The Breakdown - Discovering Bitcoin Through the #EndSARS Movement, Feat. Yele Bademosi & Akin Sawyerr

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

Yele Bademosi is CEO at Bundle social payments app and the founder of investment firm microtraction. Akin Sawyerr is involved across the industry and leads operations at BarnBridge.  Over the course of October 2020, the world’s attention became firmly fixed on a growing movement in Nigeria. With the hashtag #EndSARS, the movement was, on the one hand, about addressing police brutality. On the other hand, as our guests discuss, it was a broader awakening and a demand for generational economic opportunity. At one point, even Twitter founder Jack Dorsey called for people to donate bitcoin to help the movement.  In this conversation, Yele and Akin discuss: The state of the economy in Nigeria leading into the protests Generational differences in political action  Why the #EndSARS protests exploded into action in October Why the movement turned to bitcoin to avoid bank confiscation  How crypto can play a role in a brighter future Find our guests online: Yele Bademosi - twitter.com/YeleBademosi Akin Sawyerr - twitter.com/AkinSawyerr

The trauma from that particular experience actually silenced that generation and impacted how they felt about politics. Now, that's about 30 years, which is a whole generation, and then you now have a new generation who are not necessarily affected by what happened in 93, and are now thinking from the ground up with new tools that gives them that sense of agency. Having things like the smartphone, the internet, social media, decentralized payment systems like Bitcoin, all these things give us the tools that gives people the ability to think that you know what, maybe this time you have a chance. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by crypto.com and nexo.io and produced and distributed by CoinDest. What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, November 11th. And today we are diving into the world of Nigeria and African Bitcoin and Crypto. And specifically, we're looking at how the recent end SARS movement has created kind of an inflection point potentially for both economic action in the form of adoption of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, as well as a larger belief in political power among the younger generations. I'm joined for this conversation first by a Kin Sawyer, who is something of a crypto-Defi Bitcoin Renaissance man. He's done a huge number of things in this industry. He has a background in international development and management consulting as well, so a really diverse

perspective on it. And I'm also joined by Yale Batamose, who has been on the ground in Nigeria during these protests, and who is also the CEO of Bundle Africa, which is a cash app Venmo type application for the African markets. Together, these guys help give a context for this NSARs movement that's bigger than just one issue that's bigger than just a set of issues and really helps us understand it in terms of how Nigeria and Africa as a whole is changing. So I hope you enjoy it. All right. Jens, thank you so much for joining the breakdown. I'm really excited for this conversation. Thanks for having us. So let's, I want to do a little bit of frame setting first. I don't want to assume that people who are listening happen

to know anything about Africa and Nigeria specifically and what's going on there. So maybe let's have each of you guys introduce yourself. First, I guess, Akin, you've been working on crypto across multiple parts of the African continent and thinking about this kind of broadly. Maybe you could just introduce yourself first and talk about what you've been doing to help people kind of understand the perspective you're coming from. Yeah, sure. So I can say, I grew up in Nigeria. I grew up in Nigeria. I was working in the United States, but I spent most of my life through secondary school, high school in Nigeria, and then moved back to the States to go to college and have been here since. Most of my professional life was in international development with IMF.

I spent about 15 years working in management consulting with Accenture and Booz Allen Hamilton, mostly in the federal government space. So a lot of federal reg agencies, homeland security, that kind of stuff. And then about, I'd say about 10 years ago, I started looking into Africa a little more directly from a professional standpoint. And I got, I got involved with mobile payments through an investment I made in a company called Splash Mobile Money in Sierra Leone. This was about 12 years ago now. And so that kind of got me into Africa. I was still doing consulting, doing that part-time.

And over time, I just sort of slowly got deeper into fintech payments, trying to really understand. how that created new opportunities for Africans. And that sort of now gotten into crypto because we're looking to solve this remittance problem. Sub-Southouse in Africa is the most expensive quarter in the world to move money into. And there's some structural reasons for that. There's some regulatory reasons for that.

