Bankless - Africa's Crypto Revolution: Leapfrogging into the Future | Zuzalu #4

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

In this episode, we explore the frontier of crypto in Africa and the immense potential for both the continent and the crypto industry. Africa has a unique ability to leapfrog technologies, just as it skipped landlines and embraced cell phones. The dialogue revolves around crypto adoption in Africa and a network state project called Afropolitan, which aims to build an Afro-centric digital nation. Yoseph Ayele discusses the opportunities that Web3 can provide in terms of financial stability, access, identity services, and credit facilities for Africa. He believes that Africa will be the first to reach a billion Web3 users. Eche Emole shares insights on Afropolitan, highlighting the project's focus on crypto, network states, and the creation of Afro-centric hubs worldwide. Both guests express unwavering optimism and articulate the transformative power of these developments. This engaging and enjoyable discussion sheds light on Africa's trajectory in the crypto landscape and the potential for uplifting individuals and communities. ------ 🚀Join Ryan & David at Permissionless II in September. https://bankless.cc/GoToPermissionless  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2  ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ⁠  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  ⁠  👾POLYGON | VALUE LAYER OF THE INTERNET https://polygon.technology/roadmap  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku  ---- Timestamps 0:00 Intro 1:20 Goosebumps 5:15 YOSEPH AYELE 7:55 Why Africa Needs Crypto 15:15 Bringing Infrastructure 18:40 Stablecoins and Trust 22:20 Global Crypto Culture 28:00 Providing Essential Services 32:30 Adoption in Africa 37:00 Leapfrogging Technology 42:00 Becoming Borderless 47:45 Raising a Fund 53:00 ECHE EMOLE 55:00 Afropolitan 1:00:00 Africa is Primed 1:09:15 The Afropolitan Roadmap 1:15:45 Redrawing the Maps 1:19:30 Diaspora 1:28:45 The Team 1:33:05 Hope for Crypto ------ Resources Yoseph Ayele https://twitter.com/yosephayele?s=20  Afropolitan https://twitter.com/afropolitan?s=20  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today, on this episode of our Zuzalu series, we are exploring some new frontiers. New frontiers and new technologies, all of which are poised to completely revolutionize the world and change everything about the operating system that society is currently running. Speaking of operating systems that are about to change that guide society, Bankless Nation, today we are exploring the frontier of crypto in Africa, perhaps the first continent that is poised to leapfrog its way into a new operating system that we call Web 3, that we call crypto. What can crypto do for Africa? What can Africa do for crypto? The conversation of crypto in

Africa is extremely rich and should get anyone in crypto looking for real adoption, real utility, very excited. Developing countries have the ability to leapfrog technology. For example, landlines never made it to Africa. The entire continent just skipped to cell phones. In the thing is playing out in crypto. The banks never win to service Africans. But nonetheless, Africans are finding utility and access using bankless technologies, using Ethereum. There are two conversations here in this episode. One is about crypto adoption in Africa and why Africa is such a primed continent to accept and adopt crypto protocols. And then another about an African network state project going deep down into the reasons for why a network's date in the first

place and tying it to the deep cultural bonds that tie all Africans together no matter where they live in the greater globe. Both of these conversations gave me goosebumps, simply out of excitement and satisfaction of the adoption of crypto protocols in the way that they were always meant to be, to uplift individuals and coordinate communities. We're first going to hear from Yosef Ayelet, who's working on building a borderless Africa using Web3, of course. He started a venture fund to invest in African Web3 development and adoption because he thinks, and also gives the arguments for why Web3 will see its first billion users out of Africa. The needs that Africa has as a whole are things that Web3 provides, financial stability and

access, of course, but also identity services and credit facilities. Yosef does a great job painting this picture of Africa's trajectory to leapfrog its way to becoming a dominant player in the Web3 landscape. After Yosef, we have Eché and Molle, one of the founders of Afropolitan, a very ambitious network state project looking to build an Afrocentric digital nation. This conversation spans both crypto and network states and adds its own spin onto the Bologian idea of a network state, one with Afroletan hubs that exist wherever the African diaspora finds itself. Both of these guests are amazingly articulate and relentlessly optimistic, two things that makes my job so fun and

enjoyable as a conversation moderator. And these were probably two of my favorite episodes that I recorded at Zuzalo, so that's why I'm sure that you're going to enjoy it as well. So let's get right into this conversation of crypto in Africa. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Cracken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry. The place I used to check the charts and the crypto prices, even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Cracken Pro, you'll have access to advanced charting tools, real-time market data, and lightning fast trade execution. All inside their spiffy new modular interface. Cracken's new customizable modular layout lets you tailor your trading experience to suit your

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most trusted team in Defi. Download the Uniswap wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes. Bankless Nation, I'm here with Yosef Ayela. Yeah? Yes. Beautiful. You got it. And we're going to talk about crypto in Africa and why there's such a large opportunity for the Web3 industry, the crypto industry in Africa. Yosef, welcome to Bankless. Thanks so much for having me. First off, how has your Zuzalo experience been? It's been amazing. Amazing humans, great connections.

I thought I came here to do work, but then spent a lot of time just building really good relationships and having a good time. What did you come to Zuzalo to do? To meet folks who are interested in the African continent. I came here for EDCOM as well. So I gave a talk there, sharing my thesis on the continent. And also to be part of some of the network state discussions and really understand where people are. are thinking about. You said the word thesis, which means I'm interested.

You have a thesis on a continent. Yes. What does it mean to have a thesis on a continent? Just a framework and a way for the rest of the world to connect with the African continent. I feel like there's a lot of crypto activities happening in the African ecosystems, but most of the Ethereum community as well as just the broader crypto communities just don't understand what's happening there. Many people haven't traveled there.

A lot of African builders don't get to come to place like this. So being a bridge and helping provide a framework. Yeah, there's, I'm assuming just a very large divide between Africa, crypto, and the rest of the crypto industry. Yes. I think there's also a very large divide between East and West in crypto. Yes. But even that, that divide co-mingles a lot. Yes.

