Topic timeline
Adoption & Africa over time
481 entries across all AMAs, in chronological order, showing the first 150.
42:24 Fed controlled instruments will not run on a permissionless ledger, so an enterprise Cardano will come for coordination among trusted actors.
53:02 Asia is the future of finance with four billion customers on old systems, like Japan's cash economy charging 300 dollars cash for a train ticket.
53:43 Innovate where there is real need and willing listeners, since American and Western European regulators protect incumbents.
55:05 Africa is next in 2018 with Ethiopia, Ghana, and Kenya, and a Haskell class is already running at the University of the West Indies in Barbados.
55:46 Cardano has been in Argentina since 2016, where a friend showed off decoy buried silver, since those people understand monetary collapse.
1:38:05 Recounts the Addis Ababa trip, the coffee industry's political intrigue, and meetings with Ethiopian ministries and the World Bank.
1:39:21 Announces an all women Haskell training class in Ethiopia leading to IOHK jobs and a coffee supply chain pilot.
1:40:55 Introduces John O'Connor as director of African operations based between Addis Ababa and London.
1:41:09 Compares Rwanda's fast-moving Kagame government to Ethiopia and Nigeria's larger growth markets after the Transform Africa summit.
1:42:32 State Cardano's African push is secondary to core protocol delivery but sees offline trusted hardware payments as the long term opportunity.
1:47:24 Warns that off-grid ATM hardware faces theft risk in Africa, requiring careful deployment site selection.
16:50 An upcoming trip to South Africa and how Ethiopian coffee farmers could gain insurance, lending and a digital identity through Cardano.
18:39 Frames Cardano's goal as building the financial stack for billions of newly digitized people, name checking Stellar, Ripple and Elizabeth Rossiello's work in Kenya.
11:06 Medical records moving between hospitals and countries, and telecom roaming like a T-Mobile phone working on Israeli networks, are coordination problems a permissioned ledger can broker.
29:53 Three billion people outside the banking system are coming online but cost too much per customer to serve, yet they demand to be banked and digitized.
46:12 The story of Inlelo, a South African venture financing apartment buildings in Johannesburg townships without an ICO.
47:41 Explains why Inlelo needs a blockchain land registry to rebuild property records that residents only ever settled by handshake.
48:14 Building a credentialing system so unemployed township workers without formal certificates can prove their skills.
49:38 Predicts trillions in new wealth as millions of township residents get digital identities and access to peer to peer lending.
1:30:42 Envisions a pan African financial system built KYC free from the start, sidestepping the legacy compliance stack entirely.
18:43 Reflects on engaging heads of state and foreign ministers, an unplanned but rewarding part of the job that grew out of the Foundation's inability to lobby.
22:22 Explains why developing countries see blockchain as an equalizer that lets them bypass distrust of local institutions to access global capital.
23:45 Credits John O'Connor's Africa outreach and Emurgo's Asia outreach for diversifying government relationships ahead of a wave of 2019 pilots.
37:14 Argues immutable land records protect against corrupt regimes rewriting history, citing Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Holocaust era land theft.
39:59 Tying payments directly to land titles so resource royalties and property taxes could be collected automatically.
42:13 Envisions peer to peer micro lending against land collateral, like a fifty dollar loan to an Ethiopian coffee farmer.
43:22 Envisions farm cooperatives eventually tokenizing output as security tokens traded through Marlowe contracts to raise capital.
1:08:28 Cardano competes for different customers than well funded rivals, chasing developing world adoption in Africa and Asia rather than the West.
7:52 Teases upcoming December announcements in Uganda as part of the pan African strategy.
17:15 Names John O'Connor as director of African operations handling regulatory relationships across the continent.
39:24 Argues enterprise blockchain adoption will come first from paper based, analog settings like African coffee farmers rather than digitized legacy systems.
24:55 Looks ahead to the pan African strategy bearing fruit in 2019 as the enterprise framework rolls out across Africa.
1:08:27 The foundation's regulatory outreach to unlock natural resource wealth in Mongolia and partner with Ethiopia's cryptographer prime minister.
1:27:13 Gives an update on the Cardano Ethiopia education program: an all female class of 23 to 24 students from Ethiopia and Uganda learning Haskell and Plutus.
42:52 Plans to fly out the trained Ethiopian class to present their results at the summit alongside the enterprise blockchain team.
1:25:00 Paint a future where scanning a QR code on a coffee cup reveals the full ethical story of its beans, letting consumers judge supply chains instead of relying on stereotypes or vague labels like organic or fair trade.
