The African cryptocurrency industry is making a lot of progress, with many developments happening in the past week. From Codeacademy starting coding programs in Africa to being able to buy coffee using crypto, there were a lot of developments worth looking at in the past week.
We start with South Africa, where cryptocurrency adoption is growing fast. Can you imagine buying a cup of coffee with cryptocurrency? Well, this is happening in South Africa today. It has been made possible by MyBroadband, a crypto company based in SA. The company has been around for some time now, and the service is attracting a lot of crypto enthusiasts.
But this is not the first time in South Africa that buying merchandise using cryptocurrency has happened. Several years ago, PayFast, another crypto company from South Africa, was offering similar services. The company partnered with Bitcoin exchange, Luno, which enables buyers to use their Bitcoin wallets to make payments.
But the cost of transacting Bitcoin, which included the high gas fee, made the transactions unsustainable resulting in PayFast ending the service in July 2019. We are in 2022 and most of these challenges have been alleviated. The gas fee and the overall cost of transacting crypto coins has been reduced significantly. So due to the reduction of transaction fees, this has again become a possibility with MyBroadband.
The fact that MyBroadband is making it possible to bypass the centralized banking system makes it a win for blockchain technology likely resulting in further adoption across other parts of Africa.
In other news coming from South Africa, there has been a large amount of capital raised by Valr, a South African crypto exchange, in their Series B funding round.
The recent capital raise reached $50 million, which is bigger than the previous round held in July 2020, where it raised $3.4 million. The raised capital has grown Valr's value to $240 million, making it one of sub-Saharan Africa's most valuable crypto projects. The round was led by Pantera Capital, while CMT Digital, GSR, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, Cadenza, Distributed Global, and Third Prime also took part.
According to the report released by Valr, the amount raised during this round will be used to expand the platform to other parts of Africa as well as new emerging markets such as India.
The amount of blockchain developers across Africa has been one of the biggest limitations towards developing crypto products to help solve local African problems. But a lot of effort is being put in place to increase the number of coders in Africa.
Codecademy, one of the world's leading online coding learning platforms is partnering with The Black and Brilliant Advocacy Network to help reach more African coders to aid in developing and improving their skills. The programs will include upskilling and mentorship, where the partnership will focus on both soft and hard skills needed to create successful careers.
According to the information released, the program will run for 10 weeks. The curriculum will cover a range of key areas including programming, data science and data engineering using Codecademy's hands-on learning platform.
This is good news for blockchain development in Africa which will hopefully promote new projects furthering coding education across the continent.
The other news making headlines this week has been the steady growth of crypto gaming platforms in Africa. In a report released by the BMM Testlab, a South African-based gaming test lab, the company posted a 20% growth in 2021 in South Africa highlighting the rising growth for gaming products.
BMM Testlab is the premier test lab in this region and has been benefiting from the booming gaming market. There has been an increasing number of gaming developers across Africa, and South Africa has been one of the leading countries, with several top-tier gaming projects being released in recent months.
As the BMM Testlab looks to expand its reach across Africa, the demand for the platform is expected to keep growing. The company has also announced that they are looking into entering other markets like Tanzania, where sports betting and iGaming are growing fast.
With blockchain gaming growing increasingly popular, we can expect to see many more gaming test labs and gaming products coming out of Africa.
Lastly in our weekly news digest is a story highlighting the increasing number of African companies showing interest in entering the metaverse. The latest entrant is MTN, which is Africa's largest telecommunication company. The company has already purchased a substantial 144 plots of land in the Africarare, South Africa's first metaverse.
MTN joins the list of multinational companies such as Shopify, Google, and Microsoft that have already entered the metaverse. Africarare launched in Q4 2021 and has been doing very well in the market after its first NFT collection featuring the works of South African contemporary artist Norman Catherine sold out immediately after the launch.
With such large African companies entering the metaverse, we are likely to see more products coming out of Africa. There is still huge potential in the metaverse industry for both developers and investors, and it could be the next big thing in the crypto industry. That's why big companies like Google are heavily betting on it through its augmented reality (AR) glasses.
https://techpoint.africa/2022/03/03/africas-largest-telco-in-the-metaverse/
These are the top crypto news stories coming out of Africa this week. Follow our social media platforms to keep up with the latest updates on the African crypto industry. Follow us on Twitter and Telegram for our latest updates.
George Hung our chief of staff is a leader in management and B2B relations, running multiple successful business across many boarders.
