The African Continent has done tremendously well in the adoption of Blockchain Technology. As an African I am proud of our giant strides but in this article I will highlight areas I think Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Projects are facing limitations in Africa.
In my three years so far in the cryptocurrency and Blockchain Industry I never knew we had a large number of projects from the African Region in Crypto. It was when I started the African Blockchain Series I gradually began to find African based crypto projects and sincerely speaking I have been amazed. Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology is here to stay in Africa. You and I are lucky to be part of those setting the pathway for this technology in the Continent.
Now back to the main issue, I believe cryptocurrency and blockchain projects/brands are currently facing limitations in the following areas:
- Use case: Before embarking on a cryptocurrency project the team needs to sit down and carry out proper research and evaluate problems they believe their project will provide solutions to. But this is not always the case with African based crypto projects, you can see an Africa Project completely copying the idea of a crypto project in China forgetting that these are two different regions with their own unique problems. Every crypto project is set up to provide solution to a problem this is where the utility or use case around such project is gotten.
- Limited or no experience of the team members: Have you ever looked up the profiles and LinkedIn of team members of an African based crypto project? You will find out that over 80% of the time they have little or no past experience in the blockchain industry or a related field. If we have a bunch of amateurs with no experience as team of a crypto project, what do you expect of such project?
- Flawed Tokenomics: This is a major area where African crypto projects get it totally wrong if they get it right with the first two limitations. You will find a majority of African crypto projects with a supply of 2 billion and above in a continent where majority of people live below a dollar in a day, who would invest in your ICO or who would buy those tokens or coins when it hits the exchanges? Personally I don’t invest or buy tokens of any crypto project with a total supply above 1 billion. You would realize that if you invest in tokens or coins with huge circulating and total supply year in year out you get no returns on your investment because prices hardly move positively due to the huge supply. A number of time the team create these huge supply tokens so they can allocate a large amount to themselves and dump at will. I call this a money grab. This is a very common practice by cryptocurrency projects team in the Industry.
- Lack of Advertisement: African crypto projects barely advertise you need to dig deep to find an African crypto project. How then do they expect people to invest when people don’t even know such a project exist? If you build it, they will only come when they know what you have built.
- No Feasible Goals: This falls back to the first point, when a project has no use case or utility, how then can the team set feasible goals to be achieved? This happens when the project idea is copied from another project. You can see a project today say they are building an exchange, tomorrow they say no we are no longer interested in building an exchange we want to development a payment processor. They keep going round circles and end up abandoning the project. This problem is not unique to African crypto projects alone but its common in the Blockchain Industry.
- Lack of trust: Majority of Africans in crypto see African based crypto projects mainly as opportunist that just want to take advantage of investors to cash out on their investments. Before and immediately after the bull run of 2017, the ICO market was booming due to this everyone was creating a token and people were buying these ICOs massively due to a fear of missing out of the bull run. Then came the bear market and boom over 85% of these projects disappeared. A majority of Africans that were in crypto then still have these memories fresh with them I still do, which leads to a lot of trust issues investing in an ICO. Talk less of investing in an African based crypto ICO.