Africa's Crypto Revolution: Leapfrogging into the Future | Zuzalu #4

In this episode, we explore the frontier of crypto in Africa and the immense potential for both the continent and the crypto industry. Africa has a unique ability to leapfrog technologies, just as it skipped landlines and embraced cell phones. The dialogue revolves around crypto adoption in Africa and a network state project called Afropolitan, which aims to build an Afro-centric digital nation. Yoseph Ayele discusses the opportunities that Web3 can provide in terms of financial stability, access, identity services, and credit facilities for Africa. He believes that Africa will be the first to reach a billion Web3 users. Eche Emole shares insights on Afropolitan, highlighting the project's focus on crypto, network states, and the creation of Afro-centric hubs worldwide. Both guests express unwavering optimism and articulate the transformative power of these developments. This engaging and enjoyable discussion sheds light on Africa's trajectory in the crypto landscape and the potential for uplifting individuals and communities. ------ 🚀Join Ryan & David at Permissionless II in September. https://bankless.cc/GoToPermissionless ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⁠ 👾POLYGON | VALUE LAYER OF THE INTERNET https://polygon.technology/roadmap 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku ---- Timestamps 0:00 Intro 1:20 Goosebumps 5:15 YOSEPH AYELE 7:55 Why Africa Needs Crypto 15:15 Bringing Infrastructure 18:40 Stablecoins and Trust 22:20 Global Crypto Culture 28:00 Providing Essential Services 32:30 Adoption in Africa 37:00 Leapfrogging Technology 42:00 Becoming Borderless 47:45 Raising a Fund 53:00 ECHE EMOLE 55:00 Afropolitan 1:00:00 Africa is Primed 1:09:15 The Afropolitan Roadmap 1:15:45 Redrawing the Maps 1:19:30 Diaspora 1:28:45 The Team 1:33:05 Hope for Crypto ------ Resources Yoseph Ayele https://twitter.com/yosephayele?s=20 Afropolitan https://twitter.com/afropolitan?s=20 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04David Hoffman?

  Bienvenidos a Bankless, donde exploramos el frontón de dinero y finanzas de Internet. Y hoy, en este episodio de nuestra serie Zuzalu, estamos explorando algunos nuevos frontones, nuevos frontones y nuevas tecnologías, todos los cuales están dispuestos a revolucionar completamente el mundo y cambiar todo sobre el sistema operativo que la sociedad en este momento está ejecutando. Hablando de sistemas operativos que están a punto de cambiar, que guían a la sociedad, Bankless Nation, hoy estamos explorando el frontón de la criptografía en África, tal vez el primer continente que está dispuesto a saltarse el paso hacia un nuevo sistema operativo que llamamos Web 3, que llamamos criptografía. ¿Qué puede hacer la criptografía para África? ¿Qué puede hacer África para la criptografía? La conversación sobre la criptografía en África es extremadamente rica

• 0:46David Hoffman?

  y debería hacer que cualquiera que esté buscando la adopción real, la utilidad real, esté muy emocionado. Los países en desarrollo tienen la capacidad de saltarse la tecnología. Por ejemplo, las redes de terreno nunca llegaron a África. Todo el continente simplemente saltó a los teléfonos celulares. Y lo mismo está sucediendo en la criptografía. Los bancos nunca ganan para servir a los árabes. Pero sin embargo, los árabes están encontrando utilidad y acceso utilizando las tecnologías Bankless, utilizando Ethereum. Hay dos conversaciones aquí en este episodio. Una es sobre la adopción de la criptografía en África y por qué África es un continente tan preparado para aceptar y adoptar protocolos de criptografía. Y luego otra sobre un proyecto de estado de redes africano, que va profundamente en las razones por las que hay un estado de redes en primer lugar

• 1:31David Hoffman?

  y vinculándolo con los profundos vínculos culturales que unen a todos los árabes, no importa dónde viven en el mundo mayor. Ambas de estas conversaciones me dieron ganas de emoción, simplemente por la emoción y satisfacción de la adopción de protocolos de criptografía en la forma en que siempre se suponía que se debía ser, para levantar a los individuos y coordinar a las comunidades. We're first going to hear from Yoseph Ayele, who's working on building a borderless Africa using Web3, of course. He started a venture fund to invest in African Web3 development and adoption, because he thinks, and also gives the arguments for, why Web3 will see its first billion users out of Africa. The needs that Africa has as a whole are things that Web3 provides: financial stability and access, of course,

• 2:14David Hoffman?

  but also identity services and credit facilities. Yoseph does a great job painting this picture of Africa's trajectory to leapfrog its way to becoming a dominant player in the Web3 landscape. After Yoseph, we have Eche Emole, one of the founders of AfroPolitan, a very ambitious network state project, looking to build an Afro-centric digital nation. This conversation spans both crypto and network states, and adds its own spin onto the Balogian idea of a network state, one with AfroPolitan hubs that exist wherever the African diaspora finds itself. Both of these guests are amazingly articulate and relentlessly optimistic, two things that makes my job so fun and enjoyable as a conversation moderator. And these were probably two of my favorite episodes that I recorded at Zuzalu,

• 2:58David Hoffman?

  so that's why I'm sure that you're going to enjoy it as well. So let's get right into this conversation of crypto in Africa. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Kraken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry. The place I use to check the charts and the crypto prices, even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Kraken Pro, you'll have access to advanced charting tools, real-time market data, and lightning-fast trade execution, all inside their spiffy new modular interface. Kraken's new customizable modular layout lets you tailor your trading experience to suit your needs. Pick and choose your favorite modules and place them anywhere you want in your screen. With Kraken Pro, you have that power. Whether you are a seasoned pro or just starting out, join thousands of traders who trust Kraken Pro for their crypto trading needs. Visit pro.kraken.com to get started today.

• 3:44David Hoffman?

  You know Uniswap, it's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over 1.4 trillion dollars in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on Bankless. It's Uniswap, but Uniswap is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswap Mobile Wallet for iOS, the newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go. With a Uniswap Wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet, buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card, with extremely low fiat on-ramp fees, and you can seamlessly swap on mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. On the Uniswap Mobile Wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore Web3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price charts, or use Wallet Connect to connect to any Web3 application. So you can now go directly to DeFi with the Uniswap Mobile

• 4:28David Hoffman?

  Wallet. Safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in DeFi. Download the Uniswap Wallet today on iOS. There's a link in the show notes. Bankless Nation, I'm here with Yoseph Ayala. Yeah?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:39David Hoffman?

  Beautiful.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  You got it.

• 4:40David Hoffman?

  And we're going to talk about crypto in Africa and why there's such a large opportunity for the Web3 industry, the crypto industry in Africa. Yoseph, welcome to Bankless.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 4:49David Hoffman?

  First off, how has your Zuzalu experience been?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  It's been amazing. Amazing humans, great connections. I thought I came here to do work, but then spent a lot of time just building really good relationships and having a good time.

• 5:01David Hoffman?

  What did you come to Zuzalu to do?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  To meet folks who are interested in the African continent. Came here for EdCon as well, so I gave a talk there, shared my thesis on the continent, and also to be part of some of the network state discussions and really understand where people are thinking about.

• 5:20David Hoffman?

  You said the word thesis, which means I'm interested. You have a thesis on a continent.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:25David Hoffman?

  What does it mean to have a thesis on a continent?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Just a framework and a way for the rest of the world to connect with the African continent. I feel like there's a lot of crypto activities happening in the African ecosystems, but most of the Ethereum community, as well as just the broader crypto communities, just don't understand what's happening there. Many people haven't traveled there. A lot of African builders don't get to come to places like this, so being a bridge and helping provide a framework.

• 5:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's, I'm assuming, just a very large divide between Africa crypto and the rest of the crypto industry.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:59David Hoffman?

  I think there's also a very large divide between east and west in crypto.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:03David Hoffman?

  But even that, that divide co-mingles a lot.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:07David Hoffman?

  Like, the Chinese, which is part of crypto, which is very large.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:10David Hoffman?

  Does mingle a lot. There's been a large Chinese cohort of people here, as Uzaloo. Would you say, like, the African side of crypto is even more cut off between east and west?

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Way more cut off.

• 6:20David Hoffman?

  Way more cut off.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Way more cut off, because the biggest, like, barrier for a lot of African builders is that it's hard for them to travel to where global crypto communities are and where main events are. So, like, the number one issue is just visas. The West and many eastern countries just don't give Africans visas. I was organizing a whole side event around Africa at DEF CON in Colombia, and basically everyone who was supposed to come participated in it couldn't make it because they couldn't get a visa to Colombia, or couldn't get a visa to transit to the US. So that's just one of the biggest barriers that creates the physical divide.

• 6:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so the cross-pollination of just, it just doesn't happen.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 6:59David Hoffman?

  So, I think there's gonna be two parts to this conversation. It's what can crypto do for Africa? And then, maybe, we'll talk about what Africa can do for crypto.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:07David Hoffman?

  And we'll talk about the cross-pollination here.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 7:09David Hoffman?

  But let's start with that. Let's start with, why does Africa need crypto so much? Like, why is Africa primed to be a crypto continent?

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Because centralized entities have failed us. That's the main point. Like, a lot, like, centralized governments, centralized banks, institutions are either not effective or nonexistent. So that's where I think decentralization makes the most sense, is it acts as the layer of trust on which so many economic, social, political, and financial institutions can be built on. And when you go to places where there's, you know, some areas are way more developed, but a whole lot of areas are just so not developed so far, I think the core infrastructures of crypto from money, and payments, and trust, and coordination, all those things make so much more sense there.

• 7:59David Hoffman?

  Would you say that another way of saying that is institutions have not just provided structure in Africa? And that's what you mean by like centralization is there's there's not trusted centralized places of organization?

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:12David Hoffman?

  That has provided like social scaffolding for the African continent?

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Let me give you just a few examples. So there are 14 African countries that were colonized by France. When the French were kind of leaving in the 1960s, they instituted this currency called the CFA. It stands for Colonies of Afri- French Colonies of Africa. And that's pegged to you go pegged to the franc and now pegged to the euro. What that means is 50% of all the income those countries get goes to the French treasury directly. So you don't own your money. It goes to the French treasury.

• 8:45David Hoffman?

  Is it is it fair to say that that was a tool of like maintaining colonization?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 8:51David Hoffman?

  Even though so like France like wanted to get out of the continent physically, but they were like, we'll leave our currency and maintain

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:57David Hoffman?

  Maintain value extraction that way.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Correct. And also, they don't like the the French government created some boundaries of your interest rates and how much money you can print and all of that. So those governments, you can say that they don't control their own currency, their own monetary policy. So here in the Western world, we talk about sovereignty from governments. In those countries, the governments don't have sovereignty over their own states and their own monetary policy. So that's one use case where, you know, for example, the Central African Republic recently made Bitcoin a legal tender. That's not because they're Bitcoin maxis or whatever. It's just it's out of desperation. They have no control over their own monetary policy. Therefore, it's easier to say, hey, why don't we just jump into a whole new monetary policy

• 9:43Speaker 01

  that's inherently global?