And so we looked at blockchain and crypto as a potential way to reduce costs, you know, kind of cut out middle, and just try to make it a more competitive space. And that's how I got into crypto. But one thing went to another, I started looking at governance as a really important aspect of crypto and how these networks are going to be successful over the long term. And so I spent about a year and a half working with Decred over the last couple of years

and have also sort of now migrated to working more into Defy space more closely. And so I work for Barnbridge, which is a new decentralized synthetics, or I'll call it like a synthetic debt protocol, derivatives protocol. But I also sort of just work across the space, right? So it involved with a few other projects in a defy space around interoperability and sort of developing these new money markets and this new financial primitives that I think is sort of the next revolution in. in finance. Awesome. That's really, really helpful. Yelai, how about you? Okay, so I was born in Nigeria, and I was in Nigeria throughout all my life until I was about

14 or 15. But I moved to the UK where I was studying medicine before dropping out because I realized that, you know, what I was interested in, which is Africa's economic development, I felt that, you know, medicine was probably not the best pathway to achieve that. I just discovered tech. And I transitioned to a carrying technology, so learned how to program and design applications. In terms of sort of like more recently, I'm currently the CEO of Bondo. So Bondo is a social payments app for cash and crypto. So think Venmo or Cash App for Africa.

We launched about six months ago, backed by finance and some local angel investors. I have about 100,000 registered users. And I'm also the founding partner of a fund called Microtraction. I invest in early stage technology businesses. A lot of them in financial services in mobility, healthcare and education. And before founding Bondo, I was the director at finance labs, where I led investments not just into African projects, but into other global protocols like fuel protocol, but also actively invested in a bunch of other African crypto projects. But what really drew into crypto was because, I haven't done a number of financial fintech investments, I really felt that we had some, you know, infrastructure challenges that needed to be leapfrogged.

And similar to how in Africa, we lived frog landlines and ventured into mobile, and you're having places that are having, you know, 4G technology already on telephony, I felt that crypto and digital assets and blockchain could potentially be one of these innovations that allow us to, you know, build a parallel financial infrastructure from the ground up that made, you know, access to quality. financial services be independent of your geographical location, which I can touch on later on in the show. Awesome. Super, super helpful. And such a diverse set of backgrounds for you guys. So I think part of the reason that I wanted to have this conversation now is we've just seen a

significant sort of awakening civil action movement in Nigeria that really kind of caught the attention of the rest of the world in Nsars. And I want to talk about that, obviously, but I want to kind of set up a little bit about what has been going on or how people should think about the sort of economic and political reality in Nigeria coming into this month, coming into October. And I know it's an impossibly large question, but in terms of just kind of giving people a little bit of like the way to think about key, key issues, key fault lines, what people are paying attention to, just what the economic and political reality is. How would you kind of describe it before this movement launched this past month?

Could you want to go first? Yeah, sure. You can kind of get a little more detail since he's on the ground. So what I kind of think about it is, not to go too far in history, but, you know, Africa has sort of been set up as primarily, you know, a subsidy for the rest of the world, right? So you went from colonialism to, you know, in a group of dependence, most African countries have been structured in such a way that it was really focused on resource extraction, right? So you look across an African landscape to varying degrees, you know, some worst than others, but most countries basically are set up such that a small union elite essentially aligns with foreign interests, right?

And those interests are really just aligned around extracting value from the country. Right. So however it's done, whether it's through economic policies, whether it's through, you know, destabilizing, you know, democratic processes, whether it's through working, you know, political structures that empower the people. Generally, that's basically been the narrative for, you know, Africa for the last, you know, couple hundred years. And I think now the challenge is, you know, with the advent of the internet, the advent of the proliferation of information, you know, broader education across certain groups

of people, more exposure. You're getting a lot more pushback, right, because information is more readily available, right? And that's not grinding against the system that wants to continue basically oppressing the people, in my view, right? In whatever ways you're, you're you'll see that. And so generally we're a place where, you know, I think people, especially young people, or when you look at Nigeria, for example, where the average age is like 18 and a half, the majority of people are young, they're looking at a future that doesn't look great, and they're like, look, you know, I probably don't live for the next, like, 50, 60 years,

and the people in power are essentially proliferating policies that do not support a viable life for the majority of Nigerians, right? So you're getting that pushback and you're getting this sort of environment where bad policies are now, like, you know, people are getting angry about lots of things, right? And they now have some power and some ability to voice that and voice that in a very global way.

And so I think that's reviewing, so they're really on both sides, right? It's reviewing the fact that young people have access to more information and more and more and more they're pushing back against that. And the powers that be are essentially now, you know, flexing, right, their ability to kind of repress this. And so that's, in my view, sort of like, broadly where, you know, we are, right? And it's a question now of what tools the young people have to wield. There's democracy in Nigeria, but how do we engage a little more in that process to essentially take back power?

