Onboarding One Billion Africans Onto Blockchain

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1:36what's up guys it's ash bennington welcome to real vision crypto daily briefing before we bring our guests in i want to talk about an exciting initiative at real vision the mint for season two of the Real Vision Collective is happening right now. The aim of the RV Collective is to bring all your favorite NFT communities together while giving you the knowledge you need to navigate Web3. Season two is the next step in this journey to create this collection. We've pulled artwork from nine of the most significant CCO projects out there and transformed them into three unique mashups. If you want to help us keep building the super community of NFTs, Head over to realvision.com slash collective.

2:19That's realvision.com forward slash collective to learn more and to mint your own season two NFTs. With that said, let's bring in our guest, Chi Nadi, co-founder and CEO of Mara. Chi, welcome to the show. Thank you, Ash. It's good to see you. And thanks for having us on the show. We really appreciate the opportunity to share our story from Africa. Well, it's a pleasure to have you here. Let's talk a little bit more generally. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and of course, about the current state of play of blockchain in Africa. sure okay as background on myself um i was i've been raised all over the world you're a classic global citizen um started off young life in nigeria um left around seven years old and went to canada which was a shock as you can imagine um but as anybody's years were not from culture oh my god the first time i ran into the snow i thought it was going to be fun and I quickly learned that snow meant shoveling driveways.

3:27And so not fun, you know. And then we moved to the U.S. when I was 13. And then that's where I was. We stayed most of my adult life. Now, because I'm from a specific tribe in Nigeria called the Igbos, that Nigerians who are listening will know, we are famous for going home to our village every single year. It's actually something that came from the Nigerian Civil War, the Biafran War, where our tribe was almost exterminated, actually. About a third of our tribe died at that time. And our villages are what saved us. The reason why I say that is because growing up in Canada, we were in Nigeria every single Christmas and every single summer.

4:13So that kept me very, very close to growing up there. And so when I hit my 20s in the late 2010s, I actually moved back to Nigeria. And then I spent the whole last decade splitting my time between Nigeria and California. And I share that for a reason, because it allowed me to be very early in crypto or the blockchain space. And when I say very early, I mean the crypto-philosophical anarchist days of the early 2010s, 2011, 12, 13, where it was really about the philosophy of blockchain, right? And a lot of my friends were actually libertarians in the U.S., so deep in that world. But at the same time, I was transplanting myself to Nigeria, not just Nigeria, but my home, my homeland, which is a southeastern part of Nigeria.

5:10And so I was seeing this revolutionary technology that I immediately recognized as a leapfrog technology for Africa because I immediately understood that it could be utilized to reorganize society and build social infrastructure in society. Yeah, you know, I'm fascinated by one word that you just said there in particular, and that's the word leapfrog. This is one of the most interesting things about the African continent to me is that the ability, for example, of the just extraordinary adoption of mobile phone technology and peer-to-peer style networks, it would seem to be very much a natural fit for blockchain, particularly because you don't have a lot of the legacy incumbents in the space to block you as you might have somewhere else in the world.

5:59Talk a little bit about that aspect of it. I find that incredibly fascinating. I mean, I remember it's so interesting because, so I'm from Nigeria specifically, and I've watched Nigeria leaf frogs. I remember when we did have a modicum of dial-up, or a modicum of, it's actually called NITO, but it was not very good. And then suddenly we just switched, and everybody was on mobile. And that's what everybody was doing. And that's how we actually received internet for the first time. And when I think about blockchain as a leapfrog technology, I really think it's so much more than it just adds to technology.

6:42because in Africa, we find ourselves at this place where we haven't set down our infrastructure yet. We're just now setting up our trade infrastructure, our financial infrastructure. We're just now setting down our healthcare infrastructure, our transportation infrastructure. And that's what I really saw with blockchain technology. It is a piece of technology that can reform how humans interact with each other. And so many of the things that are the ills of Africa are actually remnants of last century and are actually not really of our own doing, meaning country lines being drawn by other countries and that sort of thing.

7:26And so one of the things that I really saw that would be really exciting, that's really exciting for Africa is that blockchain creates an opportunity to create currencies and assets for the bottom of the economic pyramid. Now, if you really think about that, no matter where you live in the world, the top of the economic pyramid has lots of assets to hold value in. But the bottom of the economic pyramid doesn't. In fact, I can tell you what, other than like fiat currency, proprietary fiat currency, the number one currency all across Africa is phone credit. And that's new. That only has existed in the last 20, 25 years.

8:07And so whether it's tokens representing blockchains or tokens representing protocols, it creates an opportunity for us to create value, African value, and trade amongst ourselves. And that is illuminating when you're talking about a society where, especially in Nigeria, 70 % of the population is under the age of 30. So you also have a society that's very malleable and can adopt new things. And so just quickly to go back to what we mentioned about leafrogging, text has been a huge step forward. WhatsApp has been a huge step forward. Just to take it back to the work we're doing in Nigeria, we initially started, I remember in 2012-2013, I was working through my nonprofit and a group of other nonprofits.