• 9:44David Hoffman?

  Right, so the idea is like, okay, if we're going to use somebody else's money, perhaps we should use one that is based on the internet and not benefiting some particular power elsewhere. And let's just use the the one that's found on the internet. Well, you will you will use Bitcoin because its monetary policy is going to be better than the French monetary policy.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 10:02David Hoffman?

  And so like it's it's maybe they they still don't, the African countries don't have control over the monetary policy, but at least it's not the French. It's Bitcoin and Bitcoin is has all the properties of Bitcoin that we enjoy.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Now, that's not to say that that's the ultimate goal and answer. I think some level of sovereignty is amazing, right? But it's kind of an example of where some of those countries, it's just fourteen countries out of fifty-four, are basically struggling to get sovereignty over themselves. Another sort of macro example is that there are fifty-four African countries. Only forty countries print their own money in their own countries. So they're outsourced out to European printing press and they pay six percent of the total money supply as printing fees and transportation costs. So just imagine a ship.

• 10:50David Hoffman?

  Who charges that?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  There are three companies in Europe, in France, in the UK and Germany, that basically act as the printing press for the fiat.

• 11:00David Hoffman?

  They charge a service for access to the printing press?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 11:04David Hoffman?

  So they get inflation and they get to charge fees?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:09David Hoffman?

  I can see why there's demand for something else.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And even at a very practical, very, this is like examples at a macro level, just at a human level, like the internet has been a big game changer for many people. When I was growing up in Ethiopia, the internet opened the world to me. I learned most of my English online. It, you know, opened up a lot of access to information and connectivity, which is amazing. But the internet is still very gated to Africans. That was gated, that was many years ago and still get it. Because if you don't have a means to transact and pay and receive money, then you cannot access the best of the internet. If you cannot set up a PayPal account and use that to receive money for the work that you do, then how can you say you're actually accessing the best of the internet?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  So even remote workers in many African countries are using crypto as a means to get paid for the work that they do.

• 12:02David Hoffman?

  So what you're saying is that the internet is a massively democratizing force that has benefited the world as a whole, including Africa. But then there's this more that as the internet matured, it evolved and adapted and became what you're calling permissioned, as in like parts of the internet are paywalled by. Whatever you would do, like subscribe, you subscribe to bank, you gotta use a credit card. We do accept crypto, but also you can also subscribe anything that you would subscribe, pay for on Amazon or pay for any sort of credit card.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:30David Hoffman?

  You're saying that that was not available to most of Africa because most of Africans can't, they're not connected on the payment rails.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  And today is still the case.

• 12:37David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  So you might even have the level of connectivity, but for example, in Nigeria, banks have a limit of $20 a month that you can spend internationally with your bank card. So even though you have the connectivity, the lack of foreign currency creates these really low ceilings for people to actually participate online and in the digital world.

• 13:00David Hoffman?

  So as much as, as great as the internet is, it simply just means less for Africa.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  And that's because, again, it goes back to centralized institutions. Even in tech, you know, centralized technology institutions are still gated. And some of it is just structural, right? So how those countries' economies are structured or the relationship between that economy and global economies. We pay five to 10 billion dollars a year on SWIFT fees alone.

• 13:25David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  That's, that's a massive cost. If I'm trying to send you money from one country to the next country, the money goes through Europe, the US, blah, blah, takes, makes a big route around the world and comes next door. And then I pay like around 10% of what I'm sending you and just fees.

• 13:45David Hoffman?

  Routing fees?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Routing fees to get it all around. So that's so inefficient. It's blocking any type of development and progress when you're basically relying on global institutions that are not designed for your needs.

• 13:59David Hoffman?

  Interesting. So a bank transfer in Africa that goes to a different African country, routed through like Europe banking rails.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:06David Hoffman?

  And a bunch of middlemen up there, charge a bunch of fees, and then down to a different African country that's very, very proximate to the originator, but it just goes through Europe first.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  And most transactions are low in numbers. So the percentage is-

• 14:19David Hoffman?

  High volume, low in numbers.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  High in volumes, high in low in numbers. So the percentage that you pay for the transaction cost-

• 14:25David Hoffman?

  It's a flat fee?

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so high as a result of it.

• 14:28David Hoffman?

  Huh. Okay, so these are all money and fee and banking system use cases?

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:34David Hoffman?

  Which makes total sense to me. Does it, does it end there?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  No.

• 14:38David Hoffman?

  Or where, where does this go next?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  So Africa is 1.4 billion people. 500 million don't even have any form of ID. So that's a big friction point to participate in anything in the world. So that trust, identity, reputation, those are really critical areas where I believe blockchain technologies can have a real impact. And that's actually when I talk to different African governments, those are areas they're really interested in. How do we create shared consensus-based truth? What is true? Who owns this land? Who owns that land? Knowing, like, having a verifiable form of property rights, that's one of the biggest areas where you go to, truth is consensus-based, then we're always in negotiation of what

• 15:25Speaker 01

  truth is. That creates a lot of friction to actually build, you know, really sophisticated economies on top of those.

• 15:33David Hoffman?

  I would imagine some of these problems are symbiotic with each other. It's weird to call problems symbiotic, but like, in the negative direction. As in, like, perhaps it's harder to produce a financial system and banking rails in Africa because there's no identity.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:47David Hoffman?

  And then also, it's harder to produce identity when, like, such a core part of identity is like your bank account and your nation-state ID. And you're saying, like, there's neither in Africa.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Well, I wouldn't say there's nothing exists.

• 15:59David Hoffman?

  There's less.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  It's just there's a lot less of it. It's not sophisticated, it's not fully developed, right? So, for example, when you look at payments, some African countries have way more advanced payment systems than the US. You go to Kenya, for example, we have M-Pesa there, which is a mobile money company. It works so well everywhere, including remote villages, doesn't need internet. When you have internet, it can get sophisticated. Basically, your phone number is your bank account, it's your means of paying salaries or receiving income, it's your KYC. It works so well, you know, in that country. It's heavily centralized, but it's functional. But when you're trying to do business cross borders, then that's where it becomes challenging.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  When you're trying to get any form of credit, then that's where you reach a ceiling, because those layers of trust and reputation and even credit scoring are not as effective, are not as efficient. So you see some things that are way more developed, but a whole lot of things that are not as developed.

• 17:02David Hoffman?

  Okay, so I have so I have so many more questions, but but I first want to make sure that does it end there? Or so we have banking and money.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:10David Hoffman?

  We have identity.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:11David Hoffman?

  The other for the use cases that that we need to talk about about like what's okay. Oh, boy, it keeps on going.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, this this. So the other area is actually the art creative spaces. So there's like African art and African culture is all over the world. You see it in music, you see it in art, you see it in food. You know, the world is consuming African creatives. But very little value is captured by the people who are creating that. Right? So I'm seeing so many artists getting into the NFT world. And even experimenting with that medium that wouldn't be possible in traditional art of just painting something, you know, so that's one that's one movement that's happening.

• 17:52David Hoffman?

  Okay, so I I think the the picture that you're painting is that there are there are no good monies. There are a few good monies in Africa.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:00David Hoffman?

  And the crypto monies that we've invented, as troublesome and chaotic as they are, still present very valid options for for Africans.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:07David Hoffman?

  Uh, not only that, but stable coins, I'm sure, are very, very relevant.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  They're massive.

• 18:11David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  It's easier to access stable coins in so many countries than accessing fiat dollars, especially US dollar stable coins.

• 18:18David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  To give you an example, where I come from Ethiopia, there's the bank rate and then this unofficial rate.

• 18:23David Hoffman?

  Of course, yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  There's a hundred percent. There's a hundred percent premium, hundred percent premium on the bank rate, twice. So.

• 18:30David Hoffman?

  Called the corruption rate?

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Or the free market rate.

• 18:34David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  That's that's what I call it. So there's the controlled bank rate.

• 18:37David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  And that's because and there's a lot more money being transacted outside of the bank rate than, you know, outside of it than than within the system.

• 18:46David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Right? That's because, you know, there's so many layers, it's hard to kind of go through every aspect of it, but it's systemic. And I don't know if there's a pathway for the governments to find a way out of that.

• 18:58David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Right, so basically, people are transacting outside of that system. If I'm running a small shop and I need to buy inventory, let's say I'm selling shirts and I need to import a whole lot of shirts from India. How do I pay the thousand dollars to actually order that? This is hard to go through the, you know, the existing process. Yeah, I might try to use MoneyGram or Western Union.

• 19:22David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  But I'm going to pay ridiculous fees, long processes and all of that. I might as well just buy US dollar stablecoins, send it to person over there, instant settlement, and then I get my item shipped over to me. That's how a lot of people are using it.

• 19:37David Hoffman?

  Right, okay, so the money conversation is a double whammy because it's not, it's not just a better money or stronger money alternatives. It's also the lower fees.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:46David Hoffman?

  Right, and so like that, that makes it a very competitive banking system.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  And access.

• 19:50David Hoffman?

  And access, yes.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Global access.

• 19:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Global integration.

• 19:52David Hoffman?

  Permissionless access, right?

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Permissionless access, yes.

• 19:55David Hoffman?

  And then, and then there's, I'm sure, as soon as you have like established bank account on Ethereum with your wallet and your money, then like you can start engaging in a more sophisticated financial tools that we call DeFi.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:08David Hoffman?

  I'm sure that is a much more powerful set of financial tools than what the Africans can discover locally.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:13David Hoffman?

  And that's just a money and finance thing.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:15David Hoffman?

  That is like, that's where so much demand for Web3 utility products and services comes from. And then also identity on top of that as well. Yes, interest.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  The broad area of trust.

• 20:26David Hoffman?

  Trust.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  So basically, wherever you need trust, here, there's so many things that we take for granted, right? Like you get into a hotel room, or you buy a piece of land, or you order something online. You know something is going to be delivered. You kind of like assume that's already going to happen, right? In a place where there's not a lot of trust infrastructures, you're always asking. Is what the person said actually gonna come true?

• 20:53David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  If I have this thing, is it actually mine? Right, so all the different things of trust that you kind of take for granted, they're either nonexistent or are very weak in many African countries.

• 21:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, if any Bankless listeners just had the term settlement assurances come into their head, points for you. Settlement assurances like core part of like what we believe is makes crypto so powerful. Is the thing that you think is yours actually yours? That's like the beautiful thing about crypto is extremely high settlement assurances.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:22David Hoffman?

  And so it sounds like not just like money and settlement assurances are is benefit for Africa, but just like identity as like this is also your identity too. And other people, not just yourself, but other people can also rely on that, which is important infrastructure. I want to ask about just like the culture of users who use these tools in the the United States and the privileged land where we have like general abundance. Like we have the crypto is like a casino for us.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:51David Hoffman?

  It's like sadly, I mean, it is one of these things that makes these things powerful and you proves all the use case, but it's that we have the luxury of using this as a casino. And I'm wondering, what is the the culture or the disposition of African users who use crypto not as a casino, but because they actually really need it and it is legitimately a better tool? Like, how would you describe just like the how people engage with these things down there?

