AFRICAS WEEKLY 👌
Web3 Afrika Dev Roundup Jan 13-20TH innovations +funding announcements+web3 in Africa +weekly highlight +Technical corner
🔥Investments/Innovation/Funding
➥Pre-seed VC fund TheCatalystFund has announced a $2 million investment.
The Catalyst Fund has announced a $2 million investment into 10 African startups building solutions to improve the resilience of African climate-vulnerable communities.
The Catalyst Fund is a pre-seed venture capital (VC) fund and accelerator that backs high-impact startups that seek to improve the resilience of underserved, climate-vulnerable communities.
This is the inaugural cohort of the new $30 million VC fund of Catalyst Fund that is anchored by the financial sector development agency FSD Africa.
➥Africa Web3 Gaming Publisher Carry1st Raises $27M.
Carry1st, a mobile games publisher, has just completed a fundraising round that raised $27 million. The money will be used to enhance the company's publishing, and digital content production platform in Africa, an area that Carry1st's investors believe is ready for Web3 adoption.
Several other investors participated in the investment round, including TTV Capital, Konvoy, Alumni Ventures, Lateral Capital, and Kepple Ventures.
➥Elon Musks Starlink to launch in Kenya.
Elon Musk’s satellite internet firm, Starlink, has announced plans to set up shop in Kenya. The internet service is awaiting regulatory approval and will be accessible in several cities, including Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa, and Nakuru, by June 2023.
Sidebar
Starlink is an internet broadband system capable of delivering 150Mbps internet speed to any place on the planet as long as its satellite dish has a clear view of the sky. In May last year, SpaceX received the license to operate in Nigeria and Mozambique. Several Nigerians who pre-ordered it have reportedly been receiving their Starlink kits.
The kit entails a Starlink dish, a mounting tripod, a WiFi router, a power supply, and cables. It costs Ksh74,216 ($599 ). Kenyans can pre-order and deposit a fully refundable deposit of Ksh12,260 ($99) to reserve a Starlink kit.
Albeit pricey, this means faster internet speed in Kenya (even in rural places) and bigger competition for internet service providers (ISPs) like Telkom, Airtel, Safaricom, Zuku, Faiba, and others who mainly offer internet connectivity through fiber optics.
➥TeamApt sheds its name and Rebrands as Moniepoint, And also moves its headquarters to London.
TeamApt, a Nigerian Fintech company, has adopted the name of its flagship product—Moniepoint. Moniepoint says the move is a testament to the success of Moniepoint and a desire to bring the company closer to its customers.
Moniepoint will also relocate its headquarters to London, which the company says is inspired by its ambition to be “an employer of choice, not just in Africa, but globally.” There are, however, no plans to provide services in the UK market.
According to Moniepoint, expansion plans into East Africa and North Africa will depend on “identifying large markets where millions of businesses are underserved.
➥Tanzanian fintech startup NALAmoney has officially launched in the European Union.
NALA, the Tanzanian fintech startup known for its African remittance services, has expanded to 19 additional European countries. With this expansion, the company hopes to gain a sizable market share from the more than 11 million African migrants living in Europe. As it expands the usability of its platform, the company has recently added Apple Pay and Google Pay.NALA aims to provide a better and cheaper money transfer option across the EU.
➥Egypt-based payments firm enza_group has entered the African payments market. Enza will focus on providing native digital payment capabilities to service institutions.
➥Canadian telco iristel has announced its expansion into Kenya, its first African market.
Iristel's expansion to Kenya is part of its mission to expand its wide range of communications solutions to new emerging markets.
The highlight of the week👏
With the importance of Africa growing quickly, Nigeria is the 17th biggest traffic provider on CoinMarketCap.
Coinmarketcap has revealed the top countries with the largest increase in the number of users. One segment shows the countries with the most user growth in the first quarter, including India, Pakistan, Colombia, Canada, and Nigeria. The countries with the most female user growth include Greece and Romania.
46% Increase in Youth Users, Nigeria Up 211%
Leading cryptocurrency price and market data provider Coinmarketcap published a report Friday highlighting the crypto market and user trends for the first quarter of this year. The company explained that the data analyzed comes from its “proprietary market capitalization data and user insights from our massive user base.”
Coinmarketcap named nine countries with the highest increase in users between 18 and 24 in the first quarter compared to the previous one. The nine countries with at least 80% user growth were led by Nigeria, which saw an increase of 210.6%, followed by Australia (158.07%), and Spain (120.71%). Other top countries were Canada (112.45%), Mexico (97.33%), the U.K. (91.48%), Colombia (85.07%), India (83.07%), and Pakistan (81.79%).
Technical corner💻📚
➤ How to read a smart contract and why you’d want to in the first place.
Reading a smart contract gives you insight into the popularity of a project, how distributed its ownership is, and what it’s capable of.
Plus, you can investigate the details of every transaction. A big advantage in web3.Read more
➤ Here are some very helpful tutorials on Web3, Defi, Solidity, and Vyper. https://www.quicknode.com/guides
➤ Financial preparation is the key to a successful future. we look at some of the reasons why you should invest in cryptocurrency before the upcoming recession hits. Read more
Thanks for reading👌
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Shiko Karanja✍
About NGENI🔥
NGENI is Kenya and East Africa's first pure-play and largest Blockchain & Web3 development engineering Studio with a 70-plus-person team. The studio recruits and trains recent graduates from STEM Universities across Kenya and today has fourty one (41) talented developers, at our Kilimani Headquarters.
All engineers have successfully taken on complex coding challenges, and hackathons and have ultimately delivered on complex multi-Blockchain applications, bots, and dApps for international projects.