Charles Hoskinson, Cardano inventor, has been outspoken regarding the enormous opportunities offered by the African continent for the implementation of blockchain technology. He has time and again stated that his firm IOG (previously IOHK) has several ventures for Africa in the channel.
Considering the verity that the ventures are too large as disclosed in an interview by John O’Connor, Director of African Operations at IOG, even longstanding members of the Cardano community were taken by a pleasant surprise.
The announcement made by O’Connor certainly guarantees blockchain adoption in a big way in Africa. O’Connor is confident that the IOG’s final phase in a huge government deal will draw millions of people to the Cardano blockchain:
“Unfortunately, I can’t show as much as I like. What I can say is that we are at the final stages of a large government contract which would have multimillion users being onboarded onto the platform for a real world blockchain implementation. This is a sort of 10x improvement in real world terms what currently being done is in this area. But obviously this is also a government process as well. So getting the contracts done, done getting everything agreed, is a very lengthy process. But that’s not just in Ethiopia.”
O’Connor trusts that by the end of February, all the formalities will be finished so that an official statement can be made while conducting routine monthly IOHK update show with prominent people in the country.
The core of the venture is Atala PRISM, a decentralized identity system using Cardano blockchain. The project will permit people to have control over their private data and engage with institutions in an easy, private and safe manner. The venture will transform into the biggest “real word use case” for the budding blockchain. O’Connor has stated:
“I think that this deployment will actually be the largest blockchain deployment done anywhere, period. I am not including speculative asset trading […] but an actual real world deployment in the world.”
A second venture in Tanzania is also on the verge of getting completed. The venture will center on offering internet access to people who cannot afford it. IOHK will provide every telecom client with a digital identity and also offer ADA as a mode of payment. As Connor mentioned, IOG intends to create “some serious movement into the financial inclusion” through this project.
“So now that we have 100.000 to 200.000 telco subscribers in Tanzania, now let’s plug in the $12 billion ADA market and allow people to start making loans directly to the people and generate real economic value.”
However, the two ventures in Tanzania and Ethiopia is just a start. As disclosed by O’Connor, IOG has three more countries on the radar: Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria. In case of South Africa, he stated that it is an “interesting project” encompassing insurance. All ventures are anticipated to benefit several million people, implying that IOG will draw 100 million users in the initial stage.
We have quite reasonable plans to on board 100 million users on this identity platform within the next year or two. This might seem ambitious, but actually the scale of the African continent means that it’s quite realistic.
After hosting smart contracts and native assets on Cardano mainnet, with the total roll out of Goguen, O’Connor anticipates a huge push with respect to advancements from the community. Furthermore, after completing projects on five countries, 14 more African countries are anticipated to follow suit:
That should be just the beginning. After these five focus countries, we got plans for another 15 countries which we will be working on after we delivered on these first five.