• 22:15Speaker 01

  So, it's our reality is the casino of steel exists. It's everywhere. It's like you see a lot of that in Africa as well. Now we're in a bear market, which is actually good because there's not a ton of like blind speculation that's happening. But the other side, the real use cases, one is US dollar stablecoins. So that's something that a lot of people use for cross-border payments, for inflation and currency devaluation hedging.

• 22:46David Hoffman?

  I would assume inflation across Africa is terrible.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  It's very high, yeah. And the other side is also, I'm hearing of fintechs, traditional fintech startups, who are actually becoming the key banking infrastructures in the continent. So you're finding startups providing better financial services than banks do, but that's a separate conversation. They're using crypto at the back end. They won't admit it, but they're using crypto at the back end.

• 23:12David Hoffman?

  Why won't they admit it?

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Because it creates a lot of

• 23:15David Hoffman?

  Crypto.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Crypto, yeah, exactly. Like, you don't want a lot of attention. But when I talk to a number of exchanges, they're telling me that the biggest clients are fintechs, not retail users, which is fascinating. So they're using it for the treasury management. Again, if you cannot access US dollars and the currency that you're holding is being devalued over time, you want to put it in other asset classes. And crypto stablecoins make a lot of sense as a treasury management. It's just a smart thing to do. And it's more available to you in a permissionless way than knocking on the doors of a bank.

• 23:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah. The one thing that makes me just so happy and optimistic about this story is that individual Africans are choosing to use crypto tools by their own merits and adopting them and, you know, becoming bankless, getting all their bank accounts. But I actually think that that part of the story is also very cool and optimistic, too. Fintechs adopting crypto for the same reasons, because it also provides them as businesses better foundations to provide financial services. So even if the individual African is not adopting crypto tools, the fintech layer of Africa is also improving because of crypto to do the rest of the mile.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And I expect to see a lot more of that. Another area that I'm seeing some action in and I'm super excited about is the credit space. Now, for you and I and many people here, you know, if you've got salary or whatever, it's easy for you to access some level of credit. Even if you have crypto, you can borrow money from AVE or Compound or whatever, right? But if you're just like, you know, a small business, and most of African companies are small businesses, and you don't have a real asset that you can use as collateral, banks won't lend to you. Banks, so here's a sad reality. Banks lend to bankers.

• 24:56David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Because it's bankers that have stable jobs that bankers think is solid, which is kind of weird and twisted, right?

• 25:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  So if you're, if you don't have something that's valuable that you can collateralize, then you go to uncollateralized borrowing.

• 25:10David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Do you know how much money you pay? What's, have a guess. Have a guess of what, how much interest are on average?

• 25:16David Hoffman?

  On a year?

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:18David Hoffman?

  Higher than 20%.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Keep going.

• 25:23David Hoffman?

  Forty percent?

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Okay, so in Kenya and Nigeria, for example, a bunch of fintechs, they are charging 10 to 30% a month.

• 25:33David Hoffman?

  A month?

• 25:34Speaker 01

  A month.

• 25:35David Hoffman?

  Oh, my numbers weren't a year.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  No.

• 25:37David Hoffman?

  10 to 30% a month because the risk is so high.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Well, yes.

• 25:42David Hoffman?

  Or perceived risk?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Perceived risk.

• 25:44David Hoffman?

  Not actual risk.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Some actual risk, some perceived risk. So some fintechs that I've talked to where the default rate is less than 10%, they're still charging super high because that's the current going market rate.

• 25:55David Hoffman?

  Is it just a... Why is that the going market rate? Is it just a very inefficient market with no liquidity? So...

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Liquidity is a big part of it, but the main issue is also just how to price risk.

• 26:06David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  How to price risk? And also, as a borrower, I can borrow X amount of money from you. And then if I cannot pay it, then I go to someone else, borrow that money and then pay you back. You get into these cycles.

• 26:17David Hoffman?

  So one person can cause 100 people's worth of destruction?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. So one interesting area of application that I'm seeing is there's some fintechs that are getting access of user data from mobile money, for example, which huge mass adoption there, and putting that on-chain and helping you build on-chain credit reporting, which helps you access on-chain liquidity. So it's actually onboarding a whole lot of people into crypto without them even realizing it and helping you build on-chain reputation and track record, which now multiple fintechs can use as a single source of truth, as opposed to each one kind of determining, you know, what your creditworthiness. Does that make sense?

• 27:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, 100%. And when I was previously talking about, oh yeah, so you have your Ethereum wallet or your Bitcoin wallet and you're using stable coins. And that's all great because you get better money and cheaper fees. And then I was talking about DeFi. It's like, oh, and also like DeFi is better. Like they can use Uniswap to swap tokens. Maybe they are, but I think maybe the bigger story is this credit access to credit is the bigger part of the finance world for Africa.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Let me put it this way. You talked about casinos earlier, right?

• 27:28David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  My view is that in the Western and many Eastern worlds, crypto is a nice to have. For the masses, it's just a nice to have.

• 27:36David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Because you already have so many things working for you, right? And that's where we hit.

• 27:41David Hoffman?

  Banks are a nuisance, not a critical problem.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. They exist. They provide services, governments provide services, even though we don't like them.

• 27:48David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  So for, for the like 10% or 15% of us, crypto is so much more valuable, is important. But it's hard to go above that unless you start adding real utility that is way better than the current system. Right? And the friction is low. And that's what we keep talking about in this world. When you go to many African countries, the, the existing apparatus, the, the current paradigm is just not working. Right? So that's where you can reach beyond the 5, 10, 15% of adoption rates of a whole population. You can go a lot higher than that when you start building applications that actually meet people's needs.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  So I think that's where the real opportunity is to me is in Africa, crypto can be a plan A, not a plan B, plan C, or plan F.

• 28:35David Hoffman?

  Not a backstop, it's the first choice.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  It's not a backup plan.

• 28:38David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  It is the plan.

• 28:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Well, so this thesis resonates, obviously. And I think anyone who's been in crypto long enough understands that like, this is why we do this. Like, this is why we're here. The opportunity is salient.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:50David Hoffman?

  So if the opportunity is so good, what's the, the venture landscape? What's the, the business landscape look like? I would imagine this would be interesting for more than a few VCs out there.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:59David Hoffman?

  What's that like?

• 28:59Speaker 01

  So in February, I led a trip with Vitalik and I for a month across four countries.

• 29:05David Hoffman?

  I am Iago Chi of the EF.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  I am Iago Chi, who runs the EF and a number of other Ethereum communities. And we just held very low key events to make a big splash. And we had about, you know, a few hundred founders and builders came, came up to various of those events.

• 29:21David Hoffman?

  Is Vitalik known as well known in Africa as he is in Argentina?

• 29:26Speaker 01

  I don't know about how well he's known in Argentina, but we went, we went to cafes and restaurants where, you know, people were trying to pay for our meals or come by and say hi, you know, like. You know, it was, it was, it was amazing, but also I think people are quite respectful. Sure. You know, so he wasn't getting overloaded, but people recognized him and that was a really interesting little miss test. So yeah, you know, he was well known and we had, we met a whole lot of builders who were basically at the stage of building the core infrastructures. I think that's still very much needed. So on-ramps and off-ramps, exchanges, credit tools, lending pools. Means for people to basically create advances on their salaries.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  But we met a whole lot of people trying to build new stablecoins. Either real world asset backed stablecoins or a basket of currencies. Because that's where the energy is at, that's where the demand is at. And there's so many other builders who we met around, you know, solving problems that you wouldn't think of coming from the West. So for example, like in Ethiopia, getting medicine that's high quality and known is really hard. And the one common thing that we have is, you know, if I'm visiting Ethiopia, I can tell you all my relatives are asking me, "Hey Youssef, can you buy A, B, C, D, put it in your bag and bring it along here?" It's so common and like every Ethiopian listening will totally get this. Yes. It's just something we all do. So there's a team that's actually building an application

• 30:55Speaker 01

  to like make that process a lot simpler. Like, "Hey, if I've got a kilo or two kilos in my bag, I can get stuff that people need." But then how do I trust? Right. Me, how do I trust what I'm buying is correct? So they're putting aspects of that on-chain to create a level of transparency. So these types of applications, like you wouldn't think about it coming in the Western world. But African builders are working on those. So you see some like really original thoughts and approaches. But the market is still early. So crypto adoption, in my view, like really started in 2018, 2019. So we're, we're just seeing one cycle on the continent. So it's still quite early.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  But you know, last year there was about 150 plus million dollars invested in crypto companies. Five billion dollars in just general tech startups. So still a long way to go in terms of the venture space being developed. Sure.

• 31:50David Hoffman?

  So I'm kind of afraid about how naive this question is, but you said like adoption happens and it started happening in 2018. Well, I would say like even inside of America or Europe, the adoption didn't happen until then too.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:02David Hoffman?

  And even throughout the bear market, we were still like looking for our use case. We were talking about, oh yeah, payments, we know that, but like we want more. But it really sounds like perhaps Africa is actually the continent that has adopted crypto the most?

• 32:15Speaker 01

  It is.

• 32:16David Hoffman?

  Already? It's already number one in crypto users.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  So Kenya and Nigeria make the top 20 crypto adoption index.

• 32:22David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Last year, we had about $100 billion of on-chain transaction of volume. It's small compared to the rest of the world, but it's significant for the local economies. You know, many countries is between 5 to 15% of those populations. But if you see in actual numbers, Africa is 1.4 billion people. To put that into context, it's all of Europe, all of the United States, and all of South America combined. So this is huge market, huge continent. Nigeria is just 250 million people. Ethiopia is 120 million people. So it's, we're talking about large populations. So in sheer numbers, it is high. The volume per user, it's low.

• 33:02David Hoffman?

  What's the average age of Africa?

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Median age is 19.

• 33:07David Hoffman?

  It's very young.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Median age is very 19.

• 33:10David Hoffman?

  Extremely young.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So it's the youngest part of the world.

• 33:13David Hoffman?

  What about like internet connectivity and access, access, like how hard is it to access crypto?

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. So about 590 million Africans have access to the internet, and that's growing 6% a year. So in urban areas.

• 33:26David Hoffman?

  6% a year?

• 33:27Speaker 01

  6%, it's increasing by 6% a year.

• 33:29David Hoffman?

  That has to be the highest rate in the world, right?

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's very high. I don't know, I haven't benchmarked it to the rest of the world, but that's really high.

• 33:35David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  And in urban areas where 40% of the population lives, internet access is very high. So one of the things I've spent the last two years doing is actually talking to normal people, students.

• 33:46David Hoffman?

  Crazy.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Recent graduates, universities. Well, that's where a lot of the people are at, right? Just to understand what's their dream, what's their vision for their lives, what are the things that they're learning about. Many young people are learning online more than what they're learning universities and in schools. Two thirds of all African developers are self-taught or learning on the job. So the internet is really opening up access to education and information. And you know, I've talked to a number of folks who graduated in architecture, for example, and thinking, well, what kind of career can I build in architecture in my country here unless I have an ability to go elsewhere? And then discover crypto and say, this is so interesting. How about I teach myself solidity?