Like the Chinese, which is part of crypto, which is very large, does mingle. There's been a large Chinese cohort of people here as Uzalu. Would you say, like, the African side of crypto is even more cut off between East and. Way more cut off. Way more cut off. Because the biggest, like, barrier for a lot of African builders is that it's hard for them to travel to where global crypto communities are and where main events are. So, like, the number one issue is just visas. The West and many Eastern countries just don't give Africans visas. I was organizing a whole side event around Africa at DefCon in Colombia. And basically, everyone who was supposed to come participate in it couldn't make it because they couldn't get a visa to Colombia. or couldn't get a visa to transit through the U.S. So that's just one of the biggest barriers that creates the physical divide. Yeah, so the cross-pollination of just it just doesn't happen. Exactly.

So I think there's going to be two parts of this conversation. It's what can crypto do for Africa? And then maybe we'll talk about what Africa can do for crypto. Yes. I will talk about the cross-pollination here. Awesome. But let's start with that. Let's start with why does Africa need crypto so much?

Like, why is Africa primed to be a crypto continent? Because centralized entities have failed us. That's the main point. Like a lot of centralized government, centralized banks, institutions are either not effective or non-existent. So that's where I think decentralization makes the most sense is it acts as the layer of trust on which so many economic, social, political, and financial institutions can be built on. And when you go to places where there's, you know, some areas are way more developed, but a whole lot of areas are just so not developed so far. I think the core infrastructures of crypto from money and payments and trust and coordination, all those things make so much more sense there.

Would you say that another way of saying that is institutions have not just provided structure in Africa? And that's what you mean by like centralizations. There's just not trusted centralized places of organization that has provided like social scaffolding for the African continent. Let me give you just a few examples. So there are 14 African countries. that were colonized by France. When the French were kind of leaving in the 1960s, they instituted this currency called the CFA.

It stands for colonies of Africa, French colonies of Africa. And that's pegged to, you respect to the franc and now spec to the euro. What that means is 50% of all the income those countries get goes to the French treasury directly. So you don't own your money. It goes to the French treasury.

Is it fair to say that that was a tool of colonized, of like maintaining colonialization. Exactly. Even those were like France, like, wanted to get out of the continent physically, but they were like, we'll leave our currency and maintain value attraction that way.

Correct. And also they don't, like the French government created some boundaries of your interest rates and how much money you can print and all of that. So those governments, you can say that they don't control their own currency, their own monetary policy. So here in the Western

world, we talk about sovereignty from governments. In those countries, is the governments don't have sovereignty over their own states and their own monetary policies. So that's one use case where, you know, for example, the Central African Republic recently made Bitcoin a legal tender. That's not because they're Bitcoin maxis or whatever. It's just, it's out of desperation. They have no control over their own monetary policy.

Therefore, it's easier to say, hey, why don't we just jump into a whole new monetary policy that's inherently global? Right. So the idea is like, okay, if we're going to use somebody else's money, perhaps we'd should use one that is based on the internet and not benefiting some particular power elsewhere. And let's just use the one that's found on the internet. Well, you will use Bitcoin because its monetary policy is going to be better than the French monetary policy. Exactly.

And so, like, it's, maybe they still don't, the African countries don't have control over the monetary policy, but at least it's not the French, it's Bitcoin. And Bitcoin has all the properties of Bitcoin that we enjoy. Now, that's not to say that that's the ultimate goal and answer. I think some level of sovereignty is amazing, right? But it's kind of an example of where some of those countries, it's just 14 countries out of 54, are basically struggling to get sovereignty over themselves.

Another sort of macro example is that there are 54 African countries, only 40 countries prints their own money in their own countries. So they outsourced that to European printing press, and they pay 6% of the total money supply as printing. fees and transportation costs. So just imagine a ship. Who charges that? There are three companies in Europe, in France, in the UK and Germany, that basically

act as the printing press for the fiat. They charge a service for access to the printing press? Of course. So they get inflation and they get to charge fees? Yes. I can see why there's demand for something else. Yeah. And even at a very practical, very, those are like examples at a macro level.

to start a human level. The internet has been a big game changer for many people. When I was growing up in Ethiopia, the internet opened the world to me. I learned most of my English online. It opened up a lot of access to information and connectivity, which is amazing. But the internet is still very gated to Africans. That was gated. That was many years ago and still gated because if you don't have a means to transact and pay

and receive money, then you cannot access the best of the internet. If you cannot set up a PayPal account and use that to receive money for the work that you do, then how can you say you're actually accessing the best of the Internet? So even remote workers in many African countries are using crypto as a means to get paid for the work that they do. So what you're saying is that the Internet is a massively democratizing force that has benefited the world as a whole, including Africa. But then there's this more that as the Internet matured, it evolves and adapted and became what you're, calling permission as in like parts of the internet are paywalled by whatever you would do like subscribe to bank is to use a credit card we do accept crypto but also you can also subscribe anything

that you would subscribe pay for on amazon or pay for any sort of credit card yes you're saying that that was not available to most of africa because most of africans can't they're not connected on the payment rails and today is still the case right so you might even have the level of connectivity but for example in nigeria banks have a limit of $20 a month they're that you can spend internationally with your bank card. So even though you have the connectivity, the lack of foreign currency creates these really low ceilings for people to actually participate online and in digital world.

So as much as great as the internet is, it simply just means less for Africa. And that's because, again, it goes back to centralized institutions. Even in tech, centralized technology institutions are still gated. And some of it is just structural, right? So how those countries' economies are structured or the relationship between that economy and global economies.

We pay $5 to $10 billion a year on sweep freeze alone. That's a massive cost. If I'm trying to send you money from one country to the next country, the money goes through Europe, the U.S., blah, blah, makes a big route around the world and comes next door. And then I pay around 10% of what I'm sending you and just fees it. Routing fees to get it all around. So that's so inefficient. It's blocking any type of development and progress when you're basically relying on global institutions

that are not designed for your needs. Interesting. So a bank transfer in Africa that goes to a different African country routes through like Europe banking rails. Yes. And a bunch of middlemen up there charged a bunch of fees. And then down to a different African country that's very, very proximate to the originator. But it just goes through Europe. first. And most transactions are low in numbers. So the percentage is high and volume low and low in

numbers. High in volumes, high and low in numbers. So the percentage that you pay for the transaction cause. It's a flat fee. Yeah. It's so high as a result of it. Huh. Okay. So these are all money and fee and banking system use cases. Yes. Which makes total sense to me. Does it, does it end there? No. Where does this go next? So Africa has 1.4 billion people. Five hundred million don't even have any form of ID. So that's a big friction point to participate in anything in the world. So that trust, identity, reputation, those are really critical areas where I believe blockchain technologies can have a real impact.

