of things. Other than that, there is no real clarity and that's the risk that we all take as speculators. So this moves us into the next phase. What are we talking about? We're talking about Cardano helping a lot of countries, a lot of people who are banking the unbanked. And I know we've had people who are very negative on this, this subject, you know, they're just like, it's never going to happen. Well, it looks like it's happening. So IOHK coming beyond Cardano, is it in the final stages of securing a huge government contract in Africa? A government contract in Africa? According to John O'Connor, the director of African operations at IOHK, John Tana, the project could add millions of users to Cardano for real world blockchain implementation. So what's going on here? So they're in its final stages of development, IOHK. And how do we know this? Because there was an interview with Poof of Africa, John Tana, IOHK's director of African operations, revealed there's a real world blockchain solution being built on Cardano that's designed specifically to be released in Africa, just in Africa. And he states, what I can say is that we are at the final stages of a large government contract that would have multi-million users being onboarded onto the platform for real world blockchain implementation. So O'Connor is based in Ethiopia. He said the IOHK's project will focus on other African countries like South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. Another 15 will be out of the list in the near future. Do you know any people that is? That is close to, I'm talking about Sub-Saharan Africa, you're talking between 750 million and a billion people. Now they're not all in banks, but that is a ton of people to onboard. That is a massive undertaking. The company's work in Tanzania will provide each user of the country's telecom providers with digital identity and access to the ADA payment network on Cardano. Everybody gets access through this ID, to ADA, to the Cardano foundation. That's the Cardano network. That's amazing. South Africa, O'Connor said that IOHK was working on an interesting project involving insurance. I don't know what that is, but we'll find out later. Almost all the projects IOHK is working on in Africa were based on Atelah Prism, the company's identity solution, how you say it, Atelah Atelah. This is also, Johnny says, we have quite reasonable plans to onboard 100 million users on this identity platform within the next year or two. This might seem ambitious, you think, but actually the scale of the African continent means that it's quite realistic. It's not that it's just unrealistic because there's not enough people. It just seems daunting to me to have to onboard at least all these, I mean, hundreds. This is just the first 100 million users, right? And then they start to expand. What does that mean? Maybe talk about the Asia-Pacific Rim. A lot of people unbanked. All the processes required to launch the mysterious African solution should be done by the end of February. Let me read that again. All of the process required to launch the African solution should be done by the end of February. That's a pretty good timeline. That's pretty ambitious and we'll see if they can pull it off. Who knows? They've been hitting their strides already, so we will see. The team at IOHK will be the one that makes the news public. Why is this 100 million users so big? Because it just seems like, I mean, besides the obvious, right? There's a lot of people, that's pretty good. The more people you have, the more of a network effect you have. Metcalfe's law, the more connections they have, the more things just start to increase in revenue or value, whatever you want to associate value with. This is actually taught to me by Pat Ackerman when he was talking about the Voyager token. He also talked about this with the Celsius token. He also in indirect ways was talking about the Binance token. The more types of connections that you have, the more users that you have, the increase in value will come up just on scale. I had covered this in the Voyager video, but all I want to show you is this. You can kind of see it in Bitcoin. How would we see the amount of users in Bitcoin? Well, we'll just take a look at the wallets. The more wallets that are opening up, the higher the amount of Bitcoin that is actually being valued at. Then this is what my problem was, and I talked about this before. For the Binance coin, I never got it. I'm like, who cares about that? What does Binance coin do? Well, it does a lot of things, right? For their debit card, then they have a credit card coming out. It reduces and fees. They've got a lot of different things as far as the rewards program. The more utility it has, the more people want to use it, the more people want to use it, the more value it has. It's the same thing with Binance, and then you see it on Celsius. Now you're going to see it on Voyager. You're going to see it on Swissborg. All those types of utility tokens that have real-world utility that do things, that help a person out, that is fantastic. The more people you have, the better off you are. If you're getting like 100 million, 200, 300 million people, I think that the value of the token will probably go up, and it's a good darn thing that the actual max supply of Cardano is in the hundreds of millions. Speaking on top of that, there was just this little piece here, Metcalf's Law, and I talked about this before, is that you can see this in an old world example of Facebook when Facebook came out. The more users that it had, 2004 was when it started, 2008, 2009, it started to actually open up to advertisers. Everything started to blow up. Before you know it, there's a ton of people on Facebook. The more people that were on Facebook, the more value it had. However you want to justify that in dollars or whatever else, ad revenue, whatever. That is just one of those things. When we take a look at this, this is a ton, I can't say any different. This is just a lot of people, which means that there should be an increase in value. However, you want to distinguish that. But I had to take a look real quick about the banking situation and actually reached out to Ray Yusef, Ray Yusef, the head of Paxful. They do a lot of things with exchanging Bitcoin with gift cards, which is a novel idea, but they do a lot of that because in Africa, that's what a lot of I guess a lot of people have. So I took a look at, well, what is the banking situation in Africa right now? So this is the first article I just brought up, and it's just two pieces. Across the continent, the number of banks are declining, driven by tightening regulations. Here we go. Mergers and acquisitions, liquidations and collapses. In Nigeria, only 27 banks remain out of 89 that existed in 2004. Kenny has seen 10 completed mergers and acquisition deals and two collapses since 2016. So right here, even if people want to be banked, well, the options are limited. And the less different types of banks that you have, the more they have an actual control on what is going on, the fees and the structure. And that's not good. Free market is not free. And if you only got a couple of people around. Apart from customer growth, Africa is the second most profitable region after Latin America for banking with return on equity at 14, but almost 15% compared to 9% global average. So