• 34:29Speaker 01

  People teaching themselves solidity on YouTube, on their mobile phones. And then start working with DAOs and then earn your first few hundred dollars and you buy a laptop. And then you start contributing more to DAOs and you do it anonymously. No one cares. No one is to know who you are, where you're from. And people are making real income, real living as a full-time job, without meeting a single person in real life who's working in the space. And that's really fascinating, like how people are getting to this space on their own. Yes, there are a whole lot of people getting in to speculate, to buy shit tokens and all of that. But there are a whole lot of serious people getting to the space and seeing it as a real source of income

• 35:10Speaker 01

  and a real source of really maximizing the full potential as human beings without needing to leave home.

• 35:16David Hoffman?

  There's always this idea of leapfrogging technologies. I think it's typically used when Africa never really went desktop, it went just mobile first. And so it leapfrogged into that technology. I'm sure there's other examples that are low hanging fruit that I'm gonna forget in this moment.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  We've had multiple leapfrogs on the continent. We leapfrog landlines with mobile and it's so fast, right? I think the last data points that I checked, 93 out of every 100 user has set up a SIM card account on the continent. So that's like, that's huge, right? We leapfrog banks with mobile money. And now we're leapfrogging the centralized institutions with crypto.

• 35:56David Hoffman?

  And so it seems like, and that's, I think, the punchline in the combination of like, leapfrogging education tech with AI, sorry to bring AI into the conversation, but just like, I'm sure AI is a powerful democratizing force of education. It's happening at the same time that we are able to, Africa is able to leapfrog into better money and better financial services with crypto. And that part, like leapfrogging technology is always an exciting conversation in and of itself. But when you leapfrog money. Is big because money is so deeply rooted in the bottom of a social cultural stack.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:28David Hoffman?

  It is very important, critical social infrastructure.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:31David Hoffman?

  And so when you leapfrog advancements in money, the downstream net effects of that can only be bullish. We have absolutely massive.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Massive. Yeah, because a whole economy is built on that. If you don't have that, it's hard to build.

• 36:44David Hoffman?

  Everything else.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Everything else.

• 36:45David Hoffman?

  Right. Trust is at the bottom. You're leapfrogging trust.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Leapfrogging centralized institutions. And my view is that if we keep with the status quo, Africa's position at the bottom of the pyramid is pretty much locked in for at least the next hundred years.

• 37:01David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Because it's, there's a downward pressure to kind of keep you at that bottom of the pyramid.

• 37:07David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  And when you talk to whole of the young people, there are 900 million Africans who are under the age of 30. 900 million. They have dreams. They have desires. They want to have much of this world as much as everyone else.

• 37:20David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Right? And so the best outlet is online, but then online is gated if you don't have a means to pay and receive money, right? You need that to power that. And so crypto is like, great, this makes a lot more sense. So this is not, to me, the Africa narrative here, an opportunity, is not just like, hey, let me put 5% of my assets into some high-growth, high-risk space and see what happens. Like, no, I want to have access to the world. And this is giving me that.

• 37:49David Hoffman?

  Hmm. Access to the world. That's very, that's beautiful. Also, another opportunity really is that the incumbent continents like America and China,

• 38:01David Hoffman?

  like, America is going to go down fighting, like the banking system is going to go down fighting. Like, they're trying to ban crypto before really allowing it to be adopted. And then like, most of the population doesn't care.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:11David Hoffman?

  Like crypto is that weird thing with like the Wall Street Bets folk. So they're not going to adopt it simply because they're, they don't need it. And then the incumbent systems are going to fight it. Meanwhile, Africa is going to adopt it simply out of necessity.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:25David Hoffman?

  And learn to use it and learn to refine it and grow it naturally and organically.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:31David Hoffman?

  That makes me bullish.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:32David Hoffman?

  Because it's. It's accepting crypto, there's all like continents and populations and cultures have to get over the accepting crypto hurdle.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:39David Hoffman?

  And it sounds like Africa is like, that hurdle for Africa is like very, very low to the ground.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 38:43David Hoffman?

  It's not hard to accept crypto in Africa.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  This, this makes a lot more sense. And to me, it's not like, um, you know, shops and everything accepting crypto necessarily. That's not the indication of success to me. It's not like onboarding everyone to the crypto economy. The way we think about it here is like, I don't want to have a bank. I don't have fiat. I don't want to hold any local payment systems. I think what I'm observing is actually people move fiat to crypto and then crypto to fiat to do things that fiat to fiat doesn't allow them to do. And that's a lot of things, right? So to me, it's not like just make everything Ethereum. And that, that makes sense. It's actually make your whole economy powered by Ethereum.

• 39:24David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Right? That, I think that's, that's the bigger opportunity to me. It's not like what we talk about in just in our own crypto circles of like how the world can be more like live on decentralized blockchains. Is actually make decentralized blockchains, the back end.

• 39:41David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  That powers the whole economy.

• 39:44David Hoffman?

  Right. I remember this one line from Andreas Antonopoulos. He called it, um, I think it's like technology inversion. Something inversion. And he was using the idea of once upon a time.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:54David Hoffman?

  We squeezed the internet through dial-up.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:58David Hoffman?

  And that's how we use the internet. And then we made broadband. And then that was instead of having to put the internet through telephone lines. We just made, we made wires specifically for the internet.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:08David Hoffman?

  And then, and then the internet exploded because it didn't have to get throttled through dial-up. And when you tell me like, like in the beginning stages, it goes from fiat to crypto to fiat to do things that fiat only can't do. To me, that's like, we're trying to squeeze through crypto through the fiat.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:22David Hoffman?

  Bandwidth.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:23David Hoffman?

  And which is great. It's where you get started. You got to start somewhere. But then also merely doing that also sets the stage for the inversion where we just do away with the fiat and be like, okay, just, just crypto.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:33David Hoffman?

  Crypto only.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:34David Hoffman?

  And Africa sounds like it's first down that, down that path.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's happening at scale in a lot of different places. And you talked about governments earlier. African governments are still wary and not sure about this space. There are some that have outright banned it. So when I talk about Africa, well, Africa is 54 countries, right? So it's very different dynamics. I actually love to talk about Africans, the people. It's like, this is people power.

• 41:00David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  It's not institution power. And it's the people who have the needs, who have the demands. And I'm betting more on the African people building the infrastructures for an economy that works for them instead of waiting for a permissioned way to create this. So crypto is thriving despite governments, not as a result of governments.

• 41:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and to my loose and uninformed take about Africa is that's just like the borders, the countries of Africa mean less than the culture and communities of Africa. As in, just like, the boundaries of Africa was drawn by Europeans. And they were

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Some, a bunch of them.

• 41:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, in like the 1880s Berlin Conference, right? And so I think Africa, of all continents that are out there, is most primed to become borderless, using borderless tools like Ethereum, like crypto.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Yes. I have this vision that, you know, borderless Africa is what many young people are striving towards. But not necessarily like, hey, let's bring down the borders that we kind of see and know of. It's just the borders, like where borders create. Exactly. Where borders create a lot of the barriers.

• 42:10David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Because the way IMF relates to Africa, the way the World Bank relates to Africa, the way the global powers relate to Africa is bordered nation by bordered nation, right? And so whenever you try to break free of that, you come across a brick wall

• 42:26David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  that you can't pass through.

• 42:28David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  So the shared experience of being separated from the world, separated from each other, that's the borders. There's a physical border, there's an economic border, there's a psychological border, you know? And that's what I see many African builders thinking is like, I am African first and a citizen of that country second. It's because there's a shared experience and there's a shared challenge there. And I believe, like, you know, I'm kind of inspired by you guys, Bankless, right? I think a borderless Africa makes a lot of sense.

• 42:59David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah, no, well, we also see that. We also see that. Yoseph, you're starting a venture fund.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  I am.

• 43:06David Hoffman?

  Tell us about the strategy.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  So my vision is basically increasing crypto adoption on the continent in real world use cases and helping us build a borderless life for a whole lot of Africans. And I see that in multiple approaches. One is actually creating soil. I love the notion of infinite garden, right? So you need to build rich soil on the continent to help whole ecosystems to thrive, right? And that is around education, community building, awareness building. And that's all to me, public, public goods. That's one stuff I'm really focused on is supporting a lot of communities on the ground, supporting events. Hopefully, you know, you and friends can come, spend time there, connect with local communities.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  So there are a few events that are happening there. There's Eat Safari. It's a local Ethereum community happening in Kenya in September. So there's a lot of those beautiful things that are happening that I believe is public goods and we need to put resources and support that. On the other side, when you have fertile soil, you need forests.

• 44:09David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  And those are the projects, the protocols, the applications that are actually bringing those visions to life. And to me, I think capital is a means to support and enable that to happen. So I'm building a venture fund to basically back African founders who have deep local context and understanding and are building from the bottom up and are long-term thinkers. And I don't wake up thinking, hey, I'm going to be a VC, but that's the highest leverage way to actually support this work.

• 44:37David Hoffman?

  Right. Funnel capital into the places that it needs to go. Being a good capital allocator is one of the best things you can do to grow a burgeoning, like ecosystem inside of a, an economy that needs it. Why are you the right person to do this job? What's your advantage? Why are you going to be a great capital allocator for Africa? Like, what skills do you bring to the table?

• 44:56Speaker 01

  So I have spent still the majority of my life on the continent and I have felt the pain that many young Africans feel and I have deep. Like in my blood relationship with the struggle, right? And I feel like I've been extremely lucky in my life to have leapfrogged so many parts of society. And, you know, spent a lot of time in the US, in the West and in the East. And I've seen that side of the world as well, and I've built a lot of relationships. And I see my role as a bridge builder between that world and African ecosystems where there's mutual value and relationship building. So that's one lens that I have. The other lens is I've spent the last eight, 10 years building stuff.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  So I come from a builder perspective and world and have a deep empathy towards founders and builders who are down in the trenches, you know, building the infrastructures that's going to last. So that's the lens that I'm bringing to the table. And the third is, you know, I want to see the crypto world succeed and I want to see Africa succeed. So I'm operating with a very long-term lens in mind. And the sad realities on the continent today, there are a lot of mercenaries.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Mercenary chains, mercenary protocols, I don't want to name names now.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Certainly.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  But there's a lot of bad behavior that is underselling the value of crypto and underselling the value of where Africans want to go. So I'm positioning myself to do the opposite of that, hopefully, and help us build a thriving community, a thriving continent, and help global communities also understand and be part of Africa's journey. You know, we saw China's growth in a tremendous way. We're seeing India's growth and development and technology has been a big part of that. Now is the phase of Africa. And I don't think the world understands what's happening there. I don't think the crypto world understands the potential. And I want to see more of the Ethereum community get plugged in and connect

• 46:56Speaker 01

  because I believe the Ethereum values are deeply aligned with where many young Africans want to go. And I want to help build that bridge.

• 47:05David Hoffman?

  Where are you in the setting up this fund? Where are you in the life cycle of this fund? And what are you currently raising?