And that's actually when I talk to different African government. Those are areas they're really interested in. How do we create shared consensus-based truth? What is true? Who owns this land? Who owns that land? knowing like having a verifiable form of property rights, that's one of the biggest areas. Where you go to truth is consensus-based, then we're always in negotiation of what truth is.

That creates a lot of friction to actually build, you know, really sophisticated economies on top of those. I would imagine some of these problems are symbiotic with each other. It's weird to call problem symbiotic, but like in the negative direction. Yeah. As in like perhaps it's harder to produce a financial system, banking rails in Africa because there's no identity. And then also it's harder to produce identity when like such a core part of identity is like your bank account and your nation state ID. And you're saying like there's neither in Africa.

Well, I wouldn't say there's nothing exists. There's less. It's just there's a lot less of it. It's not sophisticated. It's not fully developed. So for example, when you look at payments, some African countries have way more advanced payment systems than the US. You go to Kenya, for example. We have Mpesa there, which is a mobile money company. It works so well. Everywhere, including remote villages, does it need internet? When you have internet, it can get sophisticated. Basically, your phone number is your bank account. It's your means of paying salaries or receiving income. It's your K-Y-C. It works so well in that country. It's heavily centralized, but it's functional. But when you're trying to do it.

business cross borders, then that's what it becomes challenging. When you're trying to get any form of credit, then that's where you reach a ceiling because those layers of trust and reputation and even credit scoring are not as effective, not as efficient. So you see some things that are way more developed, but a whole lot of things that are not as developed. Right. Okay, so I have so many more questions, but I first want to make sure that does it end there? Or, so we have banking, in money. We have identity. Are there other other use cases that we need to talk about about like what's, okay,

oh boy, it keeps on going. So the other area is actually the art, creative spaces. So there's like African art and African culture is all over the world. You see it in music, you see it in art, you see it in food. The world is consuming African creatives.

But very little value is captured by the people who are creating that. So I'm seeing. so many artists getting into the NFT world, and even experimenting with that medium, that wouldn't be possible in traditional art of just painting something. So that's one movement that's happening. Okay, so I think the picture that you're painting is that there are no good monies. There are a few good monies in Africa.

And the crypto monies that we've invented as troublesome and chaotic as they are still present very valid options for Africans. Yes. Not only that, but stable coins, I'm sure, are very, very relevant. They're massive. It's easier to access stable coins in so many countries than accessing fiat dollars, especially US dollar stable coins. To give an example, where I come from Ethiopia, there's the bank rate and then this unofficial rate. Of course, yeah. There's 100% premium, 100% premium on the bank rate. Twice.

Call it the corruption rate? Or the free market rate. That's what I call it. So there's the controlled bank rate. And that's because, and there's a lot more money that's been transacted outside of the bank rate than, you know, outside of it than within the system. Right. Right. That's because, you know, there's so many layers. It's hard to kind of go through every aspect of it.

But it's systemic. And I don't know if there's a pathway for the governments to find a way out of that. Right. Right. So basically people are transacting outside of that system. if I'm running a small shop and I need to buy inventory, let's say I'm selling shirts and I need to import a whole lot of shirts from India. How do I pay the $1,000 to actually order that? This is hard to go through the existing process.

Yeah, I'm going to try to use Moneygram or Western Union, but I'm going to pay ridiculous fees, long processes on all that. I might as well just buy US dollar stable coins, send it to person over there, instant settlement, and then I get my items shipped over to me. That's how a lot of people are using it. Right. Okay, so the money conversation is a double whammy because it's not just a better money or stronger money alternatives. It's also the lower fees.

Yes. Right? And so, like, that makes it a very competitive banking system. And access. And access. Yeah. Global access. Yeah.

Global access. Right. Permissionless access, yes. And then there's, I'm sure, as soon as you have, like, established bank account on Ethereum with your wallet and your money. and your money, then you can start engaging in a more sophisticated financial tools that we call Defi. I'm sure that is a much more powerful set of financial tools than what the Africans can discover locally.

And that's just the money and finance thing. That is like that's where so much demand for Web3 utility products and services comes from. And then also identity on top of that as well. Trust. Yes. Interest? The broad area of trust. Trust. So basically wherever you need trust, here there's so many things that we take for granted.

right like you get into a hotel room or you buy a piece of land or you order something online you know something is going to be delivered you kind of like assume that's already going to happen right in a place where there's not a lot of trust infrastructures you're always asking is what the person said actually going to come true right if I have this thing is it actually mine right so all the different things of trust that you kind of take for granted they're either not a existent or are very weak in many African countries. Yeah. If any bankless listeners just had the term settlement assurances come into their head,

points for you. Settlement insurance is, like, core part of, like, what we believe this makes crypto so powerful, is the thing that you think is yours actually yours. That's like the beautiful thing about crypto is extremely high settlement assurances. And so it sounds like not just like money and settlement insurances is benefit for Africa, but just like identity as like, this is also your identity too. and other people, not just yourself, but other people can also rely on that,

which is an important infrastructure. I want to ask about just like the culture of users who use these tools in the United States and the privileged land where we have like general abundance. Like we have the crypto is like a casino for us.

Yeah. It's like, sadly. I mean, it is one of these things that makes these things powerful and proves all the use case. But we have the luxury of using this as a And I'm wondering what is the culture or the disposition of African users who use crypto not as a casino, but because they actually really need it and it is legitimately a better tool? Like how would you describe just like the how people engage with these things down there? So, so reality is the casino still exists.

It's everywhere. It's like you see a lot of that in Africa as well. Now we're in a bare market, which is actually good because there's not a ton of like blind a speculation that's happening. But the other side, the real use case is, one is US dollar stable coins. So that's something that a lot of people use for cross-border payments, for

inflation and currency devaluation hedging. I would assume inflation across Africa is terrible. It's very high, yeah. And the other side is also, I'm hearing of fintech, traditional fintech startups, who are actually becoming the key banking infrastructures in the continent.

So you're finding startups, providing better financial services than banks do, but that's a separate conversation. They're using crypto at the back end. They won't admit it, but they're using crypto at the back end. Why won't they admit it? Because it creates a lot of... Crypto.