8:57And we went and taught one member in the rural community to use Facebook and WhatsApp. This is 2012-2013, so it was actually novel at that time. And this is an area that receives an incredible amount of oil spills. And because of that WhatsApp group and putting people from Shell on that WhatsApp group, One Village won$83 million from Shell. And showing how just a layer of technology shortens the time. It shortens the spill response times from a year and a half to three weeks. And that's how technology can really impact the fabric of society. And that's why we really get excited about blockchain technology in Africa.

9:39It's about creating assets, African value, but also Africans being able to interact with the rest of the world and be economically included. And that's why it's a new product technology. Yeah, and you mentioned those incredibly favorable demographics, 70 % of the population being under 30. I believe that I was reading last night that either the median or the mean age in Nigeria is like, it's like 18 years old. Yeah. That's actually why I went back. That's actually the main reason. So as a back story, my grandfather was mayor of the largest city in Nigeria when it started. He had 33 kids. So I have 172 cousins.

10:20And I'm one of the older cohort of the cousins. and I just looked, in 2010, I just looked at our demographic numbers and realized that the entire population of the country were the age of my younger cousins. And the people running the country are in their 70s and 80s. And I just thought to myself, who's at the wheel here? What's going to happen over this century as Nigeria explodes? But when you've got a young, very valuable society, you can adopt new technologies, you can adopt new practices. The question is, can we make sure that that innovation actually takes forward? And that's, I think, something that we've been all struggling with, with blockchain.

10:59But I truly believe that Africa will actually show the whole entire industry the way forward this decade, actually. Let me just quickly say one thing. So when I first got into crypto, one of the things that dawned on me I thought was so strange was, okay, this technology, Bitcoin, disintermediates or allows you not to deal with weak intermediaries. but inherently it really only thrives in a place where electricity is cheap which is a signal of having good infrastructure which means you have somewhat uh strong intermediaries when you go to culture or countries like nigeria we have a lot of weak intermediaries you have almost no power nigeria produces as much power as the city of columbus ohio and i realized that that was a poison pill in the technology in our industry and we've just experienced what almost 14 years of just sheer speculation which is just you know bringing together cheap money and a burgeoning new technology but not a lot of use cases not a lot of problems being solved and that's what really attracted me to blockchain was living half of my life in america and half of it in africa in Nigeria and seeing all the problems that could be solved.

12:20And so I think this decade, now that everybody has got a certain level of education, which is absolutely key about smart contracts and launching technology, I think we'll start to see the productive era of our industry. Hey, everyone. We're going to take a quick pause and hear a word from our partners. We'll be right back.

12:42Yeah, fascinating. You said another key word there for me, which is infrastructure. Before we start talking about the blockchain infrastructure in Nigeria, talk a little bit about the mobile phone infrastructure in Nigeria. What kind of penetrance does it have? What is the sort of demography of it for folks, for example, you know, under 30? and how does it look sort of, is it something that working people have access to almost universally? Because in my understanding, mobile phones are really at the very core, particularly for young people in Nigeria, of their ability to communicate and connect as they are here in the United States and elsewhere.

13:22Yeah, I believe mobile phone penetration, and I say smartphone penetration sits at 70%. But here's an interesting statistic. In some records, mobile phone penetration will sit at like 130%. And you're wondering, why is that the case? Well, that's because people have more than one phone. And the reason why they have more than one phone is because one network isn't working as well as the other network isn't working. And so that's one of the things that we saw in the last decade was that widespread mobile phone adoption take place and smartphone adoption. And then 3G and 4G also blanketing the country.

14:02Nigeria, I'm talking about Nigeria specifically. And that ushers in the right type of infrastructure for us to start building assets and actually living and building in that digital world. So let's talk a little bit. You mentioned the idea of mobile minutes being a valuable form of currency throughout Africa. Talk a little bit about the payment infrastructure, the current payment infrastructure on mobile phones in Nigeria. You know, if you and I, for example, make a bet on a soccer match, do we pay each other via mobile phones? How does that work? So, OK, so Africa is very interesting when it comes to mobile phone penetration.

14:41Sorry, mobile phone adoption for payments. This is a little bit of alpha information as the differences between the different parts of the continent. In countries where the banking infrastructure is strong, places like Nigeria and South Africa, mobile money was slow to be adopted. but credit cards were very quickly adopted. So what you end up finding is actually, and this is actually just now changing in Nigeria, and I'll share a little bit more about that. But when you go to East Africa, when you go to Kenya, which was the inventor of mobile money, and you start to look at Uganda, Tanzania, and other parts of East Africa that, and other parts of Africa in general, that don't have strong financial services sectors, mobile money is dominant.

