Binkabi Meetup Lagos on 30 May
On 30 May, Binkabi hosted its first meetup as part of Binkabi Meetup Series in Lagos. Nearly 100 people from diverse background joined us at innovation hub in Africa, Co-Creation Hub (CCHub) for an evening with Binkabi Chief Economist Dr Andrew S Nevin and Founder Quan Le (via video).
Dr. Andrew Nevin opened the event by sharing insight into Nigeria’s key challenges “Unemployment is about the most pressing challenge in Nigeria and to bridge this gap, the country needs to create 4 million jobs annually, same applies to the African continent at large, she needs to create 20 million jobs annually to reduce the scourge of unemployment and that is one reason Africa needs to trade with Africa, to create wealth”.
Andrew emphasised that the biggest Intra-African trade barrier is using dollar to trade, in the same vein, he commended the progress made through the continental free trade agreement. He further stressed that half of the world’s trade is dollar-based when actually the United States is not usually directly involved in these trades. To this end, there is need to effect bilateral exchange in currency of both countries trading without depending on US dollars and this is what Binkabi seeks to achieve with BKB Token.
Farmers earn little and bear most of the risk, just as depicted in the coffee case study illustrated by Quan. He explained that the world drinks 3 billion cups of coffee/day worth 200 billion dollars per year however, less than 10% of 200 billion dollars is earned by producing countries and less than 5% is earned by farmers, primarily because of over-reliance on United States dollars, lack of trust, the use of middlemen and high cost funding.
Quan talked expressly about Binkabi’s MVP, a market place for deal identification and price discovery known as the Barter Block™ . Rather than double intermediary and FX costs in intra African trading and relying on US dollars, costs are saved and trade is done in country’s local currency with the Barter Block innovation. BKB token provide access and discount to members as well as govern performance (staking).
Quan spent an ample time addressing the excited audience about how a tokenized, decentralised commodity trading platform like Binkabi can offer solutions to the present challenges plaguing the agricultural commodity supply chain in emerging markets. Commodity tokenization will address including and not limited to liquidity, trading reputation and licensing, dispute resolutions quality standardization. He made a surprising announcement that Binkabi will be the first in the world to tokenize warehouse receipt which is a great stride for the team. Soonest, Binkabi will conclude discussion with a major agribusiness group in Africa about creating a commodity exchange that will trade tokenized warehouse receipts.
The excited audience engaged Quan and Andrew in various form of questioning about Binkabi’s Barter Block, the BKB token and blockchain related questions, Quan noted conclusively that in coming days, Binkabi will launch its early adopter program and by the 3rd quarter of 2018, it will launch the Binkabi beta so the participants can see for themselves all that were discussed.
The event closed on a glamorous note while our diverse participants and our media partners Fintech 1000+, Guardian Newspaper, BitcoinAfrica.io amongst others all networked over dinner.
Femi Royal Aliu, Binkabi Associate.
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