Yeah, exactly. You don't want a lot of attention. But when I talk to a number of exchanges, they're telling me that the biggest clients are fintech, not retail users, which is fascinating. So they're using it. for the treasurer management. Again, if you cannot access U.S. dollars

and the currency that you're holding is being devalued over time, you want to put it in other asset classes. And crypto-stable coins make a lot of sense as a treasurer management. It's just a smart thing to do. And it's more available to you in a permissionless way

than knocking on the doors of a bank. Yeah. One thing that makes me just so happy and optimistic about this story is that individual Africans are choosing to use crypto tools by their own merits and adopting them and becoming bankless,

getting all their bank accounts. But I actually think that that part of the story is also very cool and optimistic too. FinTech's adopting crypto for the same reasons because it also provides them as businesses, better foundations to provide financial services. So even if the individual African is not adopting crypto tools, the fintech layer of Africa is also improving because of crypto to do the rest of the mile. Exactly. And I expect to see a lot more of that. Another area that I'm seeing some action in and I'm super excited about is the credit space. Now, for you and I and many people here, if you've got salary or whatever, it's easy for you to access some level of credit. Even if you have crypto, you can borrow money from Ave or compound or whatever, right?

But if you're just like a small business and most of African companies are small businesses and you don't have a real asset that you can use as collateral, banks won't lend to you. Banks, so here's a sad reality. Banks lend to bankers. Right. Because it's bankers that have stable jobs that bankers think is solid, which is kind of weird and twisted, right? Yeah. So if you don't have something that's valuable that you can collateralize, then you go to uncolatelized borrowing. Right.

Do you know how much money you pay? Have a guess. Have a guess of how much interest are on average. On a year? Yeah. Higher than 20%. Keep going? 40%?

Okay. So in Kenya and Nigeria, for example, a bunch of fintags, they are charging 10 to 30% a month. A month? Oh, my numbers weren't a year. No. 10 to 30% a month. Because the risk is so high. Well, yes.

Or perceived risk? Perceived risk. Not actual risk. Some actual risk, some perceived risk. So some fintechs that I've talked to where the default rate is less than 10%, They're still charging super high because that's the current growing market rate. Is it just a, why is that the growing market rate? Is it just a very inefficient market with no liquidity?

Liquidity is a big part of it. But the main issue is also just how to price risk. Oh, yeah, okay. How to price risk. And also as a borrower, I can borrow X amount money from you. And then if I cannot pay it, then I go to someone else, borrow that money and then pay you back. You get into these cycles. So one person can cause 100 people's worth of destruction.

Exactly. So one interesting area of application that I'm seeing is there's some fintechs that are getting access of user data from mobile money, for example, which huge mindset option there, and putting that on-chain and helping you build on-chain credit reporting, which helps you access on-chain liquidity. So it's actually onboarding a whole lot of people into crypto without them even realizing it and helping you build on-chain reputation and trying to. and track record, which now multiple fintechs can use as a single source of truth, as opposed to each one kind of determining, you know, what your credit worthiness. Does that make sense? Yeah, 100%. And when I was previously talking about, oh, yeah, so you have your Ethereum wallet or your

Bitcoin wallet, and you're using stable coins, and that's all great because you get better money and cheaper fees. And then I was talking about defy. It's like, oh, and also, like, defy is better. Like, they can use uniswap to swap tokens. Maybe they are. But I think maybe the bigger story is this credit. Access to credit is the bigger part of the finance for World for Africa.

Let me put in this way. You talked about casinos earlier, right? My view is that in the Western and many Eastern worlds, cryptra is a nice to have. For the masses, it's just a nice to have. Because you already have so many things working for you, right? And that's where we hit this. Banks are a nuisance, not a critical problem.

Exactly. They exist. They provide services. Governments provide services, even though we don't like them. So for the like 10% or 15% of us, crypto is so much more valuable is important, but it's hard to go above that unless you start adding real utility that is way better than the current system, right?

And the friction is low. And that's what we keep talking about in this world. When you go to many African countries, the existing apparatus, the current paradigm, is just not working. Right? So that's where you can reach beyond the 5-10, and 15% of adoption rates of a whole population, you can go a lot higher than that when you start building applications that actually meet people's needs.

So I think that's where the real opportunities to me is in Africa, crypto can be a plan A, not a plan B, plan C, or plan F. Right. Exactly. It's not a backstop. It's the first choice. Yeah. Well, so this thesis resonates, obviously.

And I think anyone who's been in crypto long enough understands that like this is why we do this, like this is why we're here. The opportunity is salient. Yes. So if the opportunity is so good, what's the venture landscape? What's the business landscape look like? I would imagine this would be interesting for more than a few VCs out there. Yeah.

What's that like? So in February, I led a trip with Vitalik and IEF for a month across four countries. IAMI Gucci of the EF. I AMIA Gucci who runs the EF and a number of other Ethereum communities. And we just held very low-key events, didn't make a big splash. And we had about a few hundred founders and builders. came up to various of those events. Is Battalic known, as well known in Africa as he is in Argentina?

I don't know about how well he's known in Argentina, but we went to cafes and restaurants where, you know, people were trying to pay for our meals or come by and say hi, you know, like, you know, it was, it was amazing. But also, I think people are quite respectful, you know, so he wasn't getting overloaded, but people recognized him, and that was a really interesting little bit missed. So yeah, he was well known. And we met a whole lot of builders who were basically at the stage of building the core infrastructures. I think that's still very much needed.

So on ramps and off ramps, exchanges, credit tools, lending pools, means for people to basically create advances on their salaries. But we met a whole lot of people trying to build new stable coins, either real world asset back stable coins or a basket of currencies. because that's where the energy is at. That's where the demand is at. And there's so many other builders who we met around, solving problems that you wouldn't think of coming from the West. So, for example, like in Ethiopia, getting medicine, that's high quality and known is really hard.

And the one common thing that we have is, you know, if I'm visiting Ethiopia, I can tell you, all my relatives are asking me, hey, Yosef, can you buy ABCD and put it in your bag and bring it along here? It's so common. Like, every Ethiopian listening will totally get this. It's just something we all do. So there's a team that's actually building an application to make that process a lot simpler.

Like, hey, if I've got a kilo two kilos in my bag, I can get stuff that people need. But then how do I trust me? How do I trust what I'm buying is correct? So they're putting aspects of that on chain to greater level of transparency. So these types of applications, like you wouldn't think about it coming in the Western world. but African builders are working on those. So you see some really original thoughts and approaches, but the market is still early.