1:28:40 Details the three part Ethiopia playbook: partner with a ministry, train locals such as the 23 women in the current class from Ethiopia and Uganda, then hire the best graduates.
1:30:17 Walks through piloting the Ethiopia coffee supply chain end to end, from farmer to washing station to exchange, incentivizing data entry and scaling to all one and a half million coffee farmers through a revenue sharing subsidiary.
1:32:48 Frames giving one and a half million Ethiopians Cardano interoperable wallets as smarter strategy than fighting JPMorgan, Amazon, and Facebook for Western users on their rigged home turf.
1:35:18 Argues Africa and Asia are the better bet for crypto adoption since seventy percent of Ethiopians are under thirty, already mobile money savvy, and living in a fast growing economy that distrusts weak government currency.
32:03 Treasury money could blanket Africa with an ATM network for tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, or build a DEX with real liquidity and easy on ramps into a stable token.
56:23 Two shots at getting Cardano into smartphones, Sirin Labs and the Finney phone where Emurgo negotiated a deal, and the more meaningful route through the SIM card and trusted hardware that Rivetz is pursuing with Telefonica and its 40 million subscribers.
57:59 Samsung and Sony are moving toward hardware wallets too, so within one to three years phones become a path to mass adoption, with trusted hardware enabling offline off chain payments that reconcile later.
58:40 The other path is marrying permissioned and permissionless ledgers in agritech, starting with Ethiopia's roughly one and a half million unbanked coffee farmers, where Fairtrade, carbon and biodiversity rules and buyers like Starbucks force digital identity, wallets and certificates before ADA can power Kiva style microfinance, insurance or remittances.
1:00:47 Mass adoption comes either through consumer devices like Facebook Messenger and phones, which the big guys will do with or without IOHK, or by digitizing underserved markets so anyone is instantly banked.
1:01:28 Remittances eat 15 percent of a transfer today, in Ethiopia 70 percent of people are under 30 and unhappy with their money, and the idea that Africans have no money is a misnomer with a trillion dollars flowing in and five to fifteen percent growth.
8:57 Asking a company whether it uses blockchain or smart contracts is the wrong question, like asking in 2005 whether they used cell phone apps before the iPhone.
9:28 The better questions are foundational ones about industry verticals: what agricultural technology, supply chain management or a city adapting to autonomous vehicles actually needs.
7:28 Lays out the Ethiopia trip: ministry meetings, graduating 23 trained developers, and a phase two pilot likely in the coffee supply chain.
14:33 Sketches a longer term vision of Tangem style tap-to-pay cash cards for offline transactions in Africa.
0:55 Recaps Ethiopia, where the Haskell class graduated with Philip Wadler present, and the students spent February and March 2019 using the Atala software, surfacing usability issues that improved the product.
1:42 The April 17th to 18th summit will show Plutus playground demos, and that they met the World Food Program and the Agricultural Transformation Agency CEO Khalid.
2:27 Discussions on importing fertilizer and seeds, warehouse inventory control against skimming and adulteration, apiculture, coffee, and over 10 commodities including the teff bread crop.
4:47 Graduates will work on Cardano and dapps as IOHK employees, and he is discussing with Crypto Savanna turning four Ugandan students into TAs for a Uganda class.
41:23 Training may run in Vietnam with Mongolia under consideration pending government and academic partners, and that after Cardano he would like to return to mathematics.
33:23 Ethiopia as a flagship market, connecting fifteen million smallholder farmers among its 106 million people.
34:25 Ethiopia's Agricultural Commercialization Clusters group farmers for collective bargaining and shared standards.
35:50 Proposes a blockchain supply chain tracker to stop fertilizer bags from being adulterated or stolen on the way to farmers.
37:28 Sees ACC farmer records becoming a reliable identity kernel for loans, citing a 2014 voucher program with a 100 percent repayment rate.
38:34 Is exploring stable coins, security token marketplaces, and sports team tokenization across Africa, teasing an announcement in Jinja, Uganda.
9:58 The summit aimed to show real buyers, including government officials from the mayor of Miami to Mongolia's foreign minister.
10:41 Announces the Ethiopia MoU with the Ministry of Innovation and Technology for a city utility token with up to six million potential users.
47:36 More Haskell courses likely coming to Uganda.
1:54:06 Praises the Gates Foundation's daily 18 million dollar giving and its influence across Africa.
5:07 Atala is the bridge for people who do not care about crypto: sell an Ethiopian coffee farmer better market access, not a token, and the identity and wallet come with it.