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:11David Hoffman?

  If people are interested, where can they go to find out more?

• 47:15Speaker 01

  They could reach out to me. [email protected].

• 47:19David Hoffman?

  We'll get those links in the show notes.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. Or reach out to me on Twitter. Happy to chat on that front. Building it and there's a lot of projects that I'm ready to back right now. So I'm really keen to get going as soon as possible. But the main thing I'd say is, you know, there are a lot of people who are kind of raising funds and cutting corners and all of that. To me, it's about relationships and it's a long-term journey. So if people want to invest, it's less, there's a money part of it, but there's also like, hey, let's actually build a direct relationship with African builders. And this is one of the gateways for them to do so.

• 47:57David Hoffman?

  Well, Yoseph, the thesis makes sense to me. And I think that if in the world where we fast forward into the future and crypto hadn't completely integrated into Africa and really helped out at a very deep level, then we've deeply failed as an industry. We should look at Africa as like the first main validation of what we can do for the rest of the world because it seems like Africa is running for it first. And so I wish you the best of luck on your venture arm and I'm happy to help in any way I can.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Thanks so much. Crypto needs Africa, so let's make it happen.

• 48:31David Hoffman?

  Oh yeah, what, what, give us the bull case for our bags. Give us the, for us Westerners who are going to stick around in front of our TVs and our computers and we're just going to like, oh, I hope Africa uses the crypto. What, what is the bull case for crypto if Africa adopts it in the best ways that it can?

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:50David Hoffman?

  Why is it good for our bags?

• 48:50Speaker 01

  For the last 10 years, we've been talking about mass adoption. We've been talking about real world use cases beyond just the, you know, intellectual circles that we navigate in. Well, the masses in mass adoption are in Africa, right? So we're going to pay more attention there if we want to have this technology to be used in daily life, whether it's a bull market or a bear market and people derive real value From and if you're deriving real value, you pay fees, right? And there's a real economic model to sustain it. I believe that's where Africa contributes to the crypto narrative and cycles. So I think for this industry to succeed and to actually survive the test of time.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  We need that. We need the real stuff and the real side of the conversation. To me, Africa is a big part of it. It's not the only part, but it's a huge part of that narrative. Yes, sir. Thank you so much. Thanks so much, David. Cheers.

• 49:46David Hoffman?

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• 50:29David Hoffman?

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• 51:11David Hoffman?

  Polygon 2.0 will give users and devs unlimited scalability and unified liquidity. Right now, there is a Polygon improvement proposal regarding a potential ZK-powered upgrade of Polygon Proof of Stake. If approved, Polygon Proof of Stake would become a Layer 2 ZK EVM Velidiem. So make your voice heard on this proposal by joining the Polygon Discord today. You have a chance to help the Polygon community give the internet the value layer it deserves. Arbitrum is accelerating the Web3 landscape with a suite of secure Ethereum scaling solutions. Hundreds of projects have already deployed onto Arbitrum One. With a flourishing DeFi and NFT ecosystem, Arbitrum Nova is quickly becoming a Web3 gaming hub, and social dApps like Reddit are also calling Arbitrum home. And now Arbitrum Orbit allows

• 51:52David Hoffman?

  you to use Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own Layer 3, giving you access to interoperable, customizable permissions with dedicated throughput. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM-compatible. Faster transaction speeds and significantly lower gas fees. Arbitrum empowers you to explore and build without compromise. Visit arbitrum.io, where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app on Arbitrum. Bankless Nation, we are here in Zuzalu, and I'm with Eche Imole. Eche, welcome to the show.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you for having me.

• 52:29David Hoffman?

  So Zuzalu means many, many things for many different people. What does it mean for you?

• 52:34Speaker 02

  I think the one word that encapsulates Zuzalu for me, and even for the Afro-Palatan community, is access, right? Being able to have a seat at a table when, especially when you get to be around some of the brightest minds in the world, where a lot of these frontier knowledge is being pushed, you have access to that seat. And for so long, I would say a lot of Africans have been the last of the party, when the cake has been shared. And when we come, we're like, "Oh, we don't even get crumbs? What's going on?" Right? So for me, Zuzalu represents access, right? And access at the front seat at the table.

• 53:05David Hoffman?

  Okay, so you mentioned Afro-Palatan, which is the thing that you want to bridge towards here at Zuzalu. But specifically for your movement, access is important, but what's here in Zuzalu for that movement?

• 53:21Speaker 02

  So first, I think we were able to also come here with at least 20-plus of our citizens, right? Coming out to Montenegro, I mean, you're around, again, some of the brightest minds, right? So you have founders within our network, creatives within our network, professionals within our network. They're able to come here, collaborate, connect. Even, I think, a few of them got some investment opportunities as well. Again, it's like access not just to even the people, but just again, to the capital that's probably available, or to the information that's available, which is huge, because for a long time, the way the world has been set up, there's an information arbitrage, which is you know and we don't know. And because you know, we don't get to be, again, at the seat of the table. So again, that's what this represents for us.

• 54:02David Hoffman?

  Sure. Okay, so let's dive headfirst into the movement.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:04David Hoffman?

  What is the Afro-Polit movement?

• 54:06Speaker 02

  So, I would say.

• 54:08David Hoffman?

  Is movement, movement the right word?

• 54:10Speaker 02

  You know, definitely the right word. And I think I probably want to just give context real quick. So I think the best way to understand Afro-Polit's journey is to think about it in three phases, right? Phase one of Afro-Polit is an organization I started while in law school in San Francisco, catering to the African diaspora through events. So think your favorite Afrobeat parties, concerts, festivals.

• 54:28David Hoffman?

  Cultural events.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Cultural events, yeah. A significant, a significant highlight of that phase one was something called the Year of Return, that happened in Ghana in 2019, where we basically helped facilitate about a million plus people from the diaspora heading to Ghana. It generated about $2 billion worth of economic activity for Ghana, right? That's phase one. Phase two then starts in 2020, where we wanted to reload the Year of Return again, and then COVID happens. Right? COVID decimates the entire in real life events industry, and we were forced to pivot, and we pivoted into media, but through a social audio app called Clubhouse.

• 55:00David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  So in Clubhouse, between I and my co-founder Chika, we built communities under about 200,000 people collectively, right? And we showed the capacity for collective action, which made us very ready when the next year, 2021, Bellagio Srinivasan, right? He drops this article called "How to Start a New Country." And in the article, this was April 2021, and we were in the car at Senegal actually, when we read this. And he proposes this idea of a network state, which is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action, that's able to crowd from territory around the world, and eventually gain diplomatic recognition in pre-existing states. Now, when I read it, it was like, man, this is like a powerful idea, but it was more theoretical, but I could see the shapes of it.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  But there was a particular quote in that article that I think really held us to the, um, the idea where he says, "Because the brand new is unthinkable, we fight over the old." And I think for us, it was like, damn, it feels like that encapsulates.

• 55:59David Hoffman?

  That's a good one.

• 55:59Speaker 02

  It felt, it felt like that encapsulated what we felt as Africans, like, we consistently fight over the old, whether it's historical constraints or colonial baggage. We're not able to transcend into the future, right? So for the rest of the year, this is where Bankless comes in. We red pill our way into Web three, right? A lot of Bankless podcasts, a lot of like articles, you just consistently like every weekend. You've been through those rabbit holes where you're just consistently Web three driven. And come December twenty one, twenty twenty one, I wake up in Nairobi, Kenya at five AM. I'm pacing the room for about an hour. Um, my partner is like, hey, what's going on? I'm like, look, I know how I would look at someone who's about to tell you what I'm about to tell you. But I think we need to start a new country. And she's like, wait, what?

• 56:46Speaker 02

  And I'm like, yeah, but we need to find out why, because you're you're toeing the line between being a conspiracy theorist and like just being cuckoo bird, right? And we drew some inspiration from the American founding fathers, from the Federalist One, where Anthony Hamilton basically says, is it possible for societies of men to form a new constitution through reflection and choice? Or are we forever destined to depend on our governance through accident and force? And we were like, damn, that's our why. No modern day nation-state in Africa was created through reflection and choice. It has always been through accident and force. And so what would it look like if we could form a new country, but this time with people who have shared values and purpose in a borderless manner, right?

• 57:30Speaker 02

  The internet enables us to organize around shared values. If Facebook, for example, was a country with its own cryptocurrency, it would be the largest country in the world. But this time, instead of an online passive community, which is what Facebook is, is a social network. It's now a a community aligned around shared values and purpose with its own currency. And then you can bring, you can, you can, you can get recognition from pre-existing states based on that. And so our why is pretty strong, right? And it cuts across, like I said, we're trying to do away with a lot of the historical constraints and the colonial baggage. And that whole idea of because the brand new is unthinkable, we fight over the old. It, that's why our ideology is one of abundance, because we're seeing scarcity wreck a lot of stuff across Africa, or just even just being African in the world.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  And we want to build upon an ideology of abundance, abundance of tools, abundance of even in mindset, abundance of resources. And that, and that's the way we see it.

• 58:21David Hoffman?

  So I've talked with a few other network state people and like the broad pitch is man, we haven't had a new city or a new country in over hundreds of years.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:31David Hoffman?

  And so we're built on old foundations, like you said, and so like it's just like the incumbents of the world. I do really enjoy the idea of thinking about countries and governments as like incumbents that could be disrupted, which most people don't think about.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:45David Hoffman?

  But for many people, like people in the United States, people I'm assuming also Europe are like, that's a great thought experiment.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:51David Hoffman?

  Interesting article.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:52David Hoffman?

  Some good brain candy.

• 58:55David Hoffman?

  But like practically, I'm comfy with where I am. But also I think with what you're teasing here is that like Africa particularly is primed for this.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:05David Hoffman?

  As in it can be not a thought experiment, it can be a manifesto.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 59:09David Hoffman?

  So can you give the pitch to people who are uninformed about Africa? Why Africa is so primed for a network state movement?

• 59:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I would say, and I could give this in analogy, and I could give this in fact, so picture a house that has a weak foundation, right? You go into this house and you say, hey, we want to fix the weak foundation. And but instead of starting with a foundation, you start painting the walls, you start fixing the AC, you start fixing the fans. And then you're like, oh, pop up the window. And then the house is stable, but it still collapses, right?

• 59:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  Because the foundation is weak. The weak foundation in that analogy is our governance systems across Africa, right? The AC is maybe like our fintech industry. The fans are like maybe our health tech industry, or whatever industry exists. What happens is we have this idea that we could entrepreneur our way out of these problems, and it doesn't work. Because eventually the weak foundation collapses these different sectors that are trying to thrive, right? So for us, we're saying, why don't we go foundational? Fix the actual foundation, because when you compare Africa to the rest of the world, there's a sense of is this a feature or is this a bug? Right? And so our argument is it's a feature, and we'll explain why. When it's a, when it's a bug, what it looks like is Singapore, Vietnam, Dubai, these are

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  countries that for the most part maybe got their independence after a lot of African countries. So I'll give you an example. Vietnam war ended in 1975. Nigeria got its independence. In nineteen sixty, that's a full fifteen years head start. Look at Vietnam today, look at Nigeria today, right? Singapore, right? The Singaporean leader would literally come to, um, Lee Kuan Yew would literally come to Africa to visit because Singapore hadn't necessarily achieved its independence yet. Look at Singapore today, look at like a a whole host of African countries, nine out of the ten countries with the highest poverty rates are from Africa, right? And so for us, what we're saying, why we're saying is a feature, not a bug, it's because the feature was we never actually started it through reflection and choice. Right? Vietnam, the Vietnamese fought for what they believed in, right?