So crypto adoption, in my view, like really started in 2018, 2019. So we're just seeing one cycle on the continent. So it's still quite early. But, you know, last year there was about $150 plus million invested in crypto companies, $5 billion in just general tech startup. So still a long way to go in terms of the venture space being developed. Sure. So I'm kind of afraid about how naive this question is.

But you said like adoption happens and started happening in 2018. I would say like even inside of America or Europe, the adoption didn't happen until then too. And even throughout the bear market, we were still like looking for our use case. We were talking about, oh yeah, payments. We know that. But like we want more. But it really sounds like perhaps Africa is actually the continent that has adopted crypto the most. Is that true?

It is. Already? It's already number one in crypto users. So Kenya and Nigeria make the top 20 crypto adoption index. Okay. Last year we had about $100 billion of on-chain transaction of volume. It's small compared to the rest of the world, but it's significant for the local economies. You know, many countries is between 5 to 15% of those populations.

But if you see in actual numbers, Africa is 1.4 billion people. To put that into context, all of Europe, all of the United States, and all of South America combined. So it's a huge market, huge continent. Nigeria is just 250 million people. Ethiopia is 120 million people. So we're talking about large populations. So in sheer numbers, it is high.

The volume per user, it's low. What's the average age of Africa? Median age is 19. It's very young. It's very young. It's extremely young. Yeah. Yeah, so it's the youngest part of the world.

What about like internet connectivity and access? Access. Like how hard is it to access crypto? Yeah. So about 590 million Africans have access to the internet. And that's growing 6% a year. Okay. So in urban areas...

6% a year? 6% is increasing by 6% of year. That has to be the highest rate in the world, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's very high. I don't know. I haven't benchmarked to the rest of the world. But that's really high.

Right. And in urban areas where 40% of the population lives, Internet access is very high. Right. So one of the things I've spent the last two years doing is actually talking to normal people, students, recent graduates, universities. Well, that's where a lot of the people are at, right?

Just to understand what's the dream, what's their vision for their lives, what are the things that they're learning about. Many young people are learning online more than what they're learning universities and in schools. Two-thirds of full African developers are self-taught or learning on the job. So the internet is really opening up access to education and information. and I've talked to a number of folks who graduated in architecture, for example, and thinking, well, what kind of career can I build an architecture in my country here

unless I have an ability to go elsewhere and then discover crypto? I said, this is so interesting. How about I teach myself solidity? People teaching themselves solidity on YouTube, on their mobile phones. And then start working with DOWs and then earn your first few hundred dollars and you buy a laptop. And then you start contributing. more to doubt and you do it anonymously no one cares and when you're still who you are where you're from and people are making real income real living as a full-time job without meeting a single person

in real life who's working in the space and that's really fascinating like how people are getting to this space on their own yes there are a whole lot of people getting in to speculate to buy shit tokens and all of that but there are a whole lot of serious people getting to the space and seeing it as a real source of income and a real source of really maximizing the full potential as human beings without needing to live home. There's always this idea of leapfrogging technologies. I think this is typically used when Africa never really went to desktop. It went just mobile first. And so it leapfrogged into that technology. Yes. I'm sure there's other examples that are low-hanging fruit that I'm going to forget in this moment. We've had multiple leapfrogs on the continent. We leapfrog landlines. Right. Yes. And it's so

fast, right? I think the last data points that I checked, 93 out of every 100 user has set up a SIM card account on the continent. So that's, like, that's huge. We leapfrog banks with mobile money, and now we're leapfrogging

the centralized institutions with crypto. And so it seems like, and that's I think the punchline, in the combination of like, leapfrogging education tech with AI, sorry to bring AI into the conversation, but just like I'm sure AI is a powerful democratizing force of education. Totally.

It's happening at the same time that we are able to, Africa is able to leapfrog into better money and better financial services with crypto. Yes. And that part, like leapfrogging technology is always an exciting conversation in of itself. But when you leapfrog money is big because money is so deeply rooted in the bottom of a social cultural stack. Yes. It is very important critical social infrastructure.

Yes. And so when you leapfrog advancements in money, the downstream net effects of that can only be Polish. We have to absolutely massive. It's massive. Yeah. Because a whole economy is built on that. If you don't have that, it's hard to build everything else. Everything else. Right. Trust is at the bottom. Exactly. You're leapfrogging trust.

Yeah. Yeah. Leaprogging centralist institutions. And my view is that if we keep with the status quo, Africa's position at the bottom of the pyramid is pretty much locked in for at least the next hundred years. Right. Right. Because it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a downward

pressure to kind of keep you at that bottom of of the pyramid. And when you talk to a whole lot of young people, there are 900 million Africans who are under the age of 30, 900 million. They have dreams, they have desires, they want to have much of this world as much as everyone else. Right. Right. And so the best outlet is online, but then online is gated if you don't have a means to pay and receive money, right? You need that to power that. And so crypto is like, great, this makes a lot more sense. So this is not, to me, the Africa narrative here an opportunity is not just like, hey, let me put 5% of my assets into some high growth, high risk space and see what happens. Like, no, I want to have access

to the world. And this has given me that. Access to the world. That's beautiful. Also, another opportunity really is that the incumbent continents, like America in China, America is going to go down fighting, like the banking system is going to go down fighting. Like they're trying to ban crypto before really allowing it to be adopted. And then like most of the population doesn't care. Yes. Like crypto is that weird thing with like the Wall Street Bettsfolk. So they're not going to adopt it simply because they don't need it.

And then the incumbent systems are going to fight it. Meanwhile, Africa is going to adopt it simply out of necessity. Yes. And learn to use it and learn to refine it and grow it. naturally and organically. Yes. That makes me bullish. Yes.

Because it's accepting crypto. There's all like continents and populations and cultures have to get over the accepting crypto hurdle. Yes. And it sounds like Africa is like, that hurdle for Africa is like very, very low to the ground. Exactly. It's not hard to accept crypto in Africa. This makes a lot more sense.

And to me it's not like, you know, shops and everything accepting crypto necessarily. That's not the indication of success to me. It's not like onboarding everyone to the crypto economy. The way we think about it here is like, I don't want to have a bank. I don't have Fiat. I don't want to hold any local payment systems. I think what I'm observing is actually people move Fiat to crypto and then crypto to Fiat

to Fiat to Fiat to do. And that's a lot of things. Right. So to me, it's not like just make everything Ethereum. And that makes sense. It's actually make your whole economy powered by Ethereum. Right. Right.