10:17 Mongolia is not a vacation: meetings with multiple ministers and probably the president of Mongolia are on the schedule.
10:44 Mongolia's real problems are what blockchain is for: 18 percent of urban medicine and 40 percent of rural medicine is counterfeit or adulterated, 93 percent have mobile banking access, 30 percent receive government disbursements, and Asian Development Bank money has a poor audit trail.
10:00 A planned IOT air quality pilot in Mongolia targets Ulaanbaatar's winter air, among the worst in the world as hundreds of thousands in the ger districts burn coal, wood and tires at negative 50, needing tens of thousands of sensors for targeted enforcement.
7:11 Clarifies there was no MOU with the Mongolian government or Pharma Trust; the real agreement is with two leading Mongolian blockchain groups to discuss a training course like the one done in Ethiopia.
7:43 An air quality pilot with a private vendor, interest in working with the city government of Ljubljana, and praises Pharma Trust's fight against Mongolia's counterfeit medicine problem, where up to 40 percent of rural drugs are fake, though crypto journalists wrongly spun this into a false partnership claim.
13:33 Expects IOHK's securitization work to focus on its own operating domains like Mongolia, Ethiopia, and Uganda, such as bonds backed by natural resources or transit revenue.
18:52 Predicts Cardano will bring tens of millions of new users into crypto through deals like Ethiopia and Mongolia, growing to rival Bitcoin's impact.
32:57 Expects permissioned Atala components to work alongside permissionless Cardano in pilots like Ethiopia's air quality project, giving other builders a blueprint for the same pattern.
34:32 Early talks about Step Group and Korea's TrustChain tokenizing Mongolian real estate, with hopes they eventually build on Cardano.
39:37 Sees beef supply chain traceability as valuable for Mongolia and Ethiopia too, since proving antibiotic use and quality is what currently blocks access to US markets.
40:51 Mongolia's cashmere industry shipping unprocessed fiber to China for pennies on the dollar instead of processing it locally for far more value.
42:14 Previews his July trip to Uganda for a presidential event, contrasting Uganda's smaller, more navigable market with Ethiopia's sheer scale and complexity.
19:58 Several of the 23 women trained in Ethiopia have been hired as Plutus beta testers and QA, feeding into a push on developer experience that reuses decades of Haskell tooling and best practices going back to the 1980s.
3:45 Emurgo drives commercialization across Japan and Indonesia, while Mongolia has been pursued aggressively as a case study for local currencies, air quality pilots and supply chain projects.
5:00 Negotiations with the Ethiopian government on a token for Addis Ababa could bring millions of brand new people into crypto with wallets and digital identities, who then use dApps on Cardano.
6:26 Japan's rural areas need innovation badly: an aging population drains Hokkaido, Fukuoka and Okinawa toward Tokyo, and they could be reinvigorated with blockchain plus AI and IoT applied to verticals like rice and agriculture so people have an incentive to stay.
8:01 A visit to the University of Wyoming in Laramie showed the same brain drain as rural Japan, a monolithic economy of agriculture and resource extraction that loses its young people.
9:52 Phones with crypto wallets, NFC and programmable point of sale plus market makers taking the volatility for a fee, like BitPay does, mean merchants never have to hold ADA or Bitcoin themselves.
10:39 An MoU signed before the Africa summit explores a municipal currency for Addis Ababa, where paying a water or power bill can take hours or days, so a digitized birr would settle bills instantly and later cover phone bills, tolls and transit.
12:09 Mongolia's telco Mobicom has run a similar system called Candy for about 12 years, digitizing the tugrik from a loyalty point scheme into a currency system regulated by the Bank of Mongolia.
12:57 The unbanked are not necessarily poor, they hold local wealth in knowledge, land and raw resources that the global economy systematically undervalues, so the first step is finding that local value and giving it liquidity.
14:03 Mongolia is the second lesson: only three million people and 900,000 nomads living in gers, yet 93 percent of the country has access to banking services even without roads or cell signal outside Ulaanbaatar.
14:47 Ethiopia's Agricultural Transformation Agency ran voucher pilots since 2012 letting farmers buy fertilizer, with a repayment rate near 100 percent that is unheard of in microfinance.
15:37 The third step is that you do not bank people directly, you start with identity, reputation and social graph, and that data is fragmented: the ATA holds records on three of Ethiopia's 15 million smallholder farmers in agricultural commercialization clusters, spread on paper across six or seven silos.
