Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Atsu. Atsu is the founder of Bitsika Africa.
It’s an entire ecosystem of a plethora of products like B2B wallet as well as virtual cards which is designed specifically for Ghana, for the African continent. He has been an innovator and an entrepreneur for a long time. He was studying in USA but he dropped out of college and came back to Ghana with a simple mission to create tech products that empower Africans to solve their own problems.
So what he is building is commendable. The solution is very easy to use. It is one of the first solutions that employed USSD and short codes to basically empower even folks with non-smartphones to get like a wallet address and become a part of the web3, you know, brigade so to say.
This is a very interesting conversation. I can’t wait for you guys to hear this. Let’s deep dive right in.
Hi Atsu, thank you so much for taking out the time to speak to me today. How are you doing? I’m great, I’m awesome. How are you? I’m doing really well.
Thank you so much for making the time to speak to me today. Can you share us a little about your journey from studying in the US to returning to Ghana and starting Bitsikka? What kind of motivated you to take this path? But before that I would also like you to touch a little upon how you got into web3. All right, that’s a big question.
I’m glad we are starting high. Anyway, so my name is Atsu. I’m from Ghana, Accra, Ghana on the western coast of Africa.
So I spent my first 18 years in Ghana like most Ghanaian young kids do. But after high school I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to continue my education in the United States. So I went to this small but really good school in Minnesota called Carleton College, a small liberal arts college.
So when I went to school, initially, believe this or not, I wanted to be a film director. That was my initial career ambition. I was lucky enough, my parents wanted to support that as well.
So that’s why I went to that college specifically. So the college had like a media department, like very good media lab. So I wanted to pursue like film directing or something in like the visual media.
But once I got to school, I started making a lot of friends, especially with international kids. And most of them were computer focused. Most of them were into IT, into computer science, pursuing mathematics.
And every vacation they would go on to all these exciting internships in like Facebook and Microsoft and Google. And we’re in the US, right? So that’s the kind of direction you go if you decide to focus on computers. So I think that caught me, I caught a bug from my friends.
People always talk about peer pressure in a negative way. But for me, that peer pressure was rather positive. Whereas like you see your friends venturing into a particular direction and then you’re more or less lured or pulled into the same direction as them.
So I think that was around like 2014, 15. And around the same time that technology was more or less becoming popular in Africa as well, in the sense of the abiding tech community, people, you know, we’re having a lot of developers on the ground blossoming in Africa, people building all these mobile apps and putting on the store, people downloading. So it was more like a very perfect time for me.
So I stopped focusing on what I really went to school for, which was wanting to be a director and started going into like the tech direction. Because that’s what I saw my friends do. I saw it was, they were making impact, they were building stuff, it was lucrative.
So I would literally skip class, be in my dormitory and be learning how to code. I learned HTML, I was learning CSS, I was learning different frameworks, I was trying to learn Ruby on Rails, just learning different things. So one of my friends and I, he’s a Chinese guy, I got good enough that we built a project together.
We built like a small, we thought it was going to be a startup. I ended up just being like a web project. We built it for, it was called College Puppy.
It was like an on-campus marketplace, kind of like something in your bedroom you want to get rid of, or something like that for the school. So I got to get my hands dirty and I was just so obsessed ever since. So after I saw the magic of what I was able to do with just my technical skills and just ideas in my head, I just couldn’t stop creating or coming up with ideas or trying to build stuff.
So it got so bad to the point that I just decided to leave school. I’m like, there’s a bad in tech community in Ghana, what am I doing? You get me? What am I doing in school? I want to be on the ground. I want to be in Ghana.
I want to be doing something cool, building something for the society. I always had that in mind. So I came back around 2016.
So when I came back home, things didn’t just take off from there. I had to keep improving my skills. I had to be building different applications that even did not work out.
I had this calendar for myself where every three months I would release a new product and just put it out there. I might just get like 50 or 70 users, but I didn’t care. The next three months I’ll build something else.