I think that's the bigger opportunity to me. It's not like what we talk about in just in our own crypto circles of like how the world can be more like live on decentralized blockchains is actually make decentralized blockchains the back end that powers the whole economy. Right. I remember this one line from Andreas Antonopoulos. He called it, I think it's like technology inversion, something inversion. And he was using the idea of once upon a time, we squeeze the internet through dial-up. and that's how we use the internet and then we made broadband

and then that was instead of having to put the internet through telephone lines we just made we made wires specifically for the internet and then the internet exploded because it didn't have to get throttled through dial up and when you tell me like in the beginning stages it goes from fiat

to crypto to fiat to do things that fiat only can't do to me that's like we're trying to squeeze through crypto through the fiat bandwidth which is great is where you get started you got to start somewhere but then also merely doing that that also sets the stage for the inversion, where we just do away with the fiat,

and we're like, okay, just crypto, crypto only. And Africa sounds like it's first down that path. Yeah, and it's happening at scale in a lot of different places. And you talked about governments earlier. African governments are still wary and not sure about this space.

There are some that have outright banded. So when I talk about Africa, Africa's 54 countries, right? So it's very different dynamics. I actually love to talk about Africans, the people. This is people power. It's not institution power.

And it's the people who have the needs who have the demands. And I'm betting more on the African people building the infrastructures for an economy that works for them instead of waiting for a permission way to create this. So crypto is striving despite governments, not as a result of governments. Yeah, and to my loose and uninformed take about Africa, is that just like the board.

borders, the countries of Africa mean less than the culture and communities of Africa. As in just like the boundaries of Africa was drawn by like Europeans. And they were, some of them. Yeah, in like the 1880s Berlin Conference, right? And so I think Africa of all continents that are out there is most primed to become borderless using borderless tools like Ethereum like crypto. Yes. I have this vision that, you know, borderless Africa is what

many young people are striving towards, but not necessarily like, hey, let's bring down the borders that we kind of see and know of. It's just the borders, like where borders create, exactly, where borders create a lot of the barriers. Because the way IMF relates to Africa, the where the World Bank relates to Africa, the way the global powers relate to Africa is bordered nation by border nation, right? And so whenever you try to break free of that, you come across a brick wall, that you can't pass through. So the shared experience of being separated from the world, separated from each other, that's the borders.

There's a physical border. There's an economic border. There's a psychological border. And that's what I see many African builders thinking is like I am African first and a citizen of that country second is because there's a shared experience and the shared challenge there. And I believe, like, you know, I'm kind of inspired by you guys, bankless. I think a borderless Africa makes a lot of sense. Right.

Yeah, no, well, we also see that. Yeah. We also see that. Yosef, you're starting a venture fund. I am. Tell us about the strategy. So my vision is basically increasing crypto adoption on the continent in real-world use cases and helping us build a borderless life for a whole lot of Africans.

And I see that in multiple approaches. One is actually creating soil. I love the notion of. Infinite Garden, right? So you need to build rich soil on the continent to help whole ecosystems to thrive, right? And that is around education, community building, awareness building. And that's all to me, public goods. That's one stuff I'm really focused on, is supporting a lot of communities on the ground,

supporting events. Hopefully, you know, you and friends can come, spend time there, connect with local communities. So there are a few events that are happening there. There's It Safari. It's a local Ethereum community happening in Kenya in September. So there's a lot of those beautiful things that are happening that I believe is public goods, and we need to put resources and support that. On the other side, when you have fertile soil, you need forests.

And those are the projects, the protocols, the applications that are actually bringing these visions to life. And to me, I think capital is a means to support and enable that to happen. So I'm building a venture fund to basically back African founders who have deep local context and understanding and our billing from the bottom up and our long-term thinkers. And I didn't wake up thinking, hey, I'm going to be a VC, but that's the highest leverage way to actually support this work. Right. Funnel capital into the places that it needs to go.

Being a good capital allocator is one of the best things you can do to grow up burgeoning, like ecosystem inside of an economy that needs it. Why are you the right person to do this job? What's your advantage? Why are you going to be a great capital allocator for Africa? Like, what skills do you bring to the table? So I have spent still the majority of my life on the continent, and I have felt the pain that many young Africans feel.

And I have deep, like in my blood relationship with the struggle, right? And I feel like I've been extremely lucky in my life to have leapfrogged so many parts of society and, you know, spent a lot of time in the U.S. and the West and in the East. and I've seen that set of the world as well and I've built a lot of relationships and I see my role as a bridge builder between that world and African ecosystems where there's mutual value

and relationship building so that's one lens that I have the other lens is I've spent the last eight, 10 years building stuff so I come from a builder perspective and world and I have a deep empathy towards founders and builders who are down in the trenches

building the infrastructures that's going to last so that's the that I'm bringing to the table. And the third is, you know, I want to see the crypto world succeed and I want to see Africa succeed. So I'm operating with a very long-term lengths in mind. The sad realities on the continent today,

there are a lot of mercenaries. Mercenary chains, mercenary protocols. I don't want to name names now. But there's a lot of bad behavior that is underselling the value of crypto and underselling the value of where Africans want to go. So I'm positioning myself to do the opposite of that, hopefully, and help us build a thriving community, a thriving continent, and help global

communities also understand and be part of Africa's journey. You know, we saw China's growth in a tremendous way. We're seeing India's growth and development, and technology has been a big part of that. Now is the face of Africa. And I don't think the world understands what's happening there. I don't think the crypto world understands the potential. and I want to see more of the Ethereum community get plugged in and connect because I believe the Ethereum values are deeply aligned with where many young Africans want to go. And I want to help build up bridge.

Where are you in the setting up this fund? Where are you in the lifecycle of this fund? And you're currently raising? Yes. If people are interested, where can they go to find out more? They could reach out to me, Yosef ad hay.com. We'll get those links in the show notes. Sure.

Sure, or reach out to me on Twitter, happy to chat on that front. Building it, and there's a lot of projects that I'm ready to back right now, so I'm really keen to get going as soon as possible. But the main thing I'd say is, you know, there are a lot of people who are kind of raising fund and cutting corners and all of that. To me, it's about relationships, and it's a long-term journey. So if people want to invest, there's a money part of it, But there's also like, hey, let's actually build a direct relationship with African builders.

