Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey has ended his tour of Africa with a pledge to move to the continent for several months in 2020. On leaving Africa, he tweeted:
Jack Dorsey and former Alibaba chairman Jack Ma were in Ethiopia this week as the country’s aggressive digitization drive to create jobs, attracts global interest. The Africa tour which started on November 8, included stops in Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa.
In Nigeria, he met with entrepreneurs and young artists, as well as Twitter board member, economist and former managing director of the World Bank, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. He met with bitcoin entrepreneurs in Ghana. Dorsey is a vocal advocate of Bitcoin and has said he will integrate it into Twitter and Square, his other venture. He recently backed ConList, a cryptocurrency startup.
Many including Jack believe Africa will shape the future of Bitcoin although it has been slow in embracing it. Coingeek writes ” The African continent was slow in embracing cryptocurrencies. While the Western world and Asia took to crypto years ago as the prices took off, Africa was on the sidelines. However, the region got into crypto mostly after the price hype, at a time when the emphasis was mostly on utility. This has shaped the African crypto narrative, with most people looking at crypto to solve their day-to-day issues, not for holding and price speculation. This is what the future of crypto will be; utility over-speculation, and Jack knows this.”
However, Crytocurrency is not new in Africa. “Africa is not “getting big into” bitcoin—they have been using bitcoin for years and taught us everything we know about what bitcoin’s true use cases are,” Ray Youssef, CEO of peer-to-peer bitcoin marketplace Paxful, told Decrypt. “Africans have had peer-to-peer financial systems in place for thousands of years. In Nigeria, they call them ‘Esusu’, Kenya has ‘Chama’, while South Africa has ‘Stokvel’.”
Many are speculating on where Jack Dorsey will be based in Africa and what his big initiative in Africa will be. Many more hope it will be in cooperation with Africa startup and will serve the development of Africa.
