By Henry Uche, Lagos
George Ayinde is an African crypto nomad and developer of the WeMove platform to advance the course of cryptocurrency in Africa. He spent his early adult life in Dubai, UAE, where he studied and set up successful businesses in the creative and technology industries.
Following his successful time in the UAE, George wanted to take his passion for innovation and interest in disruptive technologies to Africa. Fueled by his deep desire to inspire, educate, and rebuild the continent; George decided to create a decentralised financial platform for Africans around the world to challenge the status quo of the world around them and offer them a space to create, innovate and participate in shaping Africa’s future.
Decentralised finance
Decentralised Finance, in many ways, is Bitcoin 2.0. And for that reason, WeMove furthers the Bitcoin narrative into the future that Bitcoin first allowed us to believe in: a world without banks as we have come to know them. What we are developing is an ecosystem and marketplace that is tailored specifically to the African market-More news to come on this, but for now, we are committed to empowering Africans all over the world.
Community is essential to the success of any ecosystem. We call ours Legion, and it is a rich, diverse, and inclusive community for all who want to use cryptocurrency to make an impact. The WeMove Legion welcomes the neophyte and the seasoned crypto professional alike.
Mission
Just a hint for now, WeMove will be solving four problems facing the average African; crypto education, remittance, financial inclusion and inflation. We will be dropping hints on our socials and closer to our launch date we will have an unveiling for the world to see.
The first step to get involved is by joining our telegram page – @wemovedefi, there our MODs will guide one on how to get on the presale whitelist and answer the usual 21 questions that come with projects in the Defi space.
Target market
We welcome the neophyte and the seasoned crypto professionals alike, Africa’s crypto investors and traders are young hardworking everyday people and I dare say the second-largest crypto community in the world, second only to Asia. As for confidence in the token, I will lay emphasis on the steps taken to ensure the platform is truly decentralised and SAFU (crypto lingo for SAFE). Our platform will be launched on PadSwap, an automated market maker, yield farming, and staking platform that rewards liquidity providers because they are the backbone of the market. The platform is flash loan proof unlike other popular AMMs in the DeFi space and this helps protect investors’ assets and boosts confidence in their projects. PadSwap also does an incredible amount of due diligence before listing new tokens; this helps ensure that the platform does not list rug pulls or pump and dump tokens with zero utility.
PadSwap solves the issue of short to unrealistically long-locked liquidity wasting in some vaults with zero benefits to the community but some misguided-overhyped “safety” guaranteed by Devs (crypto lingo for developer). Its Decentralised Perpetual Liquidity Protocol (DPLP) where fair launched or pre-sold liquidity tokens are donated to a farm which means Devs no longer have access to said liquidity so projects like WeMove on PadSwap cannot rug.
This farm functions as the liquidity pool for the token. Community members will be able to farm this liquidity, ensuring that it is decentralised. The DPLP farm has a 10 per cent in and out fee. 7.5 per cent goes back to the liquidity pool, and 2.5 per cent goes to the vault. This ensures that there will always be liquidity to farm and incentivises more extended-term holding. More importantly, this means that WeMove will always have the liquidity to trade long after I am dust.
Cryptocurrency
From your question, I understand that a centralised body banned its centralised institutions from working with centralised crypto exchanges, and research data has shown that this only drove up investment into crypto and DeFi by Nigerians. What the CBN did was completely alienate itself from Nigerian crypto adopters who are already traditional finance sceptics and further buttress the bitcoin narrative that people should be the custodians of their own fungible assets, not centralised financial institutions.
The ban gave rise to P2P (peer-to-peer) platforms, the very ethos to which bitcoin was created in the first place. Africans, not just Nigerians, have a massive problem with cross border settlements and remittances. If you are Nigerian and live outside the country, you’ll realise how worthless your retail banks are and crypto solves this issue in a lightning-fast manner. You can buy goods and services from another continent in seconds without having to wait on a two to three day SWIFT, caps on how much you can send-receive, and all the 21 questions and restrictions from the banks for remittance. For one, I have never had to wait for a transaction for a day. I do not understand it; it doesn’t compute in my head and with the plethora of cryptocurrency out there you get remittances in literal seconds.