So I built about four or five different tech projects that just my close friends and maybe their friends used. But an observer might think, oh, he was wasting his time. But for me, I didn’t see it that way.
I was always improving my tech skills. I was always getting better. And it came in handy because in the winter of 2017, just the next year, we kept hearing about this thing called Bitcoin that was about to hit 20K.
There’s this thing called Bitcoin. It’s called Bitcoin. Remember that time? That was when the most random person, like your mom or the most random, like the doorman or whoever would ask you, do you know this thing called Bitcoin? That was the first hype cycle of Bitcoin that peaked in late 2017, if I’m not mistaken.
This is the ICO boom period. Yes. The ICO boom period had to be at that time, like in late 2017.
Everyone was asking about Bitcoin. Everyone was asking about Bitcoin. It became very like, what’s this Bitcoin thing? So I started taking interest in it.
It’s like, okay, let me explore this Bitcoin thing. I found it so, so fascinating. So I think we in Africa, I don’t know if you know about mobile, mobile money or in Pesa.
So we have these digital money transfer systems that are connected to our mobile phones. I know in India, there’s something called UPI. I don’t know if UPI is connected to mobile numbers.
Yeah. UPI is connected to mobile numbers in India. Okay.
Okay. It’s basically connected. So the way it works is that, you know, your mobile phone is actually connected to a particular account, right? A savings account that you might have in the bank.
So it gets linked, the number gets linked to that particular account. And you can use your mobile, you know, your UPI ID, which is usually your mobile phone and perhaps the bank name or the identifier of that particular issue of that UPI ID. And that you can use that ID to make transactions.
That’s how it works. Oh, that’s so cool. So for the one in Africa, mobile money, that’s not necessarily, it doesn’t connect to a bank account.
So mobile money, the SIM card on your phone is the bank account. It doesn’t have to be connected to an actual bank account in the bank. So I think that’s different.
So mobile money was very instrumental in giving financial services to just the most average African who may not meet the requirements to even have a bank account or may not have the documentation for a bank account. They could, or they don’t have like the minimum deposit for, you know, like a fancy bank account or like a visa card. Mobile money in Pesa was like a savior.
It’s used by hundreds of millions of people in Africa. So as an African, I was familiar with mobile money. So when I started looking into Bitcoin, I thought of it as, oh man, this is more like a mobile money for like the whole world.
That’s how I saw it. This was like a UPI for like the whole world. That’s the first thought I got.
I was like, wow, this is crazy. Like the applications you could build on top of this, like global apps. And by now it was decentralized.
You know, it was sovereign. Like, oh my God, you could build unstoppable projects. You could build, it was just so interesting.
I think those are like the ideas that everybody gets the first time they experience like the product. Those are the same emotions that people go through. Like, it was just so amazing.
I couldn’t believe that like something like that had been invented. So that was a very good time for me to discover Bitcoin. Because like I said, I was getting good at coding over the years, right? Getting good at coding over the years.
So instead of just reading, so I had other friends who were also, I guess, exploring crypto at the time, right? But they would just read articles and watch YouTube videos. And then that was as far as they got involved. But because I was like decent at coding at the time, I didn’t just stop at reading and watching YouTube videos.
I was like, hmm, you know, I have coding skills. Let me build something for crypto, right? So it became a thing of like, if I could build something that was specific to the experience of Africa, like what could I come up with? Because at the time there were already a few crypto products. There were like a few exchanges.
There were this, there was that, there was this, there was that. I’m like, I don’t want to build another boring Bitcoin exchange. That was my thinking at the time, right? I wanted to build something that when people see they’ll be like, oh wow, I haven’t seen this one before.
So I was like, okay, this is what I’m going to do. In Ghana, we have this thing called USSD. I don’t know if you guys have it.
So it’s basically this thing where you just type a short code and you can get like a text menu. Right, right. Yeah.
Basically like sending an SMS, right? You send an SMS and that SMS where a menu response comes back to you. So you can use it on the most basic phone ever, like even phones that are not smart. Yeah.