15:31I mean, if you live in Kenya today, you will never use your credit card or your credit card. You will lose it. I mean, that's when I was living in Kenya. And every time I left, I just went to another part of the world. I just didn't know how to take my credit card with me when I left because I was so used to doing everything on my phone. In fact, I tell people, if you visit Kenya or East Africa and you haven't signed up for the mobile money, whether it's M-Pesa or Airtel money, then you actually aren't living there yet. Because it's easier to use mobile money for me to quickly send you by text M-Pesa than it is to do any other form of payment, bar none.

16:16Now, if you switch to Nigeria, which is really interesting, one, because of the sheer size of Nigeria and the incumbents that existed there with the financial sector, this beginning of this year, payments via mobile payments, mobile money just took off. And that was really driven by decisions by the Nigerian government at the beginning of this year to start moving towards cashless. And so that's a huge moment. It's a huge moment because you're talking about mobile payments, bank P2P becoming now more popular and using cash. I don't know how to stress this more. Like the problem with Nigeria before, or it's kind of still, actually before the new administration really pushing some of these things away, was that you literally had to bring in cash, go and find someone on the street, and then be able to trade him at a black market rate for cash.

17:16And he gave you a black bag full of cash, and that's how you moved around. It's one of the reasons why Mara was actually launched for Pan-Africa. I visited Kenya, and I just saw how mobile savvy the entire country was. Everybody was already having the behavior of mobile modeling. And I realized that digital assets is just one layer above that activity, that action. And fortunately, large markets like Nigeria have now started moving in that direction as well, which really creates a very good environment for digital assets going forward. What's the government view and this sort of ruling class view?

18:00I mean, I ask this question because I sort of wonder whether it's Lagos or Abuja or Washington or New York. There's always this kind of question about what do the ruling class think of this? What do the people who run the government think about it? What do the people who run the banks think about it? Is there an openness, a willingness to experiment with this technology and to attempt to empower people using it? You know, that's a really good question. I think we're all seeing that being answered in some way with this regulatory wave we're going through these next few years. And what we've seen and what we've learned is that it really has a lot to do with the demographics of the country and the opportunistic nature of the government.

18:51What do I mean by that? For most countries, when you see crypto, you see an attack on your money, which is, you know, crypto is innovating on the proprietary product of countries. um but i would say for african countries the greatest problem they have to deal with is less so um is not so much capital flight but more so security and literally literally human flight you know because our population is just exploding so much so what's really driving um if you want to call it the ruling class or the powers that be, is how can this technology be used to create jobs for the youth? Because what we don't want is a youth burning down the entire country.

19:41That's a different environment than the U.S., than Asia. I mean, I think back to the work we're doing in the Niger Delta. I wanted to build a smart contract platform since I learned of them in 2015. I did not make the move to do so until 2016. when I witnessed a bunch of youths riot at what the ruling class in the community did. It made me realize, okay, the people want something new now. And what we've seen, especially in Nigeria over the last couple of years, actually the last year, is the powers that be the politicians, the ruling class, really start to listen to the youth. I mean, we just, I mean, the current president is a minister that's 46 years old and is a tech pro.

20:34Now, that's amazing for Nigeria. We don't have ministers that young. You know, our ministers are usually much, much older. And it was a real signal to appoint a tech pro as a minister. Many of the governments in Africa see technology as a way forward to be able to employ a lot of the youth. And that's their main issue. And then also governments are also thinking, how can we be opportunistic and use the underlying technology as a way to build our infrastructure, whether it might be cross-border settlement via blockchain, whether it might be B2B stablecoins, for example, to allow more trade to happen between countries.

21:19That's what's really interesting about the continent is that we are just now building our infrastructure. African continental free trade area was just launched, what, five years ago. You know, our version of the EU and the like, basically continental trade agreements. And that's what makes it exciting to be building on chain on the continent. Hey, everyone, we're going to take another quick break and hear a word from our partners. We'll be right back to the Real Vision Crypto Daily Briefing.

21:54Yeah, extremely interesting. Talk a little bit about, Mara, what the vision is, how you're focusing in Nigeria and then across the broader African continent. What's the vision? What's the goal line look like in your mind? it all comes back to you know when i first came back to nigeria to live full-time uh early last decade and i just remember running into this really great guy named kachi who was a young father great personality incredibly trustworthy the key word there is trustworthy and we spent years working together in the Nigel Delta. And it took me years to find him. And it dawned on me because I was fully in my early crypto mind.

22:40I was like, Kauchi is someone that can be trusted. He's someone who's worked with Amnesty International, The Guardian, and all these well-known international organizations. Yet he's invisible. That was what was really driving my obsession with blockchain as a lead product technology for Africa is that we're invisible, you know? And so even the term financial inclusion is not one of my favorite terms. I prefer the term economic inclusion. And that's what Mara is about. It's about creating a crypto ecosystem that allows African value, African innovation to engage with the world and the world to engage with Africa.

