Economics
Africa is a market of over 1.2 billion consumers, with fast growing developing economies and hundreds of millions of unbanked people. As such, the continent offers plenty of opportunities for new crypto ventures and Binance is eager to tap this market.
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Binance Reaches Out to Africa
Benjamin Rameau, Director at Binance Labs , has published on Friday an explanation about the commitment by the company to invest in Africa and called on supporters to help connect them to African projects with excellent founders. He proclaimed: “We have no headquarters, no office and no geographical boundaries. We are just as African as we are Asian or European. The blockchain revolution will be a global one and Binance Labs will consider investments in all non-sanctioned countries. In Africa, we feel very much at home and we want to deploy our capital there.”
The company is turning to Africa not out of charity, or even a need to diversify its portfolio globally, but out of a pure profit motive. It sees investing in the continent as the ultimate contrarian play of our times, as Rameau explained: “Come 2018, the consensus view holds that the 21st century belongs to Asia; yet we believe that it will be Africa’s turn to surprise. Investing today in Africa could be the best trade of the century.”
An African Future
A multitude of factors support the prediction that the continent will be the greatest investment opportunity of our time. For example, in an era when many developed economies are suffering from an aging population and shrinking labor pools, Africa enjoys a large and growing young populace. Additionally, there are multiple reasons that crypto projects are uniquely suited to take part in these developments. Chief among these is that while an entrenched banking industry in rich countries can try to block new technologies which may endanger its profits, many parts of Africa are without such an impediment and can thus leapfrog directly into the age of crypto-based financial infrastructure.
Many countries in Africa also have very competitive wages and an underused labor pool that are very appealing for expense-sensitive crowdsourcing projects. As Rameau noted: “If screening through scams on Twitter and registering fake accounts pays $3/hour, developed market contributors will face high opportunity costs and be pushed out of the labor pool, but this rate could be a handsome reward for someone working out of Somalia.”
How should leading cryptocurrency companies help advance new African projects? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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