Even the non-smart phones, the basic phones, that’ll work as well. Right. Yeah.
So we call it USSD in Ghana. I think in several African countries as well, it’s called USSD. So I’m like, there’s millions of people with mobile phones in Ghana.
A lot of them have smartphones, but most of them would just have like normal phones, like just a non-smart phone. What if someone built a way where you could give Bitcoin addresses to literally everyone with a mobile phone, regardless of whether it was a smartphone or not. And what if they could transfer Bitcoin between each other via their phone numbers.
So it was just a simple idea I had in my mind. So I locked myself in a room for about a month. Not like literally, but you know what I mean.
And then I came up with the first product, first iteration. So version one or literally version zero of Bittika. So what the product was, was that when you dial the short code on your phone, whether it was a damn phone or a smartphone, we created a Bitcoin address and attached it to your phone number.
Okay. That’s very interesting. Yes.
And then when the next guy does it, we do the same. When the next girl does it, we do the same. So at the end of the day, we had hundreds of people who they dialed our short code and we created a Bitcoin address and attached it to their phone number.
So if they wanted to send Bitcoin between each other, they didn’t have to type like any long Bitcoin hash or something like that. You know, the Bitcoin address. Basically the address.
Yeah. You don’t have to type out the address, which kind of makes it prone to mistakes. Right.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So you just use your phone number as the address. So if I, if both of the 12 of us were on the network, all I needed to send you Bitcoin was just to type in your phone number and then I could just send you Bitcoin, just like I’ll send you mobile money kind of. So it was just a very interesting product.
So like Bitcoin accessible to anyone in a very user friendly way where they didn’t have to be technical and they didn’t have to deal with like all the, you know, like the nerdy nuances of crypto. So it really, I mean, it didn’t explode, but it got a lot of like attention from like very key players. People thought it was so cool.
Like it was a, it was a good conversation starter with anyone I met. So if I went to a tech program or I was talking to someone online, every time I showed it to them, they were like, oh my God, this is so cool. Like, and you know, it was something very specific to like a developing community society like Ghana.
Right. So that was my first foray into crypto, into Web3 and Binance saw that and then they made an investment into us. So yes.
So that’s how I started. Sorry for rambling so long. No, no, no.
This is not a ramble. This is your story. And I’m so grateful that you would share it with us.
You know what you’ve said and the way you kind of started building right from college. And then, you know, obviously you got disillusioned and you wanted to move back, which is what you did. And you built something for your nation, for the African continent.
And you mentioned, you know, USSD, I think it’s pretty much global for GSM phones, like a global system for mobiles. So I think it works in a similar way in India as well for the basic phones that you can, you know, type out a little short code and you get like the menu details. But this is just very innovative that, you know, anybody, even people without a smartphone could get like a wallet address and become a part of this new parallel economy that is being created.
So it started obviously with that. And, you know, you guys, how did you initially gain that traction? Like who were your early adopters? All right. So our early adopters were literally like my friends or people on my WhatsApp backstage.
So just stuff like that. So the USSD version of the app, it lasted for a couple of months. But once we got our investment from Binance, I think there was a need to build something bigger and something more commercial.
So it became a thing of like, yes, this is a fun, nerdy project you can put on GitHub. It shows your technical prowess. But you don’t want to like maybe because the crypto industry was starting to grow gradually.
And then a lot of like the middle class people with smartphones and stuff, they started exploring different crypto platforms. And the crypto platforms were all, you know, all these American and European platforms. So it became a thing of like, oh, there’s a new gold rush in town where people locally are looking for crypto products to use.
So you, the local developers, I hope you do not miss this opportunity to actually capture your own native market. So it became a thing of like that where we had to have like a serious conversation with ourselves like, oh, okay, we need to, we really need to focus on building something commercial to capture the new gold rush of the middle class venturing into crypto. So the middle class are people, not on USD, but people who have Apple devices or Android devices, and they have a little money to spend and they are looking for some solutions.
So we did a few iterations. So we got to the bitsecker that people know now. So it became a product where