And so I think it's, you know, in my view, that's sort of like where we are at this point. Thanks, Aki. I think I definitely agree with the sort of broad arguments that I can raise there. Like you said, I know, it's a very broad question, right? And the way I like to kind of compare it is what's different between the Occupine Nigeria sort of era, which was in 2012 and now, right? So for me, one of the big things is just the average age of the population, right? In 2012, there were still a definitely younger Nigerian population, but a number of those people were kind of disconnected, right? So at a time, mobile phones were still mainly just traditional feature phones, smartphones

were still expensive, internet data wasn't cheap. And so even though we still had kind of like similar realities, people still felt somewhat isolated, right? What is really, really changed now is that things, you know, some of the key economic indicators, which I think the most popular one is the Naira to dollar rate is a lot worse. I'm not sure what it was in 2012, but I know five years ago, you know, you'll have gotten like one dollar that's been about 280 Naira. and now $1.50 Naira, right? So in the last kind of like six to eight months, we've seen almost like a 20 to 35% depreciation

in the value of Nair to dollar. So that's definitely something that's playing the minds of people. A lot more Nigerians seem to be trying to immigrate. You know, we've seen a lot of Canada being very open, you know, in terms of the willingness to take, you know, Africans or Nigerians who are looking for a better opportunity, similar to like the U.S. in, you know, in the early 1900s. And so a lot of people are really, really disillusioned, right?

So there's been this kind of disillusionment, but at the same time, we're still kind of connected through the internet and through social media. You know, so right now, you have kind of the, you know, popular celebrities and artists and influencers who before five years, five years ago, eight years ago, maybe I had 20 to 50,000, you know, followers on social media, the most popular having 100,000. Today, you know, people are having a million, 7, 10, 15, 20 million followers across all these different social platforms.

Number two is that the African diaspora and Africa are a lot more connected. So again, 10 years ago, during Christmas or summer, you wouldn't really have people flying back to Nigeria for holiday, right? But now, you know, people are coming back home and there's a lot more connection. And, you know, this connection has always been there is a lot tighter. And I think, like, what has really, really changed is that for the first time, people really felt connected in this idea of like, wow, we want change. And for me personally, the way you felt was almost everybody has had one kind of experience

or relationship with the issues that have been raised. So either you knew it or someone else, someone else that you know, knew about this particular issues. And that really made people have a very visceral connection to the underlying issue. We all knew deep down that it was bigger than, you know, police brutality or, you know, the economy. I think people just want, people just want change, you know, and it's been underlined for a while, you know, the price of fuel has gone up. We still don't have power. I think right now it's very difficult to get access to dollars.

So if you went to pay for things online, you know, you wouldn't be able to spend much. than $200 a month on your part. So there's been a bunch of this different underlying tensions that's been going on for a while. And I think also 2020 has just been a very unique year with everything going on in the world with COVID, the economic conditions are getting worse. And I think it was just all of these things put together

that really, really ignited what's evolved into the, this end-sar movement. I can go into more detail over time. But I think understanding kind of like this context of, you know, how the economy has, as involved in the last 10 years, plus the fact that people are a lot more connected, you have smartphones that are cheaper and more readily available. So more people are on social media and, you know,

the influencers, the celebrities are all kind of like very conscious and awake about these issues. And, you know, all this thing kind of like set up this stage for what evolved into the ensignars movement. I think it's super, super helpful. So, I mean, you basically have a situation here where you've got these structural economic issues being faced by, you know, multiple generations, but especially the younger generation who's thinking about their future and who have the tools to communicate with one another and kind of have these models of saying that we don't want to stand around and just kind of let the future. happen to us, we want to make it a better place, right? And so then let's get maybe into the specific, almost the match that lit this particular set of action. So I guess, tell us a little bit, Yaleh, about what SARS is and how this sort of pattern of abuse has come in. Okay. So SARS stands for

special anti-roborish squad. And they were a police unit that were set up in the, I believe, early 90s to combat things like robbery, which at the time was an extremely notorious form of crime in Nigeria. Essentially, they don't have, they don't wear uniforms because they're meant to be in plain clothes, so robbers don't really know when they're around. So they're playing clothes, they're driving sort of like en masse vehicles, and they have kind of like the license to carry firearms in public. Now, what has happened in the last kind of 10 years of, you know, 10 to 15 years is that there's been a digitization of cash.

