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Bonafide is a USDC powered dollar wallet service that lets anyone send, receive, make online payments, and earn yield.
Features include:
We are in the prototype stage. Our beta will launch in Dec 2021. We haven’t raised money yet and the project is currently funded by our parent company, Moneymie.
Bonafide has acquired the necessary licenses and partnerships to operate a digital dollar wallet platform. We also have engineering resources to bring the project to live. However we are seeking support from the community via a bug bounty system to improve security.
Bonafide is on a mission to include 1b+ Africans into the global economy by providing digital dollar wallets for Africans everywhere.. At the very basic level, Bonafide will offer all Africans the ability to save, send, receive and earn dollars.
The world is a global village, yet 1bn people cannot easily transact in the world’s dominant currency. 1bn+ people do not have access to “globally” available money movement services like paypal. A substantial portion of the world’s trade including trade between African countries are done in United States dollars, creating problems for thousands of businesses in countries who do not have easy access to save or pay in dollars. This makes payments for imports, tuition, software, and other dollar bill payments a painful process. Current alternatives include owning domiciliary accounts with local banks who partner with a correspondent bank. This option is not easily accessible for most citizens. It is also very expensive to move money - it costs $45 on a minimum, 3-5 days.
Poor people are most disproportionately affected by unpredictable inflation. African currencies have suffered from abnormal levels of inflation over the last 3 decades. As a result, networth of Africans half every other 3 years due to currency devaluations and seek stable currencies to save in. The top 5 African countries with the lowest levels of inflation use the same currency the CFA which is benchmarked to France’s franc.
The coronavirus pandemic has also accelerated the growth of remote work. Companies like Deel ($5.5b) and Papaya have reached unicorn valuations by making it easy to pay remote teams. However, there are more people in the freelance (organized and unorganized) space who still find it difficult to get paid. With increase in digital adoption and lack of local unemployment, we expect the trend of Africans working remotely with global companies to be the norm and not the exception.
Current alternatives include getting an account on Transferwise (very few people know this, even Transferwise doesn’t publicize that you can open a US bank account from Nigeria for obvious reasons), or asking a friend or family member to set up PayPal accounts on their behalf and access via VPN.
Lastly, remittance to sub-saharan Africa still remains the most expensive (~8.02%) in the world, according to the World Bank Remittance Report March 2021. This is due to illiquidity and the high costs of movement of dollars to local currencies through the big banks
Bonafide is a USDC powered dollar wallet service that lets anyone send, receive, make online payments, and earn yield. Features include:
We’ve chosen a single currency focus since the majority of international transactions from Africa are in USD. This also helps us provide a super simple app, avoid feature distraction, simplify regulatory concerns, and reduce the amount of technical effort needed to ramp up quickly were we to do multiple currencies.
There are key foundational beliefs that show the “Why” of our approach to solving the problem.
While we are targeting Africans anywhere, we will be focusing our firepower on a beachhead market - audiences based in Africa that currently need to engage in dollar-related transactions at least once a month.
We estimate the 3 personas combined is over 2 million users across Africa.
In the future, We will have the opportunity to offer dollar based financial services directly or in partnership with other players such as Cards, locked savings, investments, p2p lending, p2p fx and BNPL.
Ope, Product + DesignStablecoin lover and has held cryptocurrency since 2013. Built APIs at Indeed as Technical PM and previously founded Jobberman (funded by Tiger Global), Whogohost (60k paying users). MIT Legatum Fellow. Computer Science @ Obafemi Awolowo University.https://www.linkedin.com/in/opeawo/
Oluwaseun, Backend EngineeringBuilt software applications for global small and medium enterprises. As a student, he built his college’s payment systems and got a cut on every transaction. Computer science @ University of Abujahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/omopekun-smart/
Chisom, Frontend and Mobile EngineeringBuilding software for the web, mobile, and for blockchain,Systems Engineering @ University of Lagoshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/chisom-ekwuribe-696b07a9/
Boluwatife , Backend Engineering & QABuilt software on the web and recently in the decentralised space.Computer science @ The Federal University of Technology, Akure.https://www.linkedin.com/in/boluwatife-ayodele-g/
* The amounts shown are budget requests and not (yet) granted to the projects. During the Community Vote phase, voters can indicate whether the project deserves the amount it's asking for (budget request). The total pool of XLM available for SCF#11 is 8M XLM. SDF will allocate the XLM equivalent of the specified USD budget of the submissions with the most votes in descending order of rank until the earlier of (i) the XLM Pool is fully distributed (ii) there is not sufficient XLM remaining in the XLM pool to fully fund the next ranked submission or (iii) there are no remaining eligible submissions. The USD valuation of the budget request in XLM will be calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on December 5, 2022 as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR). Learn more in the SCF Handbook.
*The USD valuation of the award in XLM is calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on July 5th as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR)
**The USD valuation of the award in XLM is calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on December 16, 2021 as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR)
*The USD valuation of the award in XLM is calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on September 27, 2021 as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR)
* The USD valuation of the award in XLM is calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on the date of transfer as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR)