For the purposes of speed to market & scalability, we built Moja 1.0 on traditional financial rails. Over the next 18 months, we will become a Web3-enabled company, to take advantage of the shift from two decades of African airtime and mobile money, to pan-global Web3 mobile networks fuelled by airtime, mobile money, and loyalty points. This will allow Moja to give unprecedented access to DeFi, earnings, savings, yield, and payments, to historically underbanked customers.
These young African customers will define the direction of Web3. It is no accident that Sub-Saharan Africa has overtaken North America to become the geographical region with the highest volume of bitcoin transactions on the world’s two biggest peer-to-peer crypto trading platforms.
Below we describe how we can use Web3 technologies to create value for customers and shareholders.
1. Savings
Many of our customers live in countries with fluctuating and devalued currencies. Historically our customers would hold US$ or gold to hedge against such volatility, but our stablecoins backed by these assets will advance this practice by allowing customers the additional benefits of instant processing, security, and volatility-free stable valuations.
2. Transfers
Our cross-border savings feature requires that customers, send, receive, and save money across multiple jurisdictions. Our stablecoin will afford customers the opportunity to pool their money without having to incur FOREX-related fees, associated losses in value, and onerous capital controls imposed by established payments companies. This will in turn widen access by allowing for microtransactions.
3. Investments
A Moja stable coin offers our customers an opportunity to access long-term investment instruments. Moja will enable customers to hold select stablecoins as well as fiat currency.
In addition to financial stability, deposits on Moja which are converted to stable currencies will be automatically staked on leading DeFi high yield Staking and Lending protocols, allowing compound interest to be earned.
A multi-currency wallet will afford customers a choice of cryptocurrencies in which to save and earn returns, as well improving their access to cross-border transfers.
4. Participate (play) to earn rewards
We will reward certain actions in our app with our token, encouraging greater engagement by participants. These actions and related token count will be our version of a credit score, secure and trusted by authorities.
Distributed Ledger Technology for ledgering and data protection
Moja customers will require active ledgering of transactions and consensus among savings group participants. DLT is a technology that will facilitate this activity, bringing unique features of transparency, immutability, data security and distributed consensus.
Furthermore, the underlying protocol can afford the opportunity for savings groups — operating like distributed autonomous organizations (DAO) — to code group rules and required actions in smart contracts, that can be bound on chain with the group’s transactions.
Lastly, distributed ledger technology affords the opportunity to digitally bind elements of the customer’s Personal Identifying Information (PII), such as biometric data, into the transaction ledger, thus reinforcing product KYC/AML functionality.
- Africa’s Promise
Africa’s young, rapidly growing population, (70% of Africa’s population is under the age of 30), burgeoning middle class and increasing prosperity combined with legacy banking systems, volatile currencies and a widespread and growing adoption of mobile money mean that the continent is poised to take advantage of web3 financial technology. Cryptocurrencies are increasingly popular as an investment tool, a store of value and a means of transfer and there is growing interest from investors who see Africa as the next technology frontier.
