A meat barbeque restaurant, Betty’s Place in Nyeri, Kenya, recently started to accept Dash and Bitcoin, and BBC News recently covered their adoption.
“Since the world is becoming more global, my place is also becoming a global restaurant”.
The restaurant owner, Beatrice Wambugu, describes herself as “a crypto-currency pioneer”. The new acceptance isn’t massive adoption since they just have made “about 30,000 Kenyan shillings (£230, $300) in sales from about 20 people”. However, to encourage more usage, she hosts a workshop about cryptocurrency every Sunday. She would get questions such as “‘How does it work? and What is Bitcoin?’” and Ms Wambugu would train them. She is helping individuals discover how cryptocurrencies can help improve their lives.
Opportunities for cryptocurrencies in Africa
Cryptocurrency is very easy for any individual to get involved with on their mobile smartphone, which is estimated to hit a penetration rate of 50% in 2020 for all of Africa. Some believe that Africans will simply leapfrog technologies again when it comes to banking infrastructure and payments much like they leapfrogged over land-line telephones over the past couple decades. Nevertheless, there are still limited areas that accept cryptocurrencies in Kenya and Africa as a whole.
Cryptocurrencies also offer a chance to be transparent and accountable, which is needed in some countries more than others since corrupt governments have mishandled public funds for a significant portion of time. However, many still doubt the level of effect cryptocurrencies can have over traditional institutions. Nevertheless, cryptocurrencies can improve individuals’ lives by simply removing difficulties they previously had to suffer through. There are still 350 million Africans that do not have bank accounts and cryptocurrencies allow those individuals to become their own bank and start spending money within minutes. “Banking the unbanked” is a common phrase used, but its significance is that it is a privilege to not have to deal in all cash, earn returns, and have security. Now that privilege is being dispersed to more individuals.
Dash pushes user adoption forward in Africa
Thanks to the unique decentralized autonomous organization of Dash there are groups all around the world working on Dash development and adoption and Africa is no different. Dash Nigeria is working on Dash integrations in Nigeria and is seeing significant success with Bitrefill and mobile airtime purchases. The Dash Hub Africa team is involved in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Togo, and Benin. Both groups focus on the superior speed and cost of using Dash and also highlight other benefits, such as the safety of not having all wealth in cash.
Then with Dash Text and CoinText allowing consumers to send Dash via SMS rather than via data, this eliminates the need for smartphones and, once they expand services, will allow even more individuals throughout Africa to adopt and use Dash in their everyday lives. Dash focuses on being an everyday payment currency and is doing this by not only developing super fast and cheap confirmation times and transaction costs, but by also focusing on merchant adoption, which is now over 3,700 merchants worldwide.
