Seven Years After Leaving Africa to Join Crypto, We're Still Talking About Faith
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Seven Years After Leaving Africa to Join Crypto, We're Still Talking About Faith
From a single product to an entire赛道 and industry, what truly endures is what generates positive value for society.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Athena Y
As Token2049 wraps up, after days of deep networking with colleagues and amid a flood of negative sentiment swirling around the question "Is the crypto industry dead?"—I'm reminded of a small incident from a few weeks ago.
It's been two years since I moved to Paris. One day, while working remotely at a little café near my home, I suddenly received a WeChat call from Uganda. After an exchange filled with surprise, delight, and confusion, I did a quick mental calculation and realized—it’s already been seven years since I left traditional industries in Africa to dive into crypto.
The caller was a senior advisor to the Ugandan government, traveling to China with the president for the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation. During the years I lived and worked in Africa, I served both Chinese state-owned enterprises and the UN development system, focusing on advancing African industrialization and financial inclusion. With his support, we collaborated on various projects—from Sino-Ugandan investment promotion to initiatives supporting women artisans—and built lasting friendship.
The stories from those years in Africa could fill a lifetime of conversation. Some were grand, like casually chatting with Senegal’s president at his private residence; others were harrowing—like when my close friend’s boyfriend died in a terrorist attack at Nairobi’s busiest shopping district, a place we frequented. By sheer coincidence, I had changed flights at the last minute and narrowly avoided Ethiopia’s deadliest aviation disaster, though several acquaintances within my extended network weren’t so lucky. Despite these experiences, my decision to leave Africa was firm and final.
And that brings me back to how I unexpectedly encountered crypto. Interestingly, even after seven years, whenever I sit in a café chatting with old and new friends in the crypto space, stories about Africa always spark interest—almost as if it’s a utopia escaping hardship, a romanticized projection of exotic adventure.
But I believe the real answers to the existential questions about crypto’s value are hidden precisely within these seemingly dreamy, distant tales.
Value Transfer—Where Is the Money? How Is It Spent? And Where Does It Go?
You may have heard Binance’s bold vision: "to increase the freedom of money." To seriously consider whether the crypto industry is doomed, let’s start high-level—by examining how global value chains have shifted throughout history, where we stand today in this historical trajectory, and why Binance would even have such a slogan.
Let’s begin with the old narratives. There have been three major global industrial revolutions. The "Steam Revolution" originated with the invention of the steam engine in Britain, dramatically boosting productivity and enabling mass industrial production instead of small-scale handicraft workshops. The "Electric Revolution" saw breakthroughs in electricity, chemicals, and heavy industry across Britain, Germany, the U.S., and France, leading to a mature European industrial system. The third was the well-known "Information Revolution," where rapid advancements in information technology, computing, electronics, and automation elevated countries like the U.S. and Japan into key players in the global economy. Meanwhile, the "Asian Tigers" (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) rapidly industrialized in the latter half of the 20th century, developing advanced manufacturing and finance to integrate into the global value chain.
Clearly, each industrial revolution transformed productive forces, reshaping production relationships and allowing certain nations to leverage their "comparative advantages" to enter global value distribution. China benefited from its 1978 reform and opening-up, learning from the success of the Asian Tigers. By establishing special economic zones and industrial parks in coastal regions, it leveraged its large, low-cost, hardworking labor force, opened markets to foreign capital, and developed export-oriented manufacturing—becoming the "world factory" and securing a vital role in the global value chain.
These sweeping industrial revolutions could be studied in endless detail, but what matters here is that each also represented a process of wealth redistribution. Africa, due to its colonial history and complex mix of industrial policies and geopolitical factors, has long been excluded from this "cake-sharing" process.
But is Africa really poor? Lagos, Nigeria’s capital, hosts the world’s highest density of private jets. After exchanges launched local payment gateways in Africa, per capita trading volume far exceeded that of Europe and Asia. The wealth of Africa’s elite surpasses common imagination. Thanks to abundant resources—especially oil and agriculture—the upper class can live comfortably for generations off raw material exports, while ordinary people barely scrape by in the service sector. Manufacturing is virtually nonexistent across the continent, finance is monopolized, and due to inadequate infrastructure, financial services are prohibitively expensive—many people cannot afford bank accounts or transfer fees. Extreme, almost absurd wealth disparity is simply the norm in Africa.
During a research project with an international organization, Djibouti’s government arranged for us to stay at the Kempinski Hotel—the most luxurious hotel in this tiny, arid East African nation—at $300 per night, equivalent to half a year’s income for many locals. I still remember one moment clearly: a white businessman smoking a cigar held court on the Red Sea beach chairs, while a Black waiter stood upright in a crisp white shirt and red vest, tray in hand, staring blankly into the mist over the sea—his eyes numb and unfocused.
Our job then was to design how aid funds from international organizations should be spent, ensuring they delivered real impact. We were young elites from top universities worldwide, trained in economics, finance, and sociology. One British girl fresh out of Oxford nearly cried when told she’d be staying at a $300-a-night hotel—she felt it mocked the very purpose of our mission. But when shown the living conditions of ordinary people—corrugated metal shacks creaking under 50°C heat—she quietly withdrew her protest.