It's still kind of not fully prevalent, but a lot of people don't have huge amounts of cash in their houses like they used to in the 90s and in the early 2000s, right? So, you know, with SARS, they still had this kind of like very broad remit and, you know, began to get involved into things that were not really necessarily assigned to them. And over time, they just became a lot more brazen, right? So there were, you know, instances of direct robbery, extortion, kind of like wrongful imprisonment, assault, kidnapping. And, you know, almost everybody knows someone that has a SARS experience or has had a

has experienced themselves. And I think during this COVID lockdown, it really felt like it became worse. So me personally, I had known experience, and I kind of shared that for the first time on Twitter, right about when the movement began to really take up steam. So what really kind of pushed or kind of like, you know, set things off was that there was a video of someone in a southern state

being assaulted by SARS. And they actually kind of like drove off with the individuals vehicle. And a lot of people just became really upset by that. And even myself, when I kept seeing, you know, I kept seeing the stories on social media and I was like, wow, you know, I really want to share mine. And I shared mine and, you know, it's probably the most engaged, not probably, he's the most engaged tweet I've ever had in my life, almost 1.5 million impressions.

And it was just what everyone was talking about. And I think what really supercharged this was because over like a space of a week or two, you could see the level of coordination that was happening in a decentralized manner that made everybody wonder like, wow, like Nigeria can be so much better. Like I've never seen anything like it in my life. there were legal representation that was set up across Nigeria in about 24 states. People were donating money to support protesters. There was huge amounts of transparency and accountability. There was so much unison and unity and peace.

And people would clean up from the protest grounds. People were donating, providing water, food, music. Like, it was just like I felt for the first time, I really felt proud to be Nigerian. It wasn't coming from sports and entertainment. Like, I felt what it meant to have some kind of functioning, like a functioning democratized, you know, I don't, I can't even explain it, right? And so it made, it made everyone like, wow, like, if we can do all this stuff,

if we can allocate funds and get all this stuff done, get people out, like spread the word and get people involved in this movement, like what can Nigeria be? You know, and I think that's kind of like what just supercharged it, right? Like, it just went everywhere. And, you know, you wake up and the only thing you could think of is ensign. I'm a workaholic. And I know during like those three kind of like first three weeks in October, there was, I couldn't work on anything else.

It was just ensigns, you know. So maybe like I can kind of speak about it from his perspective. been outside of Nigeria at the time. But for somebody who was on the ground, was at protest, I really felt like, wow, like this is the future of Nigeria, we have the right people to make Nigeria work. And everybody just wants a better Nigeria.

Yeah. Yeah, I'll pardon me that. I think I can echo all when you've said, right, especially on the aspects of not being able to do anything else and it's kind of taken over. I mean, same for me. It took over my life for a couple of weeks. You know, I was waking up at 2 a.m. Eastern time, you know, and just engaging.

And it was interesting because like the LDLA said, you know, we were on crypto Twitter, like I think a lot of folks in crypto, and it's like SARS Twitter just kind of took off. And it was just very easy to kind of engage and connect with people. And, you know, ultimately, it was ultimate its ability to just, you know, know, not only engaged through a platform that, at least in the general government, didn't have the power to you, and I already shut down, but also the ability to actually move financial value. Like, I was home in D.C. and I was sending Eith. I was sending Bitcoin. I was calling on my friends who were in the crypto space and tweeting and saying, yeah, send money

to the movement. You know, you could see in the U.S. celebrities. I think one of the first people where I saw tweeting about it, before you had a little baby who, you know, has this anthem for or like, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement, like, he twir it in SARS. Like, and so it was this sense of just, not just like Africans and Africans in diaspora, but like black people around the world, like in solidarity, right? And the feedback was really short. Like, you could figure out who was saying what, like communication was going through, funding was going through.

And like you already said, like, the accountability of how those funds were being spent and dispersed was incredible, right? So you had, you know, the main, you know, the main, you know, the main, you know, the main, group that at least I saw from my end was the feminist coalition. And they're both looking daily accounts of what they were doing. We received X, we spent X, right? Like daily on Twitter. Like they had like a financial report every day. At the end of the movement, they did a complete report and, you know, account for every dollar. And, you know, the thing I think of a big in speculation by the German government was early on into the protest, they shut down the

really for the Feminence Coalition to receive funding through, like, Nigerian banks and Nigerian financial infrastructure. And we don't get a beat because it just sort of a BTC pay server. And it's like, it's like, yeah, now we have our own payment rail and anyone could touch it. And the fact that, I mean, all that stuff is on chain, right? You can see that. Like, more than somebody has to give your account. Like, you could see, like, the flows going through, like, you know, if you need the addresses, right?

