EXPERT OPINION | ‘Africa is Still Not Able to Capture OnChain Value,’ Says Founder of Asset Chain, Xend Finance and WiCrypt

"We need to create things that attract value to us. It won't make any sense in the next 10 years when we're looking at the overall market capitalization, we realize that we're still consumers and that we're not actually attracting any value."

CryptoGuru··5 min read

In a personal and open video to the community, Oguchukwu Aronu, a Founder who has built multiple successful Web3 products from Nigeria including Xend Finance, WiCrypt, and now Asset Chain, has expressed his opinion on the need for Africans to build products and infrastructure that capture onchain value.

Following the launch of The Asset Chain public mainnet, the first EVM-compatible public blockchain from Nigeria, Aronu says the journey to building has taught him a lot on the need for Africans to capture more of the value.


Having started in early 2023 to build the public chain, Aronu says this is not just about the technology – how fast or how cheap – but about a statement Africans and Nigerians are making.

“For me, its about the impact, its about a statement we’re making as a people from Nigeria, from Africa.”

 

Aronu goes on to talk about the need for systems and infrastructure that can capture value for Africans anywhere in the world giving an example of how the HyperLiquid onchain perpetuals decentralized exchange is built.


Since 2016, Aronu has been building for Africa during which time he has successfully built and launched Xend Finance and WiCrypt. Since then, Aronu has built across multiple chains – from Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Polygon.

“These chains come from multiple regions of the world and they create economic value for those regions. But one thing is lacking and that is the fact that Africans are still not able to capture that value.

The current market cap of the entire crypto market is about $3.3 trillion. If you look at that current market cap for crypto, you’d still see that most of that market cap is still captured by exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, Kraken in China and the United States and in other parts of the world.

Nigeria ranks number two when you look at crypto adoption. So the value we have we’re actually giving it out to other blockchains and other regions. 

Out of the need to contribute to the world, we need to create systems that attract value to us.”


Aronu says the goal of Asset Chain is not to compete with others but to capture atleast 10% of the entire crypto market in the next 5 to 10 years.

Aronu says we need to play in the global space and have things that grow our economy.

 

Looking at investment decisions by Aliko Dangote in manufacturing and Tony Elumelu in power and finance, who have prioritized investing in Africa over foreign opportunities that would have made them more money, he says:

“We need people with those kinds of mindsets, people that can make tough decisions, not because of how much they can make out of it, but because of the legacy they would leave behind.” – Aronu

 

Aronu believes that mindset is crucial in order to build similar systems in the onchain space.

“We’ve built systems over the years across different companies, but we’ve seen that we’re capturing just very little parts of the market. We need to create a system that can have an equal system built around it and to capture a larger part of the market.

I don’t see the reason why the Nigerian banks, for example, that want to get into crypto should use other chains. No, they should use a chain built in Nigeria or in Africa. Something that they can sit down with the team and have conversations on how to scale or solve particular problems that they have.

That is exactly what we’re doing here at Asset Chain.”


Aronu believes as liquidity grows on Asset Chain, this will create economic value for us as Africans which will eventually scale our economy. In order to do that, we need to look inwards and see how to capture that value in the next decade.

“We need to create things that attract value to us. It won’t make any sense in the next 10 years when we’re looking at the overall market capitalization, we realize that we’re still consumers and that we’re not actually attracting any value.”

 

To further hammer the point home, Aronu provides an example of the largest stablecoin transactions in Nigeria which are done on TRON. The Founder runs a big exchange with about 70% of the top exchanges globally being owned by Asians.

“What are we doing in Nigeria, what are we doing in Africa? The technology is there.

We’re not pushing the limit.”

 

Aronu says Asset Chain is reaching out to many founders and investing in multiple companies to make this happen.

See also

“We have cNGN, the Nigerian stablecoin. USDT currently sits at about $157 billion marketcap. We have cNGN sitting at $290 million Naira (~$200,000). That is so little. 

We can do more. cNGN should be sitting at more than a trillion Naira atleast or maybe a billion dollars. But we cannot do it if we do not have the infrastructure and the systems that can this value. It wouldn’t work.”


Aronu says while regulation is great, the next step is to attract liquidity through different infrastructure like Asset Chain.

 

While companies like Blockradar are doing great by building wallet infrastructure, Aronu says:

“The truth is, even with all the great technology, if you don’t have real numbers, if you don’t have real users, its just going to die. So many great technologies have died.

Our job is to push the limit. We attract people no matter how little. A user a day is very important for us. We don’t need to scale to a million users. That is not our goal.

Our goal is to gradually grow. Bring people onchain. Bring Web2 folks onchain. Bring the finance guys onchain. That is our goal and we’re going to achieve it.”

 

 

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