Fintech Review 📚
Emurgo investment +yellow card license +kenya and blockchain +mara crypto wallet in sub sahara +VC investing in Africa
🔥Investments/Innovation.
➥Emurgo_io Invests in MomintNFT to Expand the Adoption of NFTs in Africa.
Adaverse, an EMURGO-backed Web3 accelerator focused on Cardano ecosystem adoption in Africa, recently announced its investment in Momint, a Web3 marketplace that makes investing in crypto and NFTs easy for users of all skill levels. Adaverse joined Momint’s highly competitive seed round alongside Outlier Ventures, Mountain Partners, Rob Hersov, and simple Capital.
Adaverse was launched in September 2021 as a joint venture partnership between EMURGO Africa and Everest Ventures. Adaverse aims to identify and provide valuable support resources to promising African startups building socially impactful Web3 solutions on Cardano’s environmentally-friendly, decentralized blockchain.
Cardano is one of the largest open-source blockchain networks in the industry and utilizes a proof-of-stake consensus protocol to secure its network in an eco-friendly manner.
➥US-based VC firm FlourishVC has launched an Africa-focused program to support the continent's pre-seed stage tech startups.
Access to funding and lack of support systems are some of the greatest challenges faced by startup founders in sub-Saharan Africa. And while venture capital and founder support programs within the continent are growing, a lot still remains to be done to meet the financing, technology, and social capital needs of especially marginalized groups, like women founders.
It is these gaps that continue to inspire the development of new programs like Madica by U.S.-based venture capital firm Flourish Ventures, which hopes to lessen the burdens of building startups. The investment program aims to offer funding, technical support, and mentorship to underrepresented founders across the continent. The sector-agnostic program targets technology startups in the pre-seed stage, which is where most ideas fail.
➥MoneyHash, an Egyptian fintech startup has launched its services across Africa after a successful launch in the MENA region earlier this year.
The startup announced a US$3 million pre-seed funding round in February as it emerged from beta, and has now expanded across Africa. Starting in Egypt, the company allowed 17 companies to use its sandbox environment to connect with its API and access payments gateways such as Fawry, Paymob and PayTabs.
MoneyHash has now rolled out its product in Sub-Saharan Africa, starting with Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa—integrating providers like; Yoco, Paystack and Flutterwave.
➥Coinbase- and FTX-backed Mara launches crypto wallet for sub-Saharan Africa.
Coinbase- and FTX-backed Mara launches crypto wallet for sub-Saharan Africa. The Nairobi-based financial technology company Mara announced the launch of Mara Wallet, a brokerage app that will allow users to buy, send, sell, and withdraw fiat currency and the top 30 cryptocurrencies by volume.
Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for the lowest cryptocurrency transaction volume of any region included in Chainalysis’s 2022 global adoption index, it’s grown 16% from last year. Despite the low volume, Chainalysis found that Africa has one of the most well-developed cryptocurrency markets because of deep consumer penetration and cryptocurrency being used more frequently for everyday purchases. Nigeria and Kenya both rank in the top 20 countries of Chainalysis’s adoption index.
➥Kenya’s Adoption of Blockchain
Despite its initial negative remarks about blockchain and cryptocurrency, Kenya has taken significant strides in incorporating various blockchain technologies.
Kenya has begun its journey in adopting blockchain technology within its mobile applications.Africa is categorized as blockchain-friendly, allowing decentralized applications to thrive.
➥Yellow Card Receives First-Ever African Crypto License
Yellow Card has made another significant stride in the industry, becoming the first cryptocurrency company on the continent to be granted a Virtual Asset Service Provider license to operate in Botswana. The license, in accordance with Section 11 of the Virtual Asset Act, 2022, was issued by the Non-Bank Financial Institutions Regulatory Authority [NBFIRA] on the 29th of September 2022, and will become the standard for crypto operations in the country.
🏆Project of the week.
🙌Africa is quickly emerging as the hub of global crypto as the Technology goes down from developed economies toward emerging markets .
One of our amazing products👏👇
✨Highlight of the Week.
Touchandpayme team won this year's Ecobank Fintech Challenge
Touch and Pay is a Nigerian platform for NFC-enabled micropayments across Africa According to the company, ~500,000 people make payments using TAP every day.
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About NGENI🔥
NGENI is Kenya and East Africa's first pure-play and largest Blockchain & Web3 development engineering Studio with a 60-plus-person team. The studio recruits and trains recent graduates from STEM Universities across Kenya and today has twenty-five (25) 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.