Africans also put their savings into crypto as a means of avoiding inflation and this has contributed to the growing market in Africa. Everyone earning in local currency are worth a lot less at the time of this interview, thanks to inflation caused by the same institutions you revere; they made us all a lot worth-less.
As for the MMM narrative, since 2009, twelve years since bitcoin was launched and all you can see is growing adoption. According to Chainalysis, Africa’s crypto market increased in value by more than 1,200 per cent between July of 2020 and June 2021, with high adoption in Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and Tanzania.
The same CBN that banned crypto launched its own CBDC, so it begs the question: was it done to once again try to force Nigerians to use their own cryptocurrency? The same way Twitter was banned so some knock off-platform could be forced on the masses as a form of control of free speech? If this is the case then they have a rude awakening coming their way. You cannot force people to adopt your currency [laughs]. it does not work that way, and besides the more educated people are about decentralised finance. The more they will be akin to informed questions about CBDCs like who controls the mint function of the currency? Under what set of rules will new digital currency be minted? Where is the Whitepaper? Why wasn’t the Whitepaper made public? will the ledger of said CBDC be made public? In a country that prints the Naira on end, what will be different about this so-called digital currency? How are the private keys stored and the most important question of it all for adopters will be do they want to use another fork of centralisation as a store of value?
If African governments stopped wasting trillions on financial regulation and figuring out how to fleece its citizens at every turn and devote these resources to building and infrastructure, we would be terraforming Mars already and there would be no such thing as scarce resources. As for the security question, I would refer you to the Decentralised Perpetual Liquidity protocol we are founded on.
Remittance
Our DeFi protocol will provide crypto education, availability and equality of opportunities to access financial services where Africans/individuals and businesses can access appropriate, affordable, and timely financial products and services depending on their individual use case. These include banking, loans, equity, and insurance products. WeMove is a platform base for numerous marketplaces and we will be creating and adding in our ecosystem, from e-commerce to decentralised apps to Gamefi and an African NFT platform like no other. As for the remittance, that will be unveiled in the first quarter of 2022 and I promise it will be instrumental for Africans home and abroad.
Crypto economy
I created the Katalyst Africa platform for this purpose years before WeMove. It is going to be a biannual global gathering of all things disruptive and future tech that elected officials, tech entrepreneurs, startups and the general public from the cardinals of Africa will attend. There, we will discuss the Africa agenda and how these emerging technologies can further empower the next generation of Africa.
As for what the governments stand to gain, I believe they would regain some degree of trust from the same people that elected them to govern. The next generation of Africans will adopt the technology in ways we can only dream of – with or without centralised institutions and whatever system of control they want to put in place.
Each time I read of the government’s regulation and control, I ask: why regulate a fair system and who watches the watchmen? The time and money wasted on panels and endless debate by officials should be used to build transparent systems on the blockchain.
The government use cases of blockchain technologies are endless; from administration to project execution, pension funds to salary payments and budget allocation to ministries, most important idea in my opinion would be of fair, transparent election use case but that is not a conversation anyone wants to have.
Education on the best practices for crypto will negate security risks, practices like doing your own research, auditing code, multi-signature wallets, hardware over hot wallets, how best to store your private keys and equipping one’s self with the knowledge to avoid the numerous cyber attacks that even centralised systems are prone to.
Subscription
WeMove is building an efficient ecosystem powering the exchange of goods and services, not just for financial speculation, where everyday Africans home and abroad can easily use cryptocurrency to purchase services and products; that is, to use it also as a medium of payment for a diverse assortment of easy-to-use and intuitive products and services that will be deployed on our platform, putting the token to use the way satoshi intended crypto to be used ― as a peer-to-peer currency, putting it into the hands of non-technical people who wish to conduct business using non-government-issued currencies and as a hedge to Africa’s ever-rising inflation.
Does WeMove make users self-employed, employers of labour or people just use it as a channel to make transactions?
A little bit of all, depending on the type of user. I can say a day trader will most likely be self-employed and an entrepreneur. A user could also be an investor and use it as a store of value and hedge against inflation. The other type of user encompasses everyday people with regular jobs that want to use it for micro/macro transactions.