And it just made it very clear that I think for the first time, a lot of Nigerians, and to put some context too, right, Nigerians and diaspora send back over $25 billion a year back to Nigeria. And that's primarily from the United States and Europe, right? So when we think about that, just buying power of that capital, now realizing that they can more directly influence change if we just organize and we get to. together and like we use systems that, you know, are censorship resistant. We use systems that kind of show good accountability to me with like a watershed moment, right? Because it basically now said that, look, all the tools we need to take back our country and for young people to have a lot more say are there. And by the way, a lot of those tools are outside of the purview of, you know, the folks who

kind of run the country, right, who are basically, you know, not to sort of belittle them, but there are folks who are born and a very different generation. They don't understand the internet, right? They're, you know, they, like a warhead, the Nigerian guy, someone said, you know, they should be in the backseat of the car, not driving it. You know, these guys are 60, 70, 80, you know, they're not the future. They're the past. So I think basically, it's not just like a dichotomy of, oh, we have these tools,

we have his ability, but it's also the fact that the current incumbents don't even understand how to use these tools effectively or the power that these tools have. And I think that gives ultimate power to young people. I think it gives ultimate power to the diaspora that's educated and is, you know, has to, I mean, really deserves a much bigger say in the democratic process in Nigeria, which, who have been to some extent, you know, realize. So as a person in diaspora, like, I can't vote in Nigeria. even though I hold a Nigerian passport and I grew up there.

Like I usually would have to go to Nigeria, go to my local government, and sign up there. Like that makes no sense. Like I should be able to have some ability, right, to vote and to cast my vote wherever I am in the world. Like there's no reason why that can happen. Right. So things like that, I think, are not coming to the floor. And I think we're, you know, the younger generation is relying on the power they have. And by the way, too, I think their parents, right, who come and.

of our, in this sort of living generation where they sort of grew up in a state. I mean, I grew up in a police state through ladies, right? We had military governments. My parents grew up basically in police state all their lives. And, you know, there's a psychological, I think there was a psychological barrier that we broke, where our current generation, who have been essentially muzzled, right, and never really, you know, growing up, like, you know, my dad was always, and my parents were of an educated class that basically said you do get involved in politics.

You gave yourself and you found your way, right? But politics were sort of a domain of, you know, sort of the class of society that had almost nothing to lose, right? What I think was, you know, a wrong position to hold, but they were also like, you know, children of their generation, right? And I think that the younger people are not that encumbered, right? And we're not in a position where it's like, no, forget that. And I think parents now are also like in the background almost like egging people on.

Because the movement was not just young people. Like there were a lot of like silent, the silent generation that are behind, like supporting this, like they said, providing resources, providing food, providing, you know, all sorts of support. And even when, you know, things eventually blew up with, you know, the shootings that happened. And, you know, there are a lot of, you know, people in, you know, my dad's generation that started speaking out. and have been more actively speaking out in support of young people that we really haven't seen, right? At least I haven't seen this vocally. Right. So there's a, this thing that you minding us in a way across even generations now where people now,

you know, some of the good people in the older class are now speaking up and saying, all right, you know, enough is enough too. Like, you know, this has gone on too long, right? And so I think that solidarity is really the power that we're living now. And I think that we're going to kind of push forward. This episode is brought to you by Crypto.com, the Crypto Super app that lets you buy, earn, and spend crypto all in one place and earn up to 8.5% per year on your Bitcoin. Download the Crypto.com app now to see the interest rates you could be earning on BTC and more than 20 other coins.

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Stay on top of your investment game with nexo.io. And remember, it's your crypto, your credit, your choice. started at nexo.io. I've heard this sort of sentiment in other other movements too that once it's almost like once the flood is broken on a belief that you can actually exert agency and reclaim some power, it becomes, it's a genie that's very hard to stick back in the bottle, you know, and it, and it usually takes a younger generation that hasn't totally bought the line of you just don't get engaged in politics to do it. But very often, to your point, their parents come right along as that happens.

Yeah. So I think what is sort of like very interesting with some of the points that I can raise towards the end was this idea of like the older generation, right? And it actually forced me to do, you know, kind of like personal research. So in the early 90s, about 91 to 93, there were lots of kind of protests during the military regime who wanted to, we had to like this politician, very famous locally, M.K. Aboiler, who won, you know, a democratically done election, but it wasn't kind of installed as the president. And you had sort of like people who were in universities, you know, my age, protesting. And unfortunately,

things didn't go their way, right. And I think like the lessons or the trauma from that particular experience actually silenced, you know, that generation and impacted how they felt about politics. Now, that's about, it's almost about 20, it's about 30 years, which is a whole generation. And then you now have a new generation who are not necessarily, you know, affected by what happened in 93. and I'm now thinking, you know, from the ground up with new tools that gives them that sense of agency, right? I keep saying it that, you know, having things like the smartphone, having the internet, having social media, having, you know, decentralized payment systems like, like Bitcoin, all these things give us the tools that gives people the ability to think that, you know what, maybe this time we have a chance. You know, maybe this time things can be different. Personally, right, like, I actually think that the usefulness of decentralized technologies go beyond just the financial reals itself.