And this is one of the gateways for them to do so. Well, Yosef, the thesis makes sense to me. And I think that if in the world where we fast forward into the future in crypto hadn't completely integrated into Africa and really helped out at a very deep level, then we've deeply failed as an industry. we should look at Africa as like the first main validation of what we can do for the rest of the world because it seems like Africa is running for it first. And so I wish you the best of luck on your venture arm and I'm happy to help it anyway I can. Thanks so much. Crypto needs Africa.

So let's make it happen. Oh yeah. Give us the bulkcase for our bags. Give us for us Westerners who are going to stick around in front of our TVs and our computers and we're just going to like, oh, I hope Africa uses the crypto. What is the bulk case for crypto if Africa adopts it in the best ways that it can? Yeah. Why is it good for the last 10 years?

We've been talking about mass adoption. We've been talking about real world use cases beyond just the intellectual circles that we navigate in. Well, the masses in mass adoption are in Africa, right? So we're going to pay more attention there if we want to have this technology to be used in daily life, whether it's a bull market or a bear market. and people derive real value from. And if you're deriving real value, you pay fees, right? And there's a real economic model to sustain it.

I believe that's where Africa contributes to the crypto narrative and cycle. So I think for this industry to succeed and to actually survive the test of time, we need that. We need the real stuff. And the real side of the conversation to me, Africa is a big part of it. It's not the only part, but it's a huge part of that narrative. So thank you so much. Thanks so much, David. Cheers.

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Thank you. Thank you for having me. So Zuzalo means many, many things for many different people. What does it mean for you? I think the one word that encapsulates Zuzali for me and even for the Afrippolitan community is access, right? Being able to have a seat at a table when, especially when you get to be around some of the brightest minds in the world where a lot of these frontier knowledge are being pushed, you have access to that seat. And for so long, I would say a lot of Africans have

been lasted a party when the cake has been shared and when we come, we're like, oh, we don't even get crumbs. What's going on? Right. So for me, Zuzalu represents access, right? And access at the front seat at the table. Okay, so you mentioned that for Politin, which is the, thing that you want to bridge towards here at Zuzalo. But specifically for your movement, access is important, but what is here in Zuzalo for that movement? So first, I think we were able to also come here with at least 20 plus of our citizens, right?

Coming out to Montenegro, I mean, you're around, again, some of the brightest minds, right? So you have founders within our network, creatives within our network, professionals within our network, they're able to come here, collaborate, connect. even I think a few of them got some investment opportunities as well. Again, it's like access not just to even the people, but just again to the capital that's probably available or to the information that's available, which is huge because for a long time, the way the world has been set up

as information arbitrage, which is you know and we don't know and because you know we don't get to be again at the seat of the table. So again, that's what this represents for us. Sure. Okay, so let's dive head first into the movement. What is the Afriolitan movement? So I would say Is movement the right word? You know, definitely the right word.

And I think I'll probably want to just give context real quick. So I think the best way to understand the African-Politan journey is to think about it in three phases, right? Phase one of African-Politan is an organization I studied while in law school in San Francisco came into the African diaspora through events. So think your favorite Afro beats parties, concerts, festivals. Cultural events. Cultural events, yeah.

A significant highlight of that phase one was something called the Year of Return that happened in Ghana. 2019, where we basically helped facilitate about a million plus people from the diaspora heading to Ghana. It generated about $2 billion worth of economic activity for Ghana, right? That's phase one. Phase two then starts in 2020, where we wanted to reload the year of return again, and then COVID happens. COVID decimates the entire in real life events industry, and we were forced to pivot, and we pivoted into media, but through a social audio app called Clubhouse. So Clubhouse between I and my co-founder, Chica, we built communities under about 200,000 people.

people collectively, right? And we showed a capacity for collective action, which made us very ready when the next year, 2021, Belagis Rhen, right? He drops this article called How to Start a New Country. And in the article, this was April 2021, and we were in the car, Senegal, actually, when we read this. And he proposes this idea of a network state, which is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that's able to crowd front territory around the world, and eventually gain diplomatic recognition in pre-existing states. Now, when I read it, it was like, man, this is like a powerful idea, but it was more theoretical.

But I could see the shapes of it. But there was a particular quote in that article that I think really held us to the idea where he says, because the brand new is unthinkable, we fight over the old. And I think for us it was like, damn, it feels like that encapsulates. That's a good one. It felt like that encapsulated what we felt. as Africans.

Like, we consistently fight over the own, whether it's historical constraints or colonial baggage, we're not able to transcend into the future, right? And so for the rest of the year, this is where bank this comes in. We red pill our way into Web 3, right?

A lot of bankless podcast, a lot of, like, articles, you just consistently, like, every weekend, you've been through those rabbit holes where you're just consistently Web 3 driven. And come December 21, 2021, I wake up in Nairobi, Kenya, at 5 a.m.

I'm pacing the room for about an hour. My partner's like, hey, what's going on? I'm like, look, I know how I would look at someone who's about to tell you, what I'm about to tell you, but I think we need to start a new country. And she's like, wait, what? And I'm like, yeah, but we need to find out why

because you're towing the line between being a conspiracy theorist and just being cuckoo-bird, right? And we drew some inspiration from the American founding fathers, from the federalist one, where Anthony Hamilton basically says, is it possible for societies of men to form a new constitution through a reflection and choice

or are we forever destined to depend on our governance through accident and force? And we were like, damn, that's our why. No modern nation state in Africa was created through reflection and choice. It has always been through accident and force. And so what would it look like if we could form a new country,

but this time with people who have shared values and purpose in a borderless manner, right? The internet enables us to organize around shared values. If Facebook, for example, was a country with its own cryptocurrency, it would be the largest country in the world. But this time, instead of an online passive community, which is what Facebook is, as a social network, it's now a community aligned around shared values and purpose

with its own currency, and then you can get recognition from pre-existing states based on that. And so our why is pretty strong, right? And it cuts across, like I said, we're trying to do away with a lot of the historical constraints and the colonial baggage. And that whole idea of because the brand new is unthinkable, we fight over the old. That's why our ideology is one of abundance.