16:44 A correctly built identity gives you a public and private key pair that roots a wallet and payment rails, and digitizing the local currency beats hauling stacks of birr around from the ATM.
17:53 With identity and digital local currency you can build micro banks and cooperatives backed by agricultural collateral to keep default risk low, which takes years or decades, but Muhammad Yunus started this long ago with Grameen Bank so it is old concepts with new tools.
7:23 Traveling to the country of Georgia in June 2019 to meet the Prime Minister and a litany of ministers, with possible Cardano news out of it.
43:36 Being inundated with interest from Fortune 1000 companies, governments, and municipalities wanting to deploy on Cardano.
2:47 Highlights Georgia as an early blockchain adopter, crediting Bitfury for pushing land titling, health records, and self sovereign identity work.
18:46 Updates on Ethiopia, currently in deep negotiations over a feasibility study and pilot contract following the initial MoU.
10:41 Negotiations are going well with an unnamed company in the anti-counterfeiting space that wants to build on Cardano, and work continues in Mongolia, Georgia and Ethiopia.
1:13:19 Ethiopia work is running under Ala plus ADA with ongoing negotiations moving on Africa time.
29:06 Outlines two adoption paths: enterprise ledgers bringing new users in the developing world, versus a payments user experience good enough to pull people over organically.
43:56 Gives an update on the Ethiopia deal, expecting to sign a government contract soon with pilots progressing across three countries.
25:52 In Ethiopia the girls were trained and a pilot agreement was signed with the Ministry of Innovation and Technology, with a feasibility study now under way.
26:15 The Ethiopian pilot concludes around June 2020, and if the economics align a public private partnership could build a full currency for millions of people in Addis Ababa on Cardano.
48:33 The focus on Africa makes sense because things change: 95 percent of Americans were poor in the 19th century, and betting on a young, mobile centric population with 10 percent GDP growth beats betting on the satisfied.
10:48 Gives an Ethiopia update: a signed pilot deal, an ongoing feasibility study, and possible World Bank funding to finish by mid 2020.
15:08 Pitches tokenizing African soccer players and building a crypto soccer league as a mainstream on ramp into cryptocurrency.
29:37 Outlines a Mongolia adoption pilot following a training class, trailing behind the Georgia and Ethiopia efforts.
54:48 Gives an update on the Ethiopia deal, now past signed commitments and in a feasibility study heading toward a pilot running through June 2020 before commercialization talks begin.
1:15:19 Explains why he loves working in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, envisioning a future where the next Apple could come from Addis Ababa.
17:33 Recaps the Ethiopia Haskell course: all 23 graduates got IOHK job offers, but most took higher paying jobs elsewhere.
19:04 Calls the Ethiopia program logistically brutal but transformative, crediting Lars and Polina for living there to run it.
35:45 An Africa tour is planned with stops in Accra, Uganda and Tanzania, probably on the way back from Antarctica.
40:57 The Africa programs are at pilot stage with far more offers coming in than the team has capacity for.
56:52 Gives an update on the Ethiopia project, now in a feasibility study phase with the Ministry of Innovation covering key actors, cash out flows, and asset digitization.
57:22 Lays out the path from feasibility study to pilot to a public private partnership RFP that could eventually reach four million Ethiopian users.
58:17 African deals typically take three to seven years given coalition building, foreign investment, and regulatory change, calling it some of the most complex dealmaking there is.
4:07 Predicts an African nation like Kenya, Ethiopia or Nigeria will reach the economic prominence of Brazil or South Korea this decade.
21:29 Requests a formal 52 country Africa strategy and a Japan liquidity strategy from the Cardano Foundation board, pledging personal travel to the region.
34:08 Updates on the Ethiopian government project's feasibility study stage, describing the path from study to pilot to a competitive RFP.
42:26 Welcomes an Ethiopian viewer and points them to African operations director John O'Connor for ambassador opportunities.
15:06 Africa is the first geographic priority: John O'Connor and IceAddis built a proposal for presence in almost every African country with hundreds of meetup groups, and the Cardano Foundation is formally asked to approve or negotiate it.
15:53 Japan is the second priority, with a dedicated Foundation strategy requested for the second half of 2020, meetups in every major Japanese city and pilots such as agricultural supply chain that works for the Ethiopian coffee farmer and the Japanese rice farmer alike.
15:45 Discussions about a University of Wyoming donation in ADA, likely a world first for a US university, and starting IOHK payroll in ADA, then meetups in Zurich and Davos before heading back to Colorado.