You know, I've been in conversations where we are thinking about, you know, how do we scale up, you know, this, the decentralized coordination that we really had in this movement. You know, like things like Dow's that extremely famous in crypto, but I sort of crypto, I don't really think about it. And one of the things that me and Akin, you know, really like to refuff about this idea of, like, governance, right? The governance on the blockchain and why he's so passionate about DECRED. And, you know, for me, I can't help but just think, like, what does the next five to six years look like? Because a lot of people were introduced to the utility of crypto and Bitcoin for the first time during end SARS, right? They were learning, you know, how do I buy Bitcoin? How do I send Bitcoin?

What is an address? And this is already a country that is, you know, we have the highest kind of Bitcoin per capita in the world because we, you know, a lot of people use crypto for a variety of reasons locally already. But this really took Bitcoin even for the mainstream. So I think that, you know, it's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out. And, you know, unfortunately, you know, on the 20th of October, we have. had the military actually shoot and injure and kill some protesters. And I think for a lot of us, like we, you know, if I'm being honest, personally, I felt so down, you know, almost depressed by by that because I just couldn't believe what happened.

You had on-arm protesters wearing the, you know, green, white, green, which is our country's colors, you know, raising, singing the national anthem and raising our flags and being shut out by the military is meant to protect you. And, you know, this was live streamed on Instagram. I had 150,000 people watching it, you know, at around 7308, 8, 9 p.m. It's probably the largest live stream on Instagram that, you know, that we've had. And, you know, for a number of us, like, we really felt like, wow, okay, what next, right? It's very clear that we have to take this towards places that, you know, the government or other forces can't exert violence, right? And that's, that means the beauty of sort of like governance, the beauty of the centralize

technologies, where in, you know, you're creating alternative avenues for people to coordinate and, and make decisions and, you know, take particular. coordinated actions without the government being able to, I guess, enforce or take the kind of action that they did in the last, you know, in October. So hopefully, you know, the technology actually plays a huge role in this, but I can't predict what that will look like. It sounds to me like part of what happened was this technology was used to solve a, specific problem, which was the problem of funds that were being donated, not getting to the various parts of the sort of decentralized protest movement who they were intended for because

of traditional banking infrastructure. So there's a real problem that it's solving. But then people, as they started to interact with it, it's almost a politically liberating force, not just sort of a money technology. It has much bigger implications. Did you see that actually happen as people were kind of introduced to Bitcoin and Crypto through that, through that context? Yeah, I mean, I think, like, to be honest, like it happened so quickly that, you know, it's probably a lot of that education would happen, you know, as a byproduct of having a problem being solved, right? By the time, it was really like, here's this problem.

I want to keep donating, you know, this is the way to solve that problem. And to be honest, personally, I felt like, wow, okay, there's still a lot work to be done. You know, I mean, I built, you know, I run a company called Bondol and, you know, we, we, we, we, we try to build a product that is as simple as you can for somebody who has never used crypto before. A couple of my investments, like, you know, buy coins, yellow card, Bitsika, all of these guys, you know, I try to solve, you know, similar problems as well. but, you know, we still felt that, like, despite people not being as familiar, like the first time users, they were, because we're motivated to solve or, like, just donate, you know, they were able to sort of like go through those hotels. But now people are like, okay, I'm curious about this, you know, Bitcoin thing.

Like, where do I get started? How do I learn more? And so personally, one of the things that, you know, we're working on is, kind of content to kind of help this new crypto or novice users to sort of learn more about the technology. But like you said, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a general boss that has been let out that can never go back in. Yeah, I mean, I'll add to that to you. I think that, I mean, I have friends who bought Bitcoin for the first time, you know, sign up for Coinbase just to send money for the movement, right? And, you know, I think on this end, the consciousness of the fact that, because that's what I've already been in a position where they wanted to participate a lot more and a lot closer on what's going on in Nigeria.

Right. And the tools were just very not great. Like, I talked about remittances early on. Like, it's historically being expensive and clunky, right, to send money to Nigeria, especially if you're sending money to someone who's unbanked, right? Who doesn't have a bank account? You even get to a little more, like, interesting and challenging. It takes days. money, more, more, man, extracting value.