23:22And so as you can imagine, that's not just a wall that allows people to, for the first time, buy and sell assets, crypto assets, but it also allows them to interact with stable coins. It also will allow them to interact with tokenized assets, whether they be government bonds, government current, government bonds, stocks of a specific country. There's so many things that we take for granted or taking for granted in the West that are bringing them to Africa just creates an enormous amount of economic freedom. And then you talk about the one out of five or one out of 10 young person who sees a problem in their community and knows it can be solved.

24:06For example, I'll give you a really, really simple example that not many people have thought of. A lot of people listen to Afro beats, Afro beats music, you know, it's taking over the in the entire world. But what they don't realize is that a lot of the big studios in the US are just coming in and just buying up African studios for cheap. And then taking those artists and then making a lot of money as they become very popular globally. And then we think, okay, is there a way, because I know a lot of people also don't realize for every Burna, for every Wiskill, for every Davido, there's a hundred guys just like that, that are entertaining lots of people that, there's a very dense and highly creative space.

24:49What if there was a new way to build a label that involved integrating the fans into the process, that involved sharing royalties with the fans, that involved creating NFT VIP passes to allow fans to leverage the young fans in Africa that you have that are 21 years old, leverage what we all have at 21, which is great pace, into developing the music industry of Africa owned by Africans as well. And so I see the only gap to a whole ground sort of innovation taking off from Africa is something missing right now is Mara, the infrastructure that we provide, and also the education we provide as well.

25:38It's bringing the infrastructure, which is the chain, the wallets, the launchpad, the ability for folks to be able to create their own projects, launch them, seed them to a very large retail base of 4 million users as well. We create that innovation within the African ecosystem. And then we invite the entire world to collaborate with us on it as well. And it's also about the crypto ecosystem also engaging with Africa as well. Because the interest in crypto is at the highest here on the continent. Obviously, because we've got most of the Gen Zs in the world. Right. Fascinating. I guess you're officially one of the old guys now.

26:23Oh, my goodness. Listen, I always joke that Mara could only work because of me being at this, to be honest, being at this age. Because it's a weird thing in Nigeria, specifically. If you're not 45 with kids, you pretty much are a child. You're actually called a small boy, you know? It's a very interesting culture in that way. But it allows me to sit in this position. We have the same thing here in the United States. when you look at our own leadership class, I mean, skewing into men and women in their 80s. That's true. That's absolutely true. That's absolutely true. Another thing, the youth party in Nigeria, the political party, is for all candidates 50 years old and under.

27:19It's like, that's a youth party, but it allows it. I'm still in it. You're still in it. So same with me. Thank goodness. but just kind of being at this age cusp is a great benefit is because I just I really understand my young cousins that I helped raise that are like 22, 24, 25 but at the same time you can actually speak to the regulators, the technocrats and actually educate them and they'll listen to you. They'll listen to you because you look like they're you know their nephew or their son and And likely their nephew and their son is also into football. And so the great thing is that African governments are at this great place where they're open to options.

28:07They're open to seeing how the technology evolves and can be fruitful for African society, which is much different than the rest of the world. We don't have that cadre of 40-year-olds and 50-year-olds who are entrenched in the system trying to hold back the innovation that we're seeing elsewhere. That's where the demographics work in our favor. Such a fascinating conversation. We've done a number of conversations here on Real Vision about blockchain technology in Africa. I always find it fascinating. In many ways, Africa seems to be on the leading edge of this for all the reasons we just talked about.

28:43Really fascinating stuff. Final thoughts, key takeaways that you'd like to leave us with? I think that what I really like to leave folks with is just that, you know, when technologies get formed, They go through that speculative phase with blockchain. And I truly believe, as we all are thinking about utility, as we all are looking at real world assets on chain, I truly believe that we're going to see the next 10, 15 years of a beautiful ecosystem sprout from the bottom up. and the beautiful the benefit of it is that millennials all around the world are into crypto so they'll be able to co-invest partner with these young entrepreneurs on the continent they'll be able to be part of building the future of Africa and be part of it themselves one of the things I've always I said to myself uh I think it was uh in my like in my teenage years, I said, in my lifetime, my generation, everybody I know is going to go visit Africa.

29:53And we both know it wasn't like that before, you know? And I really do think that we're heading towards a different way of seeing African people in the future. And I'll leave one statistic that's kind of controversial, and I'll leave you with it, just so we can kind of reform our heads as to what the future is bringing. In 1950, for every one African there was in the world, there were two Europeans. In 2050, for every one European, there'd be four Africans. The world is fundamentally changing. At a time where we're working with technologies, it's fundamentally changing the way we interact with each other and govern ourselves.