Designing for Decentralization in the Age of #EndSars, Blocked Accounts and Un-banking the Banked.

Fundamentally, people fear what they do not understand and hate what they cannot conquer.

This is why in January 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria released a circular banning the exchange of cryptocurrency by financial institutions and directed banks to close accounts trading in crypto leading to an uproar.

What this means is that the Central Bank of Nigeria has cut the link between crypto exchanges and their users. That is, payment companies and banks of these exchanges will not have the ability to facilitate the flow of funds between them and their users.

In light of these recent developments, Nigerian Crypto exchanges (like Bundle, BuyCoins, Luno and Quidax) are readdressing their systems extensibility. Why? Because, now more than ever in this time of conventional fin-tech systems un-banking the banked, the goal is to design better ways the average African can have access to a more powerful and stable financial technology.

Crypto Exchanges have employed the use of alternative currencies, improved Peer to Peer (P2P) trading etc as a quick solution to the recent pain point generated by the Central Bank of Nigeria.

Again, on the case of the extensibility of crypto and the goal to drive home adoption globally through ease of use, Crypto leaders and passionate users are asking the most important questions.

• How might we fully educate Africans who do not understand and Africans who understand crypto so they can use and keep using respectively? (Demystifying crypto)
• How might we generate interesting use cases that are truly inclusive and are able to make crypto mainstream?
• How might we organically increase the viral coefficient of crypto users in Africa? (Currently only 1.4 million out of 1.2 billion people use crypto in Africa.)
• How might we fully give financial power to the average African through the use of decentralized currency?

Until we start designing solutions that answer some of these questions, only then can we attain true decentralization and full economic control.