All of a sudden, these guys are like spinning up Coinbase accounts, right, because that's an easy sort of first step, and sending money into a Bitcoin address, and the person receives it in seconds or minutes, right? And all of a sudden, it's like, oh, like, here's a tool I can use that I never really thought about. And ultimately, I think it's important to educate those who have the money, right? So if I'm studying Bitcoin, I'm telling my relatives,

like, Bitcoin is the way you're going to receive. cash to pay your rent or I'm supporting me some way, they can figure it out, right, because we don't get those funds. So I think there's a two-way, like, the learning process that's going to start taking place where the dashboard is sending $25 billion plus home, right, needs to be educated as to ways that not just have any financial sovereignty, but they're cheaper, right? You get more control, right? It's more predictability if you do the peer transfer than going through the financial system,

going through a minimum with extra costs and potentially having your transfers like, you know, Cs or stopped by the government as we've seen, right? So I think people are becoming wise to that. And I think as education moves on both sides, as people get more access and more mainstream access on both ends, you know, PayPal, launching crypto, for example,

like that's huge, right? Because there are lots of people who already have PayPal accounts, right? And we'll say, look, I'm not necessarily going to start, you know, set up a new Coinbase account. But sure, I'll mother with both with Bitcoin an ether on my PayPal account because I know how to use that anywhere already. I really happen to see PayPal

saying you're going to invest a lot in education, which I think, like Yale said, is really the big focus. It should be the big focus in the short term because as people become more aware of and understand these tools and understand why it makes sense, I think you'll see

much more and greater adoption, right? And I think that over time, I'm extremely like, I'm extremely, you know, optimistic. I think over time we'll see greater and good adopting because on the other end, in Nigeria, for example, the vast majority of people are in banked, right? And the vast majority of people never had access to foreign exchange, right? But Nigeria is a massive trading country, right? And even from the data I've seen, lots of people who have reeled Bitcoin primarily

to settle global transactions because they didn't have access to foreign exchange in the first place. and it's even harder, like, agnated more foreign exchange to run their business predictably. And so Bitcoin has really, like, a godsend to a number of businesses, like, you know, during the last financial downturn in Nigeria, like, I think 2014-15, we went through, like, our first recession in our 20 years. You know, dollar dried up because oil prices tanked. The government had led dollars to kind of spend in the system. And the guy on the street, who's not connected and doesn't have friends in high places, Well, you're out of luck.

And many businesses really shut down, and there that survived, probably found Bitcoin was willing to sell these transactions. And we haven't looked back since because the financial system that you're stuck within has proven unreliable living in the best times. Like, why on earth why now go back to that system that's unpredictable and unreliable when I actually have ultimate control? And I think people always ask this question about volatility. And I think even when it was just Bitcoin, right?

A lot of these businesses would still use Bitcoin because there's their only hope. So these businesses are high-margined businesses, so they could absorb that volatility. But with stable-coigne now, I think that's the game changer, right? Because I think it's part of living out of this massive adoption of stable-coons and growth. Because in a lot of emerging markets in Africa and all across the world, right, people are transacting with them because it's the only way to access for an exchange, the only way to access some sort of dollar demand needed, like store value in the exchange. And unlike in the U.S. where the average person doesn't care because, you know, your banks work generally, right? It's not that difficult to use the current financial system.

For a lot of the rest of the world, like it's a very, very different picture, right? And I think that to me, that sets things up for, you know, a very very different future. in my view, a much faster acceleration on proliferation of crypto as a means of exchange and storing value. It feels like a pretty historic moment, one that we could look back as pivotal and as an inflection point. And I could talk to you guys about this for hours, but I guess just to kind of wrap up, you know, in terms of the specific movement that just launched, what do you think is next? What are your concerns? And then kind of more broadly, what do you think is important to do next to really take advantage of this moment, you know, both in terms of crypto, certainly, but in terms of broader just political empowerment. And again, maybe you can follow up because you were kind of just on that path and then we'll close with you, Yela.

Yeah. So I think it's just really consulting around what just happened and I'm actually building more permanent structures that would see things to the end. right so you ever talked about this idea of dows and governance which you know we've talked about a lot for the last couple of years you know i think we need to set up like literally like dows structures that anyone can subscribe to anyone can get involved with right there's a governance process that's robust that you know that scales right so like you know you can't everyone talking at the same time so you have to actually delegate power in certain instances but literally like these permanent structures that anyone can subscribe to, whether you're, you know, Nigerian, Nigerian Daspar,

or anyone else who's just wants to kind of join the movement and wants to acting solar diary. Because I think that those structures will do a couple of things. One, it'll create just more long-term organization and coordination that I think we're going to move to kind of see this to the end. But I think we're also serving seeds for a different way to govern ourselves, right? Part of the challenge in Nigeria, in my view, is the fact that we have mostly centralized coordination, right? So we have a government where the federal government basically is, I mean, it's a republic, but the federal government is a lot more powerful than you would have in the U.S., for example. Right? States rights and all those, like, you know, most states are, I'm beholden to the federal government.