It was around then that I decided to quit. Our work seemed noble—we debated industrial transfer, advocated for African manufacturing, encouraged integration into global supply chains, promoted factory jobs for locals, emulating China and Southeast Asia’s garment and footwear industries. I personally spent a month inside a Chinese-owned factory in Senegal, interviewing female workers producing low-end Adidas and Nike sweatpants for export to the West. But it was too slow. Within the vast traditional "aid" ecosystem, the biggest beneficiaries were likely not the African women being "taught to fish," but rather the senior officials in London offices writing reports and auditing projects—and people like us, staying in $300 hotels on travel budgets. Data confirmed this: up to 70% of funding was consumed by "proving how the money was spent"—generating audit and impact reports.
That’s when I began seeing blockchain, crypto—technologies driving the fourth revolution, powered by blockchain and artificial intelligence—as tools capable of transforming money, transforming Africa, transforming the lives of the world’s poorest.
True Decentralization, in a Kampala Market
A few years ago, the son of Uganda’s Prime Minister founded a crypto initiative. A group of Anglo-American educated “political heirs” and tech enthusiasts came together to build simple crypto-based tools—one of which enabled peer-to-peer crypto transfers on basic phones without any 3G connectivity. Africans understand Africans best. Most locals use non-smartphones limited to calls and texts. Since many lack bank accounts and avoid long trips to find Western Union agents or one of the few banks for remittances, their solution is direct: using USSD-based mobile systems, they send money via text messages. Their phone number becomes their "wallet" or account, and airtime balance serves as their balance.
I personally experienced the seamless "onboarding, KYC, transfer" process through a friend in this group: bought a $50 phone at a telecom outlet next to a market in Kampala, waited in line, and underwent a KYC process the staff had performed thousands of times—completed in just three minutes. They helped me top up airtime with cash. Across villages, numerous fixed and mobile official/unofficial kiosks ("little booths") operate. When you want to "withdraw cash," you message the kiosk operator—"village representative"—who sends you physical currency upon receiving your crypto transfer. "Recharging" works in reverse. The experience was smooth, entirely peer-to-peer, no third party involved, zero trust required. This product and flow aren't limited to cities—they’ve deeply penetrated rural areas.
Later, I joined Binance. In my first year, answering CZ’s call for "mass adoption," I helped deploy a fully blockchain- and crypto-native network across Africa, starting with simple charity projects. Thus, Binance Charity was born—the world’s first truly "transparent" peer-to-peer donation platform. Thanks to blockchain, every internet observer could track how crypto donations reached villagers’ wallets in Uganda directly, bypassing all intermediaries. Villagers then used crypto to buy potatoes and cabbage from farmers who accepted crypto—no fiat involved. When farmers needed local currency, they periodically exchanged crypto via local exchanges or OTC desks.
Later, we issued the world’s first (and possibly still only) "value-stablecoin" on Binance Smart Chain (now BNB Chain): the Pink Care Token. Unlike other stablecoins pegged to fiat currencies, the Pink Care Token was tied to real-world value—one token equaled the cost of a year’s supply of sanitary pads for one girl in Uganda. The project emerged after conversations during food distributions revealed widespread "menstrual shame" among local women. Due to lack of sex education and the high cost of sanitary products, many resorted to leaves and grass, leading to severe gynecological issues. Girls often married and gave birth as early as 14, with early pregnancies worsening health risks—many dying from infections during childbirth. Girls receiving the token could "redeem" a full year’s supply from our eco-friendly sanitary pad partners.
What moves me most is that during the depths of a brutal bear market—when the industry was engulfed in self-criticism and doubt—the Pink Care Token received generous donations and active support from nearly all true leaders in the crypto space. The concept of a value-backed stablecoin, combined with full transparency, efficiency, and elimination of intermediaries made possible by blockchain, became a small yet powerful validation of crypto’s social value. Crypto’s fundamental function as a medium of exchange was demonstrated in the simplest, most human way.
Whenever I feel lost in increasingly complex business models and abstract narratives, or when the industry faces another crisis, I think back to that vibrant vegetable market in Uganda. I’m reminded how clean, pure, and simple crypto applications can be—how good actions yield real returns. Those pioneering farmers in Kampala who accepted payments in crypto? They initially received just 6 dollars’ worth of BNB. Perhaps they were the ones who truly believed in crypto all along.
PayFi or FiFi?
Back in bustling Singapore, PayFi emerged as a hot topic at this year’s 2049 conference. The new narrative of Payment + Finance has reignited hope for desperate capital and struggling projects. The exact name doesn’t matter much—especially since one prominent figure joked that PayFi might as well be called FiFi, because payment *is* finance. What’s truly meaningful is that, after a long detour, we’re finally returning to crypto’s foundational utility beyond speculation and investment: payment.
Like the redistribution of value and wealth, all things evolve according to fundamental historical patterns. Whether a product, a sector, or an entire industry, only those delivering genuine positive social value endure. Returning to this essence makes our faith more resilient and less fragile.
I truly hope that after all these years of twists and turns, we can once again see those girls buying sanitary pads with stablecoins, and farmers accepting BNB as payment—because maybe crypto’s original purpose was never that complicated to begin with.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
@Athenaweb33
