A new blockchain based on telephone networks is being developed in Africa and is expected to be widely adopted by consumers in the sub-Saharan area by 2021.
It will be called DéMars and will be the first blockchain payment platform developed in Africa.
Africa is one of the areas of the world where the economy is developing most rapidly, with countries such as Ghana and Ethiopia where GDP growth rates reach 8% per year.
Despite this, for the moment cryptocurrencies have had a limited introduction in these countries – except for Cardano, which has been very committed especially in Ethiopia – but all this could change.
The founder, Shaun Burrow, explains how the idea was born: “I started researching the entry-level market and I was simply blown away to learn that 1.7 billion adults don’t have access to basic financial services and to learn that in the remittance space, families are paying about 45 billion US dollars a year in fees on the funds they are sending home. This is money being diverted from the poorest of the poor. The cost of payments to Sub-Saharan Africa and within Sub-Saharan Africa are the highest in the world, they range from 10 – 20 percent of the money being sent home. It’s simply an unjust tax on ordinary, hardworking people“.
Two-thirds of adults in these areas have a smartphone, so it seems logical, using the blockchain, to use this tool as a means to make payments and transfer money.
There are already services of this kind that were able to move 19 billion dollars in 2017, but the idea is to create a platform on which, in addition to money transfers, other financial and insurance products can be implemented, allowing ordinary people, who now have access to mobile phones with limited costs, to access services otherwise off limits for them.