Because we have seen scarcity wreck a lot of stuff across Africa or just even just being African in the world. And we want to build upon an ideology of abundance, abundance of tools, abundance of even in mindset, abundance of resources. And that's the way we see it. So I've talked with a few other networks and people in like the broad pitch is, man, we haven't had a new city or a new country. in over hundreds of years.

And so we're built on old foundations, like you said. And so it's just like the incumbents of the world. I do really enjoy the idea of thinking about countries and governments as like incumbents that could be disrupted, which most people don't think about. But for many people, like people in the United States, people, I'm assuming also Europe, are like, that's a great thought experiment. Yeah. Interesting article.

Some good brain candy. But like practically I'm comfy with where I am. But also, I think with what you're teasing here is that, like, Africa particularly is primed for this. Yeah. As in it can be not a thought experiment. It can be a manifesto? Yes. So can you give the pitch to people who are uninformed about Africa, why Africa is so primed for a network state movement?

Yeah. So I would say, and I could give this in an analogy, and I could give this in a fact. So picture a house that has a weak foundation, right? You go into this house and you say, hey, we want to fix the weak foundation. foundation. But instead of starting with the foundation, you start painting the walls. You start fixing the AC. You start fixing the fence. And then you're like, oh, pop up the window. And then you're like, the house is stable, but it still collapses, right? Because the foundation is weak. The weak foundation in that analogy is our governance systems across Africa, right? The AC is maybe like our fintech

industry. The fans are like maybe our health tech industry or whatever industry exists. What happens is we have this idea that we can entrepreneur away out of these problems and it doesn't work. Because eventually the weak foundation collapses these different sectors that are trying to thrive. So for us, we're saying, why don't we go foundational? Fix the actual foundation because when you compare Africa to the rest of the world, there's a sense of, is this a feature or is this a bug? And so our argument is it's a feature. And we'll explain why. When it's a bug, what it looks like is Singapore, Vietnam, Dubai.

These are countries that, for the most part, maybe got their independence after a lot of African countries. So I'll give you an example. Vietnam War ended in 1975. Nigeria got its independence in 1960. That's a full 15 years head start. Look at Vietnam today, look at Nigeria today, right? Singapore, right? The Singaporean leader would literally come to,

Lecoigneur would literally come to Africa to visit because Singapore hadn't necessarily achieved its independence yet. Look at Singapore today. Look at like a whole host of African countries. Nine out of the 10 countries with the highest poverty rates are from Africa, right? And so for us, why we're saying is the feature, not a bug, it's because the feature was we never actually started it

through reflection and choice, right? Vietnam's, the Vietnamese, fought for what they believed in, right? The Singaporeans also put out their own constitution and fought as well for what they believed in. We had a fight for independence, but it was never based on any philosophical unapentance, right? What was the reflection and what was the choice? Keep in mind also, because of the borders

that were drawn haphazedly in the Berlin conference, right? A lot of tribes just got tossed in. and the borders just got written where when you visit Africa today you can cross the border and they speak the same language but they're just a line in front of them

that was drawn by someone else again who was not privy or maybe didn't even care about the realities on ground which brings us back to the whole Zuzalupon, right? The original seat at the table was the Berlin Conference, right? Where things are being divided and the whole continent is being shared. I bet you there was no

African India being like right, right, right. And just to dive into the history because like the Berlin Conference 1880, I think. Yeah, 1890s. Yeah, 80 something. Yeah, a bunch of Europeans come down and draw the map of Africa from Berlin. Yes. And this is no Google Maps,

by the way. And so they're drawing lines, which are completely incongerent with the actual cultural divisions that are in the space, which was where more organically emergent boundaries would be formed. Exactly. And so this is,

and this has been the way that it's is, and it's not like, it's not like the tribes of Africa then settled into those boundaries post. And so there's still tribal differences. Yeah. And so you're saying that that discrepancy between where the European lines are of Africa versus the actual cultural topology of Africa, because there's discrepancy there, because there's friction there, that makes Africa primed for a new map or a new country.

Yes, because the network states allow us to withdraw those colonial borders, but this time digitally first and then land second, right? So because now you're forming a new... society or a new nation, but this time it's around shared values and purpose. And so it's no longer about like the historical constraints or the colonial baggage or saying, hey, we don't speak the same language or we don't have the same religion or all the things that divide us that are the old, we're trying to disembark from those to do the brand new. And so for that, that requires us basically recruiting like the sort of folks who would have come on the ship heading on a Mayflower,

basically. So it's like, because that's a different sort of mindset. So right now we've set up with 500 citizens, 500 passports. you're looking to recruit the folks who, I don't know if you're into a lot of Viking shows, like Wagner, Lodberg and all that stuff. Okay, but the whole idea is like, you have people who are like, we're tired with our status quo.

We're going to go on the ship. It's the unknown. We don't know, but it is better than our status quo. We know that for a fact. Whatever it's out there has to be better than our status quo. And so for us, it involves us reaching out globally

to recruit the sort of people who would have boarded the Mayflower, which only started with 100-something people by the way. Right? And now, obviously, the U.S. is like a 300 million people. country trillions of GDP. But it's the same mindset of

we want the new world, we want a new order, and the reason is because our status quo actually sucks. This isn't even like, it's terrible across every industry. I just gave you a stat of nine out of the top ten countries in the world with the highest poverty rates are from Africa. Let's not talk about what devaluation

has done to our currencies. Proper shit. So when crypto came, right? It was like, okay, now you have crypto and now you have the ability to maybe form with the internet to organize around shared values, why don't we try for that, right? And that allows us to potentially hopefully transcend our current status quo. Yeah. The one concerning theme of like the network state movement is that you have a bunch of just like centralized founders trying to make a city. Yeah. And the what gives

me optimistic about this movement is that the case for why Afripolitan, why Africa is the right place to actually apply these principles first is the latent demand in the people, in the popular, in the community in the culture. The culture is ready to accept a movement. Yeah. Um, or at least that's my, that's my attitude and I think what you're saying. Because you just go into like why the culture, uh, is ready to accept a network state movement. Like what, why is this not going to be a top down implementation from, from some leaders? I think it's the, it's the same reason why when you look at a lot of stats about crypto, you see a lot of African markets pop up, right? When you think through the principles of like blockchain or web three, it's maybe transparency, accountability, immatibility,

no single point of failure, right? What continent has experienced the opposite of that? That's Africa to today. Single points of failure across all our governments, right? Across our CBNs or central banks our currencies are shit.

Like when I'm telling you,