Co-founders Chris Maurice and Justin Poiroux launched Yellow Card, the largest centralized crypto exchange in Africa from their dorm room in Auburn, Alabama.
But even as adoption proliferates, mobile money users don't get the perks of legacy banking, including earning interest on banked savings and building up a credit score based on a history of spending. Interoperability on the continent also remains a major issue with this alternative way of banking.
One solution for moving money across borders is the centralized crypto exchange that Maurice built. The Yellow Card CEO says he would ultimately love to tie in with the Western Union network to help bring those costs for the customer to essentially zero through crypto, given that half of all the world's remittance is still cash on both ends.
"Most of it happens on instant messenger, or on the street," he said. "Africans have been doing peer-to-peer finance for a very long time; one might say over 1,400 years. So this is nothing new to them." Starting in the fifth grade, he used his father's eBay account to sell Pokemon cards and other collectibles online – a venture that would ultimately cover his college tuition at Auburn. But the business of sending and receiving cash internationally wasn't always straightforward. Some of his customers in Pakistan, for example, weren't able to use PayPal. Bank wires were also not an option.
Every Wednesday at 7pm, he and Poiroux, a tech-savvy coder, would grab a spot in the back and split a 12-pack of Doritos Locos Tacos while drop-ins would swap dollars for bitcoin. Customers would slap a couple hundred dollars down on the table , scan a QR code, and that was it. On the backend, Maurice and Poiroux were using LocalBitcoins, a peer-to-peer exchange, to carry out the trades., whose interface was tough to navigate.
"I'm like, 'Man, have you heard of bitcoin?'" continued Maurice. "I explained to him what bitcoin is and how he could try it out by downloading Coinbase.""What on earth is this guy's mom going to do with $200 worth of bitcoin?" he said. Centralizing crypto payments seemed like the obvious thing to do. Up until their launch, peer-to-peer crypto payments on Binance, Paxful, or other more regional exchanges had been the status quo for many wanting to trade and invest in digital tokens.
The Yellow Card co-founder and chief technology officer dropped out of college freshman year, and instead holed up in his off-campus apartment teaching himself how to be a full-stack developer through a combination of YouTube tutorials and engineering blogs. It took a year and a half of coding for 16 hours a day for him to build the beta of Yellow Card, and he mostly did it himself.
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