22:59 Davos brought meetings with Guns N' Roses drummer Matt Sorum, several current and former heads of state, fund managers and Fortune 500 companies, and that interest now has to be matched with real support.
24:35 An aggressive meetup and Africa community building strategy is coming, with greetings to the Nigeria meetup and an Africa tour through Addis Ababa, Lagos, Kigali and South Africa.
26:57 There is a real shot at replacing the world's global payment settlement systems, redefining what regulated and unregulated transactions look like, contributing to computer science, and building larger coalitions to use the software, including work with Emurgo and PwC on commercialization.
27:58 At dinner with the former prime minister of Georgia the conversation was not about payment or credential systems but about rebuilding an entire country on a blockchain, and the Iowa Democratic caucus disaster shows even the richest nations cannot get basic voting right.
29:17 A ceremony at the University of Wyoming on the 14th announces a donation opening an authentication lab and a Plutus development lab.
29:38 Wyoming becomes the first university in the world to accept a unique asset, with Beef Chain among the partners and matching seven figure funds.
25:23 Gives an Africa update, heading to South Africa, Uganda, and Rwanda in March 2020 with meetings planned with South Africa's first family and Ethiopian engineers.
8:21 Announces an upcoming trip across Africa, meeting the president of South Africa and traveling to Rwanda, Uganda, and possibly Tanzania for a telecom deal, plus Ethiopia.
8:59 Outlines plans for the Cardano Foundation to earmark 2020 budget for community development in Africa and meet Ethiopia's agricultural transformation agency about track and trace supply chain and voucher programs.
3:46 The Africa trip moves tentatively from March to May, covering a South African conference run by a good friend plus Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia, and the extra time should make the trip better.
1:00:11 Cites years of work in Ethiopia, Argentina, Mongolia and Africa on voting, property rights and supply chains as proof Cardano was never built as a casino.
28:04 Praises Haskell course graduates in Ethiopia, several of whom IOHK hired, including one now on the cybersecurity team.
1:12:18 Gives a status update on the Ethiopia project's feasibility study, delayed by coronavirus disruptions there.
36:58 The on the ground Africa team led by John O'Connor across Ethiopia, Tanzania, South Africa and Nigeria, contrasting it with rivals who just talk.
37:46 Lays out the litmus test for who is serious about Africa: real agricultural technology work on supply chains, fertilizer tracking and farm equipment financing.
38:19 Outlines plans for sustainable mine financing in Africa covering environmental cleanup and worker safety, stressing three to seven year timelines and political risk.
40:10 Accuse rival projects like Apollo, Iconic and Tron of making Africa claims without real follow through, saying no one owns the continent.
54:56 Outlines how displaced diaspora populations, lacking stable identity documents, are a natural fit for identity plus payment systems, with plans in northern Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia likely following the farmer voucher work.
1:12:13 John O'Connor is deep in negotiations on a major deal to bring six million Ethiopian farmers onto the Cardano blockchain.
1:24:17 Praises Georgia's efficient digital government and describes the academic diploma pilot that grew into its national credential verification project.
1:25:15 Details the logistics of an Ethiopia farmer voucher program, where only a fraction of six million farmers even own a cell phone.
2:35:16 Credits Gates Foundation staff in Africa as sincere and competent, doing real good on vaccines, sanitation, and malaria nets despite Gates' image problem.
11:33 Hundreds of pilots run from academic credential verification to voter registration, but he is most excited about agricultural technology since the UN estimates 260 million people falling into acute starvation, where even 5 percent dying is twice the Holocaust from sheer inefficiency.
12:19 Gives fertilizer vouchers to African farmers as an example, paired with education, crop rotation, irrigation, and shared mechanization to move from subsistence to real income.
13:05 The same federated tools that distribute vouchers can build an identity system giving economic agency to millions of farmers.
13:51 Identity enables reputation systems, micro-marketplaces, better price discovery, and collective crop decisions negotiated without any central authority or government participation.
14:37 Fertilizer vouchers with high repayment could yield 15 to 25 percent returns, tranched into sovereign-guaranteed assets with low default risk like the FDIC, so in a negative-rate era greed would pour billions into microcredit, the largest wealth transfer from developed to developing world, investment not charity.
16:10 Globalization forces policymakers to change, since Starbucks buying only Fair Trade sustainable coffee means farmers who cannot prove it lose access to the largest buyers and get less money.
16:57 Only 2 percent of Ethiopia's smallholder farmers have cell phones, so the poorest must upgrade fastest yet are least able to adopt legacy systems, which is the industry's greatest opportunity.