Jack Dorsey Appoints 4 Young Africans To Lead BTrust Fund
It’s good news for Africa as its potential in Bitcoin development is now being recognised. The latest move by Jack Dorsey and Jay-Z's Bitcoin (BTrust) trust fund to donate 500 BTC to fund Bitcoin development in Africa and India will help exploit the continent's untapped potential.
On his Twitter account, Dorsey announced the appointment of 4 young Africans to the board of BTrust– 3 Nigerians and a South African. They are Abubakar Nur Khalil, Obi Nwosu, Ojoma Ochai and South Africa’s Carla Kirk.
They will oversee the disbursement of the 500 BTC fund in Africa and India without any form of supervision. The fund aims to "make bitcoin the internet's currency,"
According to the tweet from Dorsey regarding their appointment, this what the tweet said "They'll now work towards defining the operating principles as they think about how to best distribute the 500 Bitcoin towards development efforts,"
All four Africans have been involved in various Bitcoin development efforts across Africa. They came top from a group of 7,000 applications due to their vast in dealing with these kinds of projects.
Abubakar Nur Khalil has been a Bitcoin core contributor. He had received $50,000 worth of BTC from the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) in May 2020 for his work on Bitcoin wallet software. He is also the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Recursive Capital, a crypto VC fund currently in early-on-stage development that supports developers building web 3.0 projects.
Obi Nwosu co-founded Coinfloor, a seed-level cryptocurrency start that has managed to raise $300,000 in fund.
Ojoma Ochai is the Managing Partner at CcHubCreative (Co-Creation Hub), a tech-innovation platform that is helping startup growth in Nigeria and other select parts of Africa. The tech hub has raised over $5.5 million to aid its operation.
Carla Kirk-Cohen is a software engineer at Lightning Labs. She also worked for Luno, a South African cryptocurrency Exchange and Wallet firm. That's how involved in crypto projects all these Africans have been.
However, it is important to mention that the Government of Nigeria has banned the use of cryptocurrency via the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). How this fund will be distributed in Nigeria is still unclear with the bottlenecks already put by the government.
The appointment of the 4 young Africans shows that Africans are already to make a difference in this content. There are thousands of Africans involved in other projects that better the lives of local Africans. The few we can point out are Zandile Matiwaza, and Jacquez NDjamba Beleleck.
Zandile is the co-founder and the vice president of Africa grain and Seed Association (AGS), a foundation working to improve more than 10,000,000 impoverished rural African lives through education, technology, food security and agribusiness by 2030.
As a young African woman, Zandile has been very critical in empowering African rural communities and has played a critical role in bettering thousands of people's lives, in 2021, Zandile and AGS worked with KamPay to give 50,000 farmers in Zimbabwe the opportunity to access micro-lending to help with acquiring the necessary resources to grow and maintain crop. Jacquez NDjamba Beleleck is the president of Yoomee Holdings, an ISP and mobile virtual network operator in Cameroon.
Yoomee is changing local African lives through its mobile money service. The company technology is banking millions of unbanked Cameroonians through its mobile money wallet, and recently have announced their partnership with KamPay that will give YooMee’s customer base the opportunity to purchase KamPay tokens directly through their mobile money application. As the president, Jacquez NDjamba Beleleck plays a critical role in changing people's lives through better and affordable financial services.
The BTrust fund will significantly impact the growth of various African startups that can access funds to develop Bitcoin projects. With Africans overseeing the funds, we expect the right projects that impact local people's lives will be funded, and the impact in the coming years will be phenomenal.
A passionate Crypto investor since 2012, with deep understanding of marketing and business development, over the past few decades Dov Marcus has built many successful multi-million businesses as an entrepreneur and as an investor.
