A crypto exchange that operates only in Africa, Yellow Card, has become one of the first to cross one million users in the continent.
“Reaching the one million goal is fantastic,” said John Colson, the Chief Marketing Officer at Yellow Card, further adding:
“This showed us that we are on the right track, people value what we are building, and it’s solving a need.”
The exchange was founded in 2019, raising $15 million last year from entities like Square, Coinbase Ventures and Blockchain.com.
They now operate in 16 African countries, including Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and even Rwanda, among others.
“We’ve advanced key efforts to localise content and engage with customers at events and activations to essentially meet them where they are,” says Peter Mureu, Marketing Director at Yellow Card, adding:
“We have allowed our customers to use their local currency to buy and sell crypto.”
The exchange began with the intention of reducing international transfer fees, with Colson stating they are now seeing the impact cryptos can have in Africa “from job creation to breaking down borders.”
“We are only getting started,” says Mureu, as the bear market might as well be non-existent for this exchange which has gone from 150,000 customers last year and $160 million in trading volumes in 2020, to one million customers.
They thus call themselves the fastest growing crypto exchange in the fast growing continent with an overall GDP of $2.7 trillion.
Just Nigeria and South Africa account for more than 1/3rd of it at about half a trillion each, with both countries seeing an increase in crypto adoption.
For South Africa, it began in 2017-18, while Nigeria joined during the 2020 wave as awareness spread.
“We will continue to see innovative ways crypto is used to solve everyday problems,” Colson says, with such problems ranging in Africa from strict and sometime nonsensical capital controls, to a shortage of dollars in nations with high inflation.
Bitcoin can address both as the currency continues to transition to a global lubricator of trade and commerce.
Source: https://www.trustnodes.com/2022/09/12/african-crypto-exchange-crosses-one-million-users