[ad_1]
Regardless of bitcoin price volatility, 2018 saw an explosion of activity among African users.
Exclusive to CoinDesk, the Paxful peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange increased transaction volume by 130% from January 2018 with an average of $ 21 million a week, compared to $ 8.5 million in 2017. Growth is It was partly driven by Paxful user base almost tripled in Ghana, with 41,243 accounts, and more than doubling in Nigeria to 321,476 accounts.
According to CEO Paxful Ray Youssef, African bitcoin traders accounted for 41% of all new users of the platform in 2018. On average, their transactions are worth less than $ 90 each. African users now make up about 35% of Paxful accounts, a platform with 160,000 monthly users.
"Amazon, eBay, all these big companies will not send us [Nigeria] because of the huge fraud rates, "said Youssef." What [new users] I want to know is: how can I use this to do business outside the area I live in? "
Paxful is not the only exchange platform that benefits from the growing awareness of peer-to-peer finance in Africa. Also the P2P competitor exchange of LocalBitcoins saw a significantly higher Nigerian use in 2018, although without sudden peaks like the market boom brought in December 2017.
In fact, according to Google Trends, global Internet searches for "bitcoin", Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa were among the top five nations with the greatest interest for "bitcoin" in 2018.
Meanwhile, in eastern Africa, Binance opened a branch in Uganda and promptly signed 40,000 users in the first week. Paxful's East Africa audience is relatively small, with 4,289 accounts in Kenya and only 298 users in Rwanda, for example. So, Youssef said that Paxful is trying to aggressively assume in 2019 and set up separate offices on the ground in East Africa, West Africa and Southern Africa.
"We want to triple the size of the company," said the team of 97 employees with offices in Hong Kong, Estonia, Manila and New York. "The bottlenecks we are dealing with now are trying to find the best people to help us."
In the course of 2018, Paxful hired its first ground staff members in Venezuela, which could soon be added to the sanctions list of the Office of Foreign Property Inspection of the US Treasury. In order to cover their regulatory risks, the exchange will also dedicate a team in the field to the learning of African use cases in addition to expansions of Latin America.
So far, the company has learned that cross-border payments are a popular use case. Youssef said that many users in Ghana are actually Nigerian expats who use bitcoins to send remittances back home. Remittances are a huge market in Nigeria, with the World Bank estimating the nation has received remittances worth $ 22 billion in 2017.
Kevin James, Nigerian-American operations manager at the Bitcoin OpenNode payment startup with commercial connections in Ghana, told CoinDesk to get back and fight local inflation are two flagship bitcoin value propositions in Africa, adding:
"The Ghanaians are very interested in the bitcoin. … I see this net positive year due to the development and the teams that are entering the space."
Increasing awareness
Although many skeptics describe the current market as a "winter crypt", the opposite argument is that the craze at the end of 2017 has brought many newcomers into space that are not discouraged by volatility.
This was the case of Usman Abiola, a leading Lagos product at the startup blockchain Ellcrys Network that bought its first bitcoin at the start of 2018 using a site called BuyCoin.
"I just wanted to understand how the wallet / exchange system worked," said Abiola. "Bitcoin as a store of value is a key value that resonates well here.Also, its incredible cross-border use case is very viable.The cross-border remittance is a headache here."
So far, Abiola is only experimenting. He heard about Paxful and said the market is ripe for any exchange willing to invest in educational initiatives in Nigeria. Fortunately, that's exactly what Youssef, Paxful's CEO, has planned.
Youssef said that Paxful will work with schools and universities across Africa to improve educational resources, so that potential users know what bitcoin is and how to manage their own portfolios. They have already started sponsoring two new schools in rural Rwanda, including the purchase of several tablets and mobile phones so that teachers can directly manage bitcoin donations.
"The huge challenge is educating educators," said Youssef. "We want to build our next school in West Africa, preferably in Nigeria, and we are now looking for construction partners in the field."
Speaking more broadly to unbridled growth in Nigeria, Youssef added:
"The Nigerian people have shown a sense of business and the ability to mobilize around the encryption that is a source of inspiration and we see them as world leaders in cases of real use of the crypt."
Market image through Shutterstock
[ad_2]Source link
