The blockchain road to Kenya

Lately a friend and I have been in the process of investigating the potential for a new economy for online workers. We where pursuing Kenya as a potential target due to some of his connections there. I, also, have always been fascinated by Kenya and its usage of MPesa as a payment method. However, lately, we discovered that the company running mPesa is now putting a lot of fees on the transactions made with MPesa, its especially expensive for smaller transactions.

Earlier attempts made by bitPesa as an expansion of mPesa has been made and it seems now they are mainly in the market of providing remittance solutions rather than a full on scaled mobile payments solution like I was initially hoping for. It seems they are mainly using bitcoin which is slow, expensive and non flexible in terms of upgrades.

As a payment solution Dash is a milewide better solution with its instant transactions, decision making DAO, low fees, flexible approach to upgrades, and its focus on user friendliness with its Evolution platform coming up.

Imagine a system where users can simply send and receive value without using complex cryptographic addresses but rather usernames. Dash is already expanding a lot in countries like colombia and venezuela. Yes I know what you are thinking, god, venezuela is in turmoil, and yes you are right. Solutions tends to be formed where there is a need, and right now venezuela alone hosts 2500+ merchants for Dash

So fine... a turmoil country with high inflation, and venezuelans in colombia which can use dash for remittance to send to their loved ones back home, there is a business case, but Kenya is a stable country, so why should anyone bother to use things like crypto there? The fees on mPesa is not high enough to justify a switch perhaps, and the volatility is just to darn high in crypto compared to the local fiat option.

Yes and yes you are right, but imagine this: What if you wanted something done like a website, translation, spellchecking, a new logo, or perhaps a nice photo with your company brand. You can pay in crypto, get it for half the price lets say and settle things instantly and even use an escrow service for some percent.

Enter haven, a mobile app from ob1 team that made openbazaar. Haven is essentialy a mobile app where users can post trades and also interact socially. Digital as well as physical goods can be sold. I imagine this app will revolutionize the world in terms of trade, at least for the common person.

Essentially, freelancers and people who can provide digital goods can then sell their services online and get paid in global currencies like Dash, haven is not yet released but when it is, it will be a good start, although not a perfect one, ob1 will also later in 2019 integrate Dash which I am very exited about.

Nairobi in Kenya is a not a bad place to bootstrap the usage of such apps considering the growth of that region, the internet connection options, the university environment etc. There is one example of a sheep herder who went from managing sheep into programming and bitcoin mining, by teaching himself online and then offering his services to the world. In my opinion the more options to get paid for what work you do the better it is.

The mobile usage and the idea of getting paid into your mobile phone is not new in Kenya, so they should not be to foreign to the idea of yet another upgrade or option to their payments industry.

Then of course it comes down to exchanging your crypto into local currency. This can be done through various exchange options but once decentralized exchanges takes a foothold that can provide the users with on/off ramps, it will only be a matter of marketing and incentivizing the use for it to take hold, perhaps one of the most promising one is 'bisq', its the only true decentralized exchange to date that also uses a decentralized server architecture p2p over the tor network. Besides crypto to crypto exchanges, it allows local fiat to crypto exchange and vice versa which is not a common thing for the other decentralized exchange options out there today. It does however require the seller to be online all the time and it does not have a mobile app yet.

Although the government might have issues with decentralized uncontrollable options that is good for the common person, it is, and will be a part of our future, kind of like an upgrade to cash in to a digital form: Digital Cash. Trade will in the future be partly decentralized, along with other areas of our lives, and perhaps even governments one day will be made more effective, decentralized and controlled by everyone who cares to participate.