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  The Singaporeans also put out their own constitution and fought as well for what they believed in. Where did, we, we had a fight for independence, but it was never based on any philosophical independence, right? What was the reflection and what was the choice? Keep in mind also, because of the borders that were drawn haphazardly in the Berlin Conference, right? A lot of tribes just got tossed in and the borders just got rewritten where when you visit Africans today, you can cross a border and they speak the same language, but there's just a line in front of them. That was drawn by someone else again who was not privy or maybe didn't even care about the realities on ground, which brings us back to the host of Zalal point, right? The original seat at the table was the Berlin Conference, right? Where things are being divided and the whole continent is being shared. I bet you there was no African in there being like, mm.

• 1:01:51David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right. And just to dive into the history, cause like the Berlin Conference, eighteen eighty, I think.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  Ninety, yeah, it's something.

• 1:01:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, a bunch of Europeans come down and draw the map of Africa from Berlin.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:02:03David Hoffman?

  And the, and.

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  This is no Google Maps, by the way.

• 1:02:07David Hoffman?

  And so they're, they're, they're drawing lines which are completely incongruent with the actual cultural, uh, cultural divisions that are in the space, which was where more organically emergent boundaries would be formed.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:02:20David Hoffman?

  And so this is, and this has been the way that it is, and it's not like.

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  Till today.

• 1:02:24David Hoffman?

  It's not like the tribes of Africa then settled into those boundaries post. And so there's still tribal differences.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30David Hoffman?

  And so you're saying that that discrepancy between where the European lines are of Africa versus the actual cultural topology of Africa, because there's discrepancy there, because there's friction there. That makes Africa primed for a new map.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:02:44David Hoffman?

  Or a new country.

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  Yes, because the network states allow us to redraw those colonial borders, but this time digitally first and then line second. Right, so because now you're forming a new society or new nation, but this time it's around shared values and purpose. And so it's no longer about like the historical constraints of the colonial baggage or saying, hey, we don't speak the same language. Or we don't have the same religion or all the things that divide us that are the old. We're trying to disembark from those to do the brand new. And so for that, that requires us basically recruiting like the sort of folks who would have come on the ship heading on a Mayflower, basically. So it's like, because that's a different sort of mindset. So right now we've set up with five hundred citizens, five hundred passports.

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  You're looking to recruit the folks who, I don't know if you're into a lot of Viking shows, like Ragnar Lothbrok and all that stuff. Okay, but the whole idea is like, you have people who are like, we're tired with our status quo. We're gonna go on the ship, it's the unknown, we don't know, but it is better than our status quo. We know that for a fact. Whatever is out there has to be better than our status quo. And so for us, it involves us reaching out globally. To recruit the sort of people who would have boarded the Mayflower, which only started with a hundred and something people by the way. Right, and now obviously the US is like a three hundred million people, country, trillions of dollars of GDP. But it's the same mindset of we want the new world, we want a new order. And the reason is because our status quo actually sucks. Like this isn't even like, it's terrible across every industry.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  I just gave you a stat of nine out of the top ten countries in the world with the highest poverty rates are from Africa. Let's not talk about what devaluation has done to our currencies, proper shit. So when crypto came, right, it was like, okay, now you have crypto. And now you have the ability to maybe form with the internet to organize around shared values. Why don't we try for that, right? And that allows us to potentially hopefully transcend our current status quo.

• 1:04:32David Hoffman?

  The one concerning theme of like the network state movement is that you have a bunch of just like centralized founders trying to make a city, right? And the what gives me optimistic about this movement is that the case for why Afropolitan, why Africa is the right place to actually apply these principles first is the latent demand in the people, in the community, in the culture. The culture is ready to accept a movement. Or at least that's my attitude and I think what you're saying. Could you just go into like why the culture is ready to accept a network state movement? Like why is this not going to be a top-down implementation from some leaders?

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  I think it's the same reason why when you look at a lot of stats about crypto, you see a lot of African markets pop up, right? When you think through the principles of like blockchain or web 3, it's maybe transparency, accountability, immutability, no single point of failure, right? What continent has experienced the opposite of that? That's Africa to today. Single points of failure across all our governments, right? Across our CBMs or central banks, our currencies are shit. Like when I'm telling you, bro, like I'm talking about tissue paper is probably better than that. Seriously. And so people don't have faith even in their local currencies, right? So then they reach for either USD equivalents or crypto. So crypto then acts as a store of value for people on the continent.

• 1:05:54Speaker 02

  And then talk about transparency, like there's a low trust deficit because we don't trust our governments. And because of that, we don't also trust our institutions. So blockchain or even crypto allows for us to say, hey, you don't even need to trust Etchen Chica. It's transparently on the blockchain. Yes, the founders, right? And so it's not a thing where our governance, especially if it's due to doubt, right? There's no single point of failure. So if Etchen Chica starts screwing up, can get them out of here and then you can continue going, right? Or if Etchen Chica, because if you think about past historical movements like this, whether it's like the MLKs or the Malcolm Xs or whatever, once they died or once they got taken out, the movement dies, right? And so it's again, how do you not allow for a single point of failure? How do you allow for accountability, transparency?

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  And because it's also immutable, it has immutable aspects, at least for more trust. One example I give is when we released our passports. I loved just being able to go to EtherScan and see all the smart contracts details. So I remember a citizen couldn't find where they sent their passport NFT to. And all we just collectively had to do was just go on EtherScan and we're like, hey, you sent it to this address and not this address, right? And it was like, you didn't have to wait for us to go into the back room and then go look for papers. No, it's like publicly on-chain and it allows for us to then hold folks accountable. And I'll tell you another reason why. In Africa, there's a lot of corruption, especially even with government budgets and stuff, right? You have budgets that are passed and maybe one of the projects is to complete a bridge or complete a road or whatever.

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  And the money gets allocated. The bridge never gets built, the road never gets built. And when you ask her, where did the money go to, where's this? You start hearing all these stories like, oh, a snake ate it. Or literally, I'm talking about literally a snake ate it, a monkey came in. Or and these are real official stories from a government, right? And for us, it's like, hey, it's not that blockchain prevents you from stealing. But you still more transparently, you know what I mean? And for that, it then allows us to at least have a standing point to hold you accountable, which we don't have today. So then, coming back to the whole network state idea is, look, the young Africans today are ready for a borderless world, right? Crypto also speaks to them, it's an emerging market thing.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  These principles apply more to a continent that's crying out for this because we're tired of living in conditions that don't speak to our need for freedom, right? And so for us, what's the one thing that allows us to ensure our freedom in code, right? It's the blockchain, but also a potential network state as well. And I think that's the approach that we're taking.

• 1:08:23David Hoffman?

  Beautiful. What would you say, what is the Afro-Palestine roadmap? If there is one, and where are we in that roadmap?

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  So there are four phases of the roadmap. Phase one for us is what we're calling building out the network, which is us literally going out and recruiting the best of the best Africa and the diaspora and our allies have to offer across multiple sectors. I think the reason what that is, is we believe that a nation has to be formed not just by tech founders or not just by financiers, it needs to be collective. So you need to also reach out to the. Like the Renaissance movement, especially in Europe, helps usher in a lot of all the other advances in science and other other industries as well. So we've been very intentional about recruiting those folks to, and we released our first five hundred passports, N F T art passports. Um, to get those, you had to apply. What we were filtering for was high alignment, right?

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  So it's not just to say, hey, I want to get your N F T and pump and dump and flip it and go and blur it and see. No, it was like, hey, I want to be a part of this movement and I want to contribute to this movement, right? And then, and then we released those. That's phase one and obviously we'll release more passports as we go. So we're recruiting people as we go. Phase two for us is what we're calling government as a service. So it's like come for the network, stay for the tool, right? And for us, it's we're modeling that around a super app type of idea where it's like within this app, you're able to do things like potential e-residency, self-serving I D, being able to make payments for goods and services using the African currency or token one day. Um, and just being able to just ladder up services on there. And I think it's similar to like a WeChat in terms of comparison out of China, which they average about fifty seven dollars per user.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  By offering a bunch of different services, we're looking to model that out as well within the African platform. Phase three for us is what's called the minimum viable state. Which is how do we ladder up the credibility or build up the credibility to be viewed as a country one day? You don't just come and say, hey, we're a country, recognize us. It's. Here's our flag. Yeah, here's our flag. What are the things you've done to show that you even have the responsibility or the capacity? Legitimacy. Where does your legitimacy come from? Right. And so in September of last year, we got recognized by the New York Stock Exchange as the first ever internet country for the African diaspora. Again, that's more of a perception play, right? Cause so, um, the, the New York Stock Exchange is a two hundred year old institution, right? And they're recognizing you as a, um, in internet country for the African diaspora.

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  Today's New York Stock Exchange, tomorrow it could be the United Nations, right? And so other than that, we provide visa and arrival services for four African countries today, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania. And the, the thought process behind that is we started off as an entertainment and tourism company. When you try to go through the official channels and a lot of these governments, you get hit with bureaucracy. When you come through us, we're all about efficiency. Capacity. We just got it done, right? Like where government or where where services company, we just got it done. We we cut through all the merc and just go to handle it. And I think from from that is similar to, I I always give the example of Amazon, right? If Amazon says to me today, like, hey, Ache, I need your garage key to drop off your packages in your room, right? I'm like, here.

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  You you have earned my trust over so many years. They're like, hey, just do what you have to do, right?

• 1:11:31David Hoffman?

  Please place it in the top dresser, top drawer.

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate all this help you have done over the years. And the reason for that is they've aggregated their trust over years. I remember the first time that I didn't get something properly delivered through Amazon. And before I could say refund, the money was in my account. And I was like, god damn. And it's like, now you have me as a lifetime value customer because I'm like, these are the people who've earned my trust and that trust is compounded. That's the same way we're thinking about phase three, right? Phase four for us.

• 1:11:57David Hoffman?

  Wait, but I just to dive into that because I think that's such an important point. To me, the success, getting the green checkbox on phase three is like the tipping point. Because this is the fight that we say on bankless, which is the fight for hearts and minds, right? And so you you said you're here in Zuzalu to to access, for access. Accessing what? Accessing a network, accessing capital, accessing influence. Because the way that you get the hearts and minds is that you get people on board to accept the movement as legitimate. But the movement, you can't just accept it as legitimate just because it's a good idea. You also have to actually meaningfully improve people's lives.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:12:33David Hoffman?

