The Blockchain Africa Conference 2021 has so far become the most successful blockchain conference on the African continent to date.
In this post, we highlight key points from a talk by Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of Cardano – the most watched and in demand presentation during the conference.
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SEE ALSO: [WATCH] Africa is the Future of DeFi, Says Cardano Blockchain CEO
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Here are some key points from Charles’ talk:
- More 10 years ago, I remember using Kiva, a micro-lending platform and asking the question, ‘Why does the world have fractured financial systems?’
- Why is it the case that people, through no fault of their own, if they loose the geographic lottery, are born into systems that will keep them perpetually poor regardless of how hard they work or the content of their character – this led me into the cryptocurrency space
- I knew this concept of decentralization was truly magical and revolutionary but it came with no user manual, including batteries
- Over the last 10 years, its been my mission to build systems that have the capacity to act as a backbone for utility and social structures that will enable a great merging of the markets of the world
- We started building Cardano back in 2015 specifically to accommodate this concept of economic identity
- We knew it would take quite a bit of time to deploy these systems within the developing world – that meant we physically had to move to those countries, and in 2017, we entered Ethiopia and Rwanda and other countries
- We were unified with a common cause and purpose – how do we enable a system to operate from the bottom up instead of the top down and give people self-sovereign identity?
- We’ve had the ability to train and acquire local talent – most of whom are under-resourced and under uncaring bureaucracies or plain old fashion setbacks
- The reality is, Africa is not a poor continent, and the African nations collectively are not poor, but the wealth they have is inaccessible due to poor systems and difficulty in globalization
- When you look into the future, you don’t go to where the park is, you want to go to where the park will be – in other words, you wanna go to where the economies are gonna grow the fastest
- When you look at the generation of Africa that will take custodianship of the continent, you see people who are tremendously ambitious and impatient and will not tolerate past bureaucracies – in that vaccuum is a marketplace for new systems
- When there is a marketplace for completely new systems that are in orders of magnitude more efficient and at a much lower cost – this is going to result in a huge competitive advantage for the nations first to adopt them
- The first countries to hold national elections online that are free, fair and auditable will likely be African nations
- The first countries to have an end-to-end digital identity and economy – there is great potential for that to be African nations
- The blockchain industry is functionally what we do – we find ways to build trust amongst those who don’t trust each other
- It is our belief and hope that over the next 5 years, a meaningful percentage of the entrepreneurs who deploy infrastructure – P2P lending, remittance, ATM, micro-ISPs, power generation systems etc – will likely come from a Pan-African view
- Our staff, on the ground in Africa, will likely scale from the dozens to the hundreds, if not the thousands, and instead of having one headquarter, its likely we will have 4 or 5 throughout the continent
- I look at this as a new market, a new frontier upon which we can find new partners to work with – it is not our goal to save people or give away, rather to build, partner, collaborate, create wealth, and share that with our partners
- Blockchain is a great unifier, a great engine of trust, and a great engine of economic progress and creation
- Over the next 10 years, we could see the totality of the ecoystem become $10 – 20 trillion and the majority of that could be owned by those in developing nations such as Ethiopia, Uganda, or Chile
- It is incredibly important that we remember the first principle of the cryptocurrency space – that we are all truly equal and there is no centralized power
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RECOMMENDED READING: Africa Will Define the Future, Especially the Bitcoin One, Says CEO, Twitter
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