Growing Interest in Emerging Technologies (Crypto and Web3) among Africans
The Web
The World Wide Web (also called the web) celebrated its 30th anniversary with half of the world online in 2019. Overtime, the web has transformed the world and also widened humans’ scale. With web 1.0, the user’s role was primarily to read the information provided. The technology did not provide an option to communicate back to the content producers.
The inception of web 2.0, ushered in the interaction of web users and site. This allowed users communicate with other users. Even though one can assume that the inventions of smart phones had peaked the web 2.0 technology, it can be argued famous web 2.0 applications include Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter contributed to its rise.
Emerging Technologies
Africans and people in emerging markets have always had to play catch-up but not with recent technological trends. The surge in the adoption of tech processes has now portrayed Africans as tech savvy people. It has been seen that Africans are playing defining roles in the development of emerging technologies.
Although, there have been sparse involvement of Africans startups, the like of VALR and Nestcoin are showing flashes of greater things in Africa’s tech startup space. Crypto involvement is a crucial subset and building block of web3 startups. Africa happens to be one of the fastest-growing crypto markets globally. Six countries – Kenya, Nigeria, Togo, South Africa, Ghana and Tanzania – gained spots on the 2021 Global Crypto Adoption Index Top 20 list.
Although Africa captures only 2 percent of the global value of all cryptocurrencies received and sent, the continent registered $105.6 billion worth of crypto assets between July 2020 and June 2021, growing over 1,200% by value received in the last year. Africa has topped peer-to-peer (P2P) payment platforms in transaction volume across all regions using this metric.
Source: Chainalysis
Emerging Technologies Enthusiast
Historically, new models of computing tend to emerge every 10 to 15 years. The latest is Web3, one of the emerging technologies owned by builders and users, orchestrated by tokens. Web3 proponents believe that open, distributed, and permissionless ledgers will reshape the global economy. They also believe that incumbents will lose their primary competitive advantage, including data monopolies and associated network effects, creating massive opportunities for new value creation and wealth.
Larry Frank (Blogger, Crypto and Web3 expert) while sharing his journey into becoming an emerging tech enthusiast said getting insights from his favourite Crypto YouTuber Trevor James created the push in his crypto development.
“I’m still blogging till date, and as a matter of fact, we are actively running 6 blogs at Lofakia Limited. Talking of my crypto journey, I started picking interest in cryptocurrency late 2016 while I was in my 300 level in the University of Port Harcourt Nigeria. Those days, I’ll wake up to notifications from my favourite Crypto YouTuber Trevor James.
“As at then, he was marketing bit connect, a cryptocurrency that was built around a pyramid scheme. Trevor gave out 0.1BTC everyday on his YouTube channel, and this made me to want to know more about this thing called “cryptocurrency”. In my quest for knowledge, I got to fall in love with the underlining technology called “blockchain”, and ever since hit has been a win win,” said Larry.
Before venturing into the new tech, Larry Frank was majored solely on blogging. While speaking with The Ouut, he added that the versatility blogging offered him aided in his development as a crypto expert. With white paper services offered to blockchain companies as a freelancer, he was able to stay updated with what was new in the ‘cryptosphere’.
Helping Others Grow
“There’s a lot on the table for Africa in the crypto community, but let quickly tackle your question before I make my point. The crypto market is a 24/7 open market, meaning that there’s no time the market is closed unlike the traditional stock market,” said Larry Frank while speaking on the opportunities available within the new technologies.
“Crypto has no restrictions. You can access your wallets and execute a trade from anywhere you are as far as you have an Internet enabled device” He added.
“Like I said earlier, there is a lot on the table for African youths to grab in the cryptocurrencv space. Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology doesn’t revolve around trading alone. I have made decent amount of money offering different crypto services in the past 4 years as a freelancer,” Larry Frank concluded.
You can check to see some of the services offered by the Larry Frank here.