  Right? And so that's where that's phase two comes into play, where you actually start providing value and services. Not just a meme, not just a movement, but you actually meaningfully move the needle in people's lives. For people who are agnostic to the movement, like, ah, the movement, I don't really care about, but they helped me and they improved my life. And they and they and then so phase three is you turn up the dial on it, you turn up the juice on that. You you get more capital, you get more leadership, you get and you you just win the hearts and minds game. And you get larger institutions to accept you as legitimate, not because they're going begrudgingly. But because they think like, this, this is, this is a real, I want. To align with that force.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:13:13David Hoffman?

  That is a movement that is powerful. Again, I don't care. I mean, I don't necessarily care about that movement. I'm agnostic to that movement. But I acknowledge

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  Their power.

• 1:13:21David Hoffman?

  It is powerful and it's in my interest to accept it as legitimate.

• 1:13:25Speaker 02

  You, you have encapsulated that so perfectly. And I think even doubling down on that, what, what we say when we go read our manifestos, we are curators of African talent, culture, experiences, capital and information. And all those things is what we're looking to use to aggregate our leverage. So we have founders within the networks today who literally have gotten funded by being part of the network, right? For raising capital or the exclusive informations that we get access to or the experiences or the, or the culture, right? And so for us, it's, you want to be viewed as, hey, this is a powerful movement that I want to align myself to because first of all, they don't fuck around. But first of all, you just want to have these people on your side, right? And so it's, it's basically dialing up the knobs on everything.

• 1:14:09Speaker 02

  Like wherever it is that you have leverage, you just dial it up to the hundred, right? And you apply it so that people are like, hey, I might not even really care about their whole alignment or sovereign movement or whatever. But you realize that the people within this network are people who represent the influence and the power and the leverage that you, you would want to have with anything that you're looking to do. And that has been something that we're like dialing up the knob on, right? So even like with Zuzalu, like a lot of folks are like, how did you guys even get access to this, right? And it's like, yeah, we're here, we're at a seat at a table, we have information.

• 1:14:40David Hoffman?

  The people of Zuzalu have dubbed this movement legitimate.

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  Exactly. Right? And so you, you leverage that and dial up the knob in other areas as well, right? So yeah, I think you've encapsulated that perfectly.

• 1:14:51David Hoffman?

  Okay, take me to phase four.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  Which is the last phase. So, um, it's the land phase, right? So it's

• 1:14:59David Hoffman?

  It's a redrawing the map phase.

• 1:15:00Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. I love that. And we want to combine two concepts together for that. We don't just want a border anymore to be four cornered borders. We want a disconsiduous border that cuts across the world. It's similar to like a Chinese wall type of border, but across the world. What would that look like? We want to combine two concepts together. One is the embassy and the other one is a Chinatown. Take for example, the US embassy in maybe Montenegro is a sovereign territory in a host government, right? In Chinatowns, they have their own post office, their own malls, their own banking, their own services, right? We want to combine those two concepts together to get us a sovereign Afro town. Sovereign Afro town. Yes. Okay. Located in every major city in the world. Okay. So going back to the whole visa issues I was telling you about before.

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  Imagine you just had a sovereign Afro town and you're an Afro-Polynesian citizen and you're just going to the Afro town within Montenegro. Right. You might not be running into the same immigration issues if you're just going to where your own town is, right? You're going from home to home. To home, to home, to home. To home, to home. Exactly. And so let's then zoom out, right, for this roadmap. You're an Afro-Polynesian citizen. You navigate the world with the Afro-Polynesian passport. You're able to make payments for goods and services using the Afro-Polynesian platform with Afro-Polynesian currency, cryptocurrency. And you're able to get physical entry into sovereign Afro towns located across the world, right? And so like when people hear us say this vision, they're like, nah, you guys might have jumped off a cliff. But I think for us, it's when we're thinking through what is it that we want?

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  It's like we want freedom at scale, but we but we're tired of navigating the world from the place of outsiders. Like the hoops that we have to jump through all the time, even if you have the same earning power, it's it's it's insane. But we've gotten so used to it that we're navigating the world consistently from a place of survival, where I'm like, I'm I'm enough is enough because we've been to the same schools. We've read the same books. We watch the same YouTube shows. So we now know that the advantages are not necessarily innate. It's just information arbitrage. We're gonna have to go fix this. So we're locked out of the global financial systems. I can give you an example. When I travel across Nigeria or when I'm in Africa, I might not be able to access some of my US banking apps, right? And then you call them and you say to them like, hey, what's going on?

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  Like, why can't I access my money, like on my bank? And they're like, hey, you know, Nigeria, it might be a fraud issue, you know? There's a lot of Nigerian princes out there, so protecting you. And so you ask them like, so this is a database decision? And like, yeah, I'm like, okay, cool. So pull up the top 10 countries on your platform where fraud happens. Right. And I want to know if you've banned all of them because Nigeria's not even in the top 10. And I'm like, oh, but I see, are you banning Russia? Are you banning China? Are you banning Poland? Are you like banning all these countries? No. Why? Everyone goes silent. But what's being said to me, it's not even a racism issue. It's more of like, they have power, they have influence, they have resources, and you don't. So I was I was very heavy on philosophy, Greek philosophy back in the day.

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  And there's always been this quote where it says, the strong do what they can, the weak endure what they must, right? And for us, it's From an African mindset is we know the cards that life has dealt us, we just refuse to accept them.

• 1:18:08David Hoffman?

  Fair.

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

  And that's just the basis of where we're at. And so right now, we're in phase one, right? Phase one, we put out the passports, they sold out. We're gonna release some more, but every day, even while being at Zuzalu, you're consistently recruiting people, whether it's allies or just even pure citizens or even visa holders to your movement, but you're consistently recruiting because, again, it's our goal is if we can get critical mass, we aggregate leverage at scale and we can apply it to the causes and the goals that we care for.

• 1:18:35David Hoffman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:36David Hoffman?

  To, just to dive into phase four a little bit more, um, something I've learned while here at Zuzalu, um, that I probably should have known anyways, but I, I needed to know, to learn it, is the, this word diaspora.

• 1:18:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, diaspora.

• 1:18:46David Hoffman?

  Can you define that word for us? For, for me and the many Bankless listeners that actually don't know that word.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  Bro, you just killed me.

• 1:18:52David Hoffman?

  I know, I'm sorry.

• 1:18:53Speaker 02

  I should have just known this already. No, but I love Americans for that, cause she gives that to you and every time she's learning something about immigrants and I'm like, yeah, don't worry, like, it's a whole different type of story. So diaspora is folks who, for the most part, like I consider myself an African diaspora, right? And for the most part, my family left Nigeria for better opportunity and optionality in our lives, right? Because our status quo just wasn't it. Most diaspora movements are like that, whether it's the Chinese diaspora, the Indian diaspora, any, just any diaspora movement, which is we are born into a country and the opportunities and the optionality, we don't have it, right? We want opportunities and optionality in our lives for our families, for our children. We then migrate out, right?

• 1:19:33Speaker 02

  And so when we migrate out, we still have connections to the homeland, cause we still might have other family members who are not able to come or are not able to get visas, right? But what we then do is we send money back home. So African diaspora sends about seventy billion dollars of remittances yearly, right? That's a huge, like in Nigeria's case, that's, uh, that's bigger than our foreign direct investments from anything else. So our diaspora is just you holding up the country from a foreign direct investment perspective. And so that, those, those are the type of roles that diaspora plays. It's the diaspora that says, okay, now, um, I've gone to America. I might have a job, I might start with a low-paying job, but maybe I walk my way up. But now the money I send back home is not able to support my My family, they might be able to get healthcare, they might be, I might not be able to buy a home or house for people back home.

• 1:20:17Speaker 02

  I might be able to send other folks to school to get them opportunities to go. And so that's the thought process. That's what, that's the role of a dashboard and it's a lot of responsibility, right? It's like you feel it as you go, like you do, you do not just care by yourself, you represent a lot of other people. So it's almost like when we get access into rooms, your, your goal is to basically keep the door open for all the other folks who can't get in to get into it. And you always carry that sense of responsibility because there are folks who just getting to like, hey, guys, you're gonna have to figure out your ways to get in here, similar to how I did. But for us and for like you and I for Paulson, we feel that weight of responsibility, which is why by being as a value, you're like, I'm not just representing myself. I'm representing all the folks who I know would never even have a chance to even be able to get in here.

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  So that's, that's, that's the dashboard movement, yeah.

• 1:21:04David Hoffman?

  Right. And just to try and put it into just like the most concrete words possible that I've understood it. It's like people who have a home away from home.

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:21:11David Hoffman?

  Right. And so people that are like African.

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:21:14David Hoffman?

  That live elsewhere.

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:21:16David Hoffman?

  Because of opportunity or many other reasons. They were just raised there. They could be raised there.

• 1:21:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:20David Hoffman?

  But they also have family members and their cultural roots.

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:21:24David Hoffman?

  And they also in their mind, consider Africa or whatever part of the region also home because of family and culture. And so there's a bridge that's connected.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  Always.

• 1:21:33David Hoffman?

  And so the African diaspora is like, it is, which is just kind of cool to think of like the, the spreading out of Africans all over the world. As like a movement.

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44David Hoffman?

  And but everyone considers Africa home.

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:21:46David Hoffman?

  And so it's like the, the bridges that are connected everywhere else, but also has roots back in Africa. And so that I think is also why like an African network state is so primed.

• 1:21:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:21:59David Hoffman?

  Because it is a network state, it is networked all around the world anyways.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's like a human chain link over the internet, right? And I think um. We even consider the African American diaspora as part of, or the African American community as part of that diaspora as well. Because remember, we were talking about the whole accident in Forest, right? So the Forest Park could also be even slavery if you go back way enough. Because it's like, they didn't necessarily leave the continent voluntarily, right? So, it's like, how do we, because the African American community is, their economic spending power is a 1.5 trillion dollar spending power. And they're like 44 million people as a population. Africa has 1 billion people and our GDP is 2 trillion dollars. So, you can imagine what if you could combine the spending power of the African American community to Africa, that's a boost as well.

• 1:22:45Speaker 02

  And that's what we were able to do with the Year of Return that happened in 2019. It was a proof of concept.

• 1:22:50David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:22:51Speaker 02

  Right? And so for us, it's to say like, look, a lot of them don't feel, even though they have passports, or they're citizens of America, they don't feel sometimes like citizens because they're treated sometimes as subjects, right? Whereas, in Africa, we're citizens, but we don't have any of the benefits of being citizens. And so for us, it's how do we create a bridge that allows us to again aggregate our leverage at scale? What do you have that's useful? And what do we have that's useful? And can we bring it to the same table and then use that to navigate the world through it? Right? Because right now, we're just all divided and in silos. And I think through Afro-Palit, it's like, it's a bridge that's supposed to connect this diaspora together as well.

• 1:23:27David Hoffman?

  Right. And so the, the, the vision, the, the idea that I have in my, in my head is like, first, there's like, there's like the main hub of the actual network state in Africa.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40David Hoffman?

  And we're getting rid of the 1880s.

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  Berlin Conference.

• 1:23:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Berlin Conference, Europeans drawing the line. And we're making a new network state.

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:48David Hoffman?

  That is resonant with actual African culture and the African people, right?

• 1:23:52Speaker 02

  Exactly, yes.

• 1:23:53David Hoffman?

  But then also, you have the African diaspora all over the world with the, with the, what do you call them? The, the, the towns, the sovereign towns?

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  Sovereign towns, Afro towns, yeah.

• 1:24:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And so, and so those, the idea isn't for like Africans to finally have a place that they can truly call culturally home.

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:08David Hoffman?

  The also is to put, call the other parts of the world home as well.

• 1:24:11Speaker 02

  Global citizens.

• 1:24:12David Hoffman?

  But there are satellites of this, finally, this part of Africa that is now resonant with actual Africans. All over the world, which actually makes it like the when we talk about building a country in the year of twenty twenty three.

• 1:24:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:24David Hoffman?

  That is way more powerful than just a single country.

• 1:24:26Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:24:27David Hoffman?

  It's a it's actually a global movement.

• 1:24:28Speaker 02

  A global movement, yeah.

• 1:24:29David Hoffman?

  Uh, again, a naive Westerner here, but a white, a white naive white Westerner here, but just like I would imagine that.

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:36David Hoffman?

  Af- the African community has never been able to actually truly have its own home. But it all but that's because it's everywhere.

• 1:24:43Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:24:43David Hoffman?

  It's the whole world.

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:24:44David Hoffman?

  And no other, no other culture has that.

• 1:24:46Speaker 02

  Exactly. So I'll I'll tell you like a quick story. So again, that helped inform my mindset on this. I moved to the U S when I was fifteen with my family from Lagos, Nigeria, and I I moved to California, right? I went to school, like private white high school where I was like the only black kid. I remember coming from Nigeria, um, you have a situation with where I had no concept of race, like we're all black. Like, I don't, I didn't even know that race existed. And, um, but in Nigeria, when we did our studies, if you didn't get a good grade, you would get spanked. You get flopped, like literally, if you didn't get an A, you could really get flopped at school. So I come to America, I'm in Dublin, California, and I take my first U S history exam and I score like a ninety eight, right? And I'm like, and then the teacher's like, how?

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. And I'm, but then the next person is maybe like in their seventies or something. And I'm over there like culturally like, hmm, like are they about to get beat? Are they about to like, what's the issue? And no one's getting flogged, no one's getting beat. I'm like, cool, but. So there there was, you could get beat, but you'd also have shame for the grade you just got.

• 1:25:47David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  And there was no shame.

• 1:25:49David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  And I'm like over there puzzled like, so first of all, they're not getting flogged for failing or getting not getting an A. And then there's no shame attached to not getting the grade. What's the reason for that? And so later on in life, as I'm navigating a lot, because I'm, I usually find myself as the only black person in a lot of white spaces. I was like, yo, when you've already won at life, what is a great? Because they're moving from abundance, they have audacity, they're the people who are like, hey, we're gonna put a man in the moon in ten years, and they go do it. For us as Africans, like, we're still in a survival state. So we're not moving from abundance, which is why you get flogged for not getting a grade because they think that that encapsulates failure in your life, when that's not true.

• 1:26:29Speaker 02

  So for me, it was like, that level of audacity, bro, that I saw when I was in that school, I want to inject that into every African person in the diaspora and across the board. Because for us, it's like, how do we ensure our freedom at scale? So it's like, because we also want to travel, and that's the point I was trying to get to that story. It's, we want to see the world, too. We want to go around, we want to visit different cultures, but for, by virtue of where we've been born, a lot of us don't ever get a chance to do that. And you can't put a price on the role exposure plays in your mind. You had a lot of folks who went down the Silk Road and brought back ideas back to their hometowns. We're not even able to get to travel, to be able to be in maybe N'zuzalu, where you're

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  being impacted by different ideas, where you can take it back to your home country and be like, huh, this is how they're doing it over here, this is why they're doing it over here. So we are in these silos, right? And so for us, it's, how, by having a global movement that's not just relegated to your four-cornered borders, do you still create an environment in which you can go out, learn new information, bring it back, but you're also able to experience the world in a holistic manner, right? So like, for today, you can wake up today and say, hey, I want to be in Brazil tomorrow, and you're there tomorrow. I want to say, I want to be in Brazil tomorrow, I'm like, I gotta wait six months.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  Or, the visa could get denied regardless, or the opportunity doesn't pass me, it doesn't even ever come back again. So, for us, it's, we don't believe that those rules apply to a 21st century world, or even in 2023. How do we then rewrite those rules that allow us to stop navigating the world from a place of being outsiders, right? So, yeah.

• 1:28:02David Hoffman?

  So, the, uh, the actual, specific Afro-Ephropolitan effort, uh, still in Phase One?

• 1:28:07Speaker 02

  Phase One, yeah.

• 1:28:08David Hoffman?

  Maybe it's dabbling with, with Phase Two?

• 1:28:10Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, we're already building out the product.

• 1:28:11David Hoffman?

  Sure. Uh, can you just go into the actual specifics of, like, you're here in N'zuzalu, fighting the fight here, uh, who else is doing what elsewhere?

• 1:28:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, we, we are, I think we're, we span six continents right now with the first 500 citizens. You have citizens, um, who are in, like, entertainment. Citizens who are in tech, founders who are in tech. So I can just give you, name drop a couple of examples. One of the biggest festivals that bring the African, that's where it's got in Ghana. It's called Afro Future, formerly known as Afacella. They're based in Ghana, but the founders are citizens of Afropolitn, right? Some of the biggest Y C backed tech companies, Afropolitn citizens or Afropolitn investors. So you have companies like a Paystack that got acquired by Stripe for about 200 million.

• 1:28:56Speaker 02

  You have companies like a Flutterwave, just the top African companies and even VCs are within the network, right? So I think the idea is just to say, look, we have literally brought together some of the best of our best in different verticals. And our goal is then to showcase that to the world because it's not just even about the African dashboard. You have folks who are curious about Africa, but they don't know where to start, right? Like you might have been to Senegal, you might not have had a cultural guide, or you don't even know the best places to go to. Through Afropolitn, if you're part of the community, right? I'll be then able to curate that experience for you. Whether it's you're looking to invest, you're looking to know what the best founders are or the best ideas are. We represent that because of the folks and type of folks we have in our network.

• 1:29:39Speaker 02

  We can actually take you to the source, to the real source, not the stuff where you're like, eh, this is not that good. But like, this is dope. And because we've spent our time really attracting the best of the best, that's what we have to offer across the board.

• 1:29:53David Hoffman?

  So actually, there's at least a handful of bankless listeners that have been inspired by this conversation, myself included. How can they help? What kind of talent are you looking for? Who are you looking for that can, that can just help this movement?

• 1:30:06Speaker 02

  Honestly, we need a lot of technical talent as well, right? We want to be able to compete from a technical perspective because I do believe highly in being able to enshrine our freedom in code, right? And I think crypto allows us to do that or just blockchain in general. We also want allies and these allies can cut across because it's all again about access. We got invited to this ally just by just reaching out and say, hey, I want to invite you guys to this thing that we're doing with the publicity experiment. Just something that little, right? And it's, it's more about you, if you have privilege and you have a key, can you borrow that key to someone else, right? And that's What access is and so sometimes people are like, hey, how can I help? I think like they have to go do the rocket ship for us. No, it's just thinking through access. How are you able to say, hey, I have access to this thing and I'm able to share this with you guys?

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  Can you guys come use this? Right? So we've got offered islands. Tell you it's amazing, but we've got offered like so many different great opportunities, even like the whole New York's exchange thing, right? It was a hedge fund that was like, hey, we have access to being able to close. Um, do the closing bell at a New York's exchange, but we want to offer you the opportunity. And then in your second change, it embraced us as well. So again, it's thinking through access and what access looks like for us. But we are really just looking to attract the best of the best across the world, right? And this cuts across race, cuts across religion. We could care less about which, which way you are, where you've been. It's really about what, what you hope to become, right? And I think that that ideology of abundance is so powerful for us because it includes redemption.

• 1:31:36Speaker 02

  It includes again, audacity, right? It includes an ability to win and help win, right? And then we want to be able to play long-term games with long-term people, right? So yeah, that's, that, that's it.

• 1:31:46David Hoffman?

  Beautiful. And if people just want to, to learn more, uh, they, because they're compelled by the, and they want more education. Or maybe they're still skeptical and they still need to be convinced where there are any more resources.

• 1:31:57Speaker 02

  If you, if you go to afropolitan.io, afropolitan, spelt A F R O P O L I T A N, dots I O.

• 1:32:06David Hoffman?

  They'll be in link in the show notes.

• 1:32:07Speaker 02

  Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you, Dave. I know I watch, I watch a lot of bankers. No, but thank you so much for having me.

• 1:32:13David Hoffman?

  Of course, of course, actually.

• 1:32:14Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:32:15David Hoffman?

  Then there's a, a lot of crypto that I think everyone knows that crypto has done a deal with the devil. And we have things like Pepe coin and all of the short-term like short-term or stuff that they gamble. And then there's this story like this, which is the complete opposite. Uh, and so it's a great articulation for why this crypto industry is, is here to actually change the map of the world in ways that it ought to be have drawn in the first place. So thank you for bearing the, the responsibility of this crazy movement. And we need people like you to, to actually apply crypto principles for, for, for. Better without that, then I would have much less of a passion for this industry. So, thank you for providing that to me.

• 1:32:54Speaker 02

  You know, I had a friend who once said crypto has always been about abundance, right? But for some reason, obviously, it's the short termers that have that tend to navigate the headlines a lot more. But I truly do believe that it is a way, I think I follow punk six, five, two, nine. And where he makes this argument about the freedom of to transact is of it's a human right, right? And I think with crypto, if folks knew how much of the rest of the world were like systematically cut off from the global financial systems. It's why crypto is a need in Africa. It's not just a nice to have, right? And so I would encourage folks, if you want to come visit Africa to see for yourself, we can help arrange that. But I do believe that like why crypto exists is to help bring the rest of the world into this abundance, right? There's a lot of the world that's still in the darkness.

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  And I think if folks, it might sound altruistic, but really you could also benefit from this too. Because the more people who live in abundance, the more they have money to spend and the more maybe the entire economy thrives, right? And I think I want more stories like this to be told because I think during that whole period when we announced our application process, that was like the week F C X just collapsed, right? And you have a whole lot of skepticism of like, okay, N F Cs, DAOs, crypto, I don't even want to hear it. But we received about three thousand plus applications. And I think it was because people were tied to the mission and not just the technology, right? And so that allowed us to still be able to kick on and then attract the sort of people that we want into the community. So I'm here long term for crypto, man. I'm here for the principles of crypto, transparency, accountability, immutability,

• 1:34:23Speaker 02

  and just also a, a no single point of failure. I think we're tired of that, like we're tired of living in that world.

• 1:34:29David Hoffman?

  That's right. Thank you so much.

• 1:34:29Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:34:30David Hoffman?

  Cheers.