Africa is the second most profitable region after Latin America. What does that mean? There's a lot of people with a lot of money, and they are unbanked. How much unbanked are they? And how much could Cardano help them? Well, this is an article that I pulled up. The unbanked in Africa could be one of the biggest opportunities in fintech history. The interesting thing about this is that it's in 2018. The funny thing is, is that I saw an article in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and there was one in 2020, which said almost the exact same thing. It is ripe for an opportunity. The problem is, it hasn't really, a lot of different fintech companies haven't really gone in there. However, there has been a couple, and this is what's going on right now. So let's say Kenya, over 37 million Kenyans have an SMS capable mobile phone. This was the interesting to me, because people would always say, well, if they're unbanked and they don't make a ton of money, they shouldn't have a lot of like technology and cell phones. It's not true. It's actually the inverse is true. In places like this, even in America, people who are, who are as classified as poor below the poverty level, everybody has a cell phone. And in Africa, and even in Mexico, they all have a cell phone. And whatever they can do that, they have this, they have an SMS capable mobile phones, and they are able to transfer money around through an app called, let me say it's called M-Pesa. So M-Pesa, Kenya's first mobile wallet launched in 2007 to seamlessly transfer funds through Kenya using SMS. So that was the first part, right? If you couldn't get a bank, it's okay, we can do this with SMS. And so the question I always had was, well, how do you get that onto the phone? There's kiosks, you go to the kiosk, you give them that the money, they give you a card, you can use the card and then you transfer it all to the place, right? To paraphrase this whole article, it works out pretty well unless you get to transfer it far away away and excuse me, across borders because of the different telecommunications. When you do something like that, then the fees increase by 33%. So here's the thing, if you're making like 30 to 50 bucks a week or a month, depending, and you're hit with a third of that just gone because you're trying to send it back to family or friends, or you're trying to save it some in some way, you know, good luck with that. It does state though, M-PACE has made domestic payments easy, but when a payment needed to cross border transactions up to 30%, okay, great. So then the question becomes, is this, what is the problem with being unbanked? And for us in America or UK or Europe or pretty much every place that we're at, if you're listening from Africa, you know the answer right now. So when I think of being banked, it's just second nature to me because I've grown up with it. But if you're unbanked, think about this way. If you have 50 to, let's say you work, you know, you're 70 hours a week and you get $100 and then you have to carry that all around everywhere you go. Well, the chance of crime is pretty high, right? Then the fact is that you can't put it into any bank and you can't save any of that as best you can because you have it on yourself, probably goes around a lot. Then if you have to, let's say you have to pay any kind of bills, well, you have to go to each and every place to pay those bills that takes time, money and effort. And then if you want to get like some kind of advance because you need money, well, you have to go to those like a, one of those flash loan places where it's just highway robbery, what they give you. So you really can't get a loan unless you want to get a loan at like 50% interest rate and believe me, they're out there and it's even higher than that actually. So you do, you combine all those things together and you are at a major, major disadvantage. And that's why this place needs fintech for what it says. So it comes out of this. Where is the unbanked? Well, obviously we talked about it, Sub-Saharan Africa in Asia. You got 2 million adults or 38% of all adults worldwide remain excluded from financial systems. So they're 38. So we're talking about 2 billion unbanked, right? And they're in two big locations, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa. So let's take Sub-Saharan Africa. Let's say, let's put in half, you got a billion over there. Let's do a conservative number. Let's say 500 million. You got 500 million who are unbanked in Sub-Saharan Africa and Cardano's coming over there and going, look, you can use our network. You can use the ID system, some kind of insurance system that's coming in, who knows. And then you can use our payment system on the blockchain. And the processing fees are super low. We're not going to put you on Ethereum where the gas fees are like going to kill you guys. It's super low right now. We have a lot of different swaps going on. We have smart contracts. You can also, they're going to talk about loans and collateralization. This seems like a pretty good deal. So now think to yourself, how would this affect what I'm doing here? For me, I mean, it works out pretty well. I've got to, you know, I invested pretty heavily in Cardano. If you don't know, we have the DNews staking pool. So if you have any Cardano, you like to take a look at that, I will link that at the very end. And I think it's going to be a pretty good thing. And lastly, I'll finish up with this. 42% of all the unbanked are women. So it's geared towards that, but it all comes down to how to bank the unbanked, digitize payments, formalize savings. And I didn't really get it until today. This article came out. And I thought to myself, well, who's really doing this? Who's really working on all the things that they need to have done? Right? I mean, Ethereum is doing these things too, right? They can do it. The problem with Ethereum is what we talked about with the fees. Sometimes it can be fast, but you've got to pay a ton of fees. And things can really be built on that. But how long do you want to wait? You're a year out, two years out. Who knows? I know everybody says, ah, but, you know, they're building all on Ethereum. Are they? Let's say Cardano goes into Africa. Let's say they go into Asia after that and say, you know what? Here's our system. We made it very simple for you to build on top of it. Also, the fees are super low. We're very fast. You can do pretty much whatever you want to, build all your dapps. Who's going to win? And it's not about winning or losing. There's enough, it's an entire global industry, right? I'm not saying it. That's why I invested both. I have Ethereum, I have Cardano, but I see the direction they're going and it makes a heck of a lot of sense to me right now. Anyhow, that's it for today. So, you made it to the end. Congratulations. Thanks for sticking with me. If you liked the video, why don't you give it a thumbs up? That would really help me out. And also, click on that subscribe because a lot of things we do are time sensitive, a lot of news type of items. So, probably important if you want to read about that or learn about that. And that is it. So, thanks so much for watching. I appreciate it. I'll link those videos we talked about up on the left and right, but YouTube do their magic there and that's all. So, thanks for watching. See you on the next one.