Right. And I think that, you know, when governance works, when most governments is local, right, where you can see where your taxes are going to fund your education, right? can see a politician is living in the same middle of you are. And when they're going to ride, like, you know where they live. Like, they kind of have to live there. Like, I think we're looking sort of decentralized governance, move down more to the people where they interact with their local. And I think that, you know, these tools that we have,

led to crypto, leavening, you know, transferring governance, I think it'll become the way, in my view, that we can really solve some of these governance issues that plague us permanently. And there's no reason why we can't leverage crypto platforms to govern ourselves, to fund projects, right, to coordinate around people contributing to the future of the country. So for me, I think it's two phases, right?

It's the one step of keeping us organized in this movement, but it's also beginning to sort of develop these mature platforms that we could extend to governance like wholesale across the country. Yeah, I think, you know, acting is definitely along the kind of key line. So essentially, the first thing is protests are more a way to raise awareness around an issue. And the one thing that I can say is that, you know, it definitely got the government's attention. but for true sustained and systemic change, then we really need two things. One is that we need a lot more young people to understand governance and the democracy and the powers that they do have.

But the second thing is actually around like coordination itself, right? So, you know, decentralization during the Ns movement was its biggest strength and its biggest weakness, right? And, you know, it was a strength because, you know, it wasn't really clear who the leader was. It was almost, you know, one of the biggest mantras was this idea of no leaders. And obviously, that was a big confusing to the government or like, you know, traditional media because every single past historic one has always had somebody that you could say, okay, here's the leader, here's the main voice, let's speak to that person and everything is fine. Wow, this was like it wasn't clear who it was. So the thing is as that kind of like,

no leaderless movement skills, it becomes difficult to sort of always stay on the same message. So it's like how do you then kind of get, how do you coordinate this decentralized slash leaderless movement and how do you also achieve consensus? And this is where I think, you know,

it's really exciting to some of these conversations because it's very clear that almost everybody right now keeps coming back to a few things. everyone knows that technology will play a role to source one of these problems, but most people don't have the answers. Now, obviously, because of, you know, I guess our proximity to crypto and the industry, you know, I can see potential areas whereby some of these things that we've built, especially like in defy, could play a huge role, right? So number one is around kind of just fundraising and sort of capital formation on the blockchain, that level of transparency. that, you know, feminist coalition was showing in terms of the collection of funds and

disbustment of funds to those who needed it, you know, every 24 hours could now be real-time. And then even kind of like getting consensus on things like what particular candidates should support, you know, more particular issues. Do we want to focus on, you know, as a broader coalition or, you know, a broader group, I think those are kind of like some of the next steps. It's still early to say that these are things that are ready in line, but they're definitely conversations that are happening. Now, whether that happens on the blockchain or not, time would tell. But, you know, the same way how Bitcoin was kind of the best option to help as a payment rule for this decentralized movement, I think, some of these are the things

that we've seen around thousands and distributed governance would also be strong candidates in the future as well. Awesome. Really, really cool stuff. Well, let's make sure to check back in in six months or something like that one. We've had more of a chance to see how this all plays out. But I really appreciate you guys, both taking some time today to share both your experience with what's been happening as well as just your sense of where things could go from here.

So thanks for joining the show. Reflecting on that conversation, the thing I keep coming back to is the power of this new world of digital assets of non-sovereign financial tools like Bitcoin to actually allow people to do things in political environments where they would not otherwise be able to. This is a situation we just had where there were people in a movement that other people around the world wanted to support and were willing to send money to, but couldn't get that money to the people on the ground because of the compromise of traditional financial rails, which are owned by the government being protested against, or at least controlled by the government

being protested against. Bitcoin and other cryptos simply moved around that. In so doing, they introduced a whole new set of people to these technologies, to these money technologies, to these tools of not just money freedom, but political freedom. And that has big implications for the future. It's going to expand how people think of. about opportunities to use these tools, but it's also going to change how people think about organizing in general. So I think this was a really powerful moment and a demonstrative moment in how Bitcoin and other cryptos can be a tool for global freedom expansion. So that's why I wanted to bring you this show. And I hope you learned a little something on the way. I hope you give these guys a

follow and keep paying attention to what they have going on and what they're thinking about. And I appreciate you listening. So until tomorrow, be safe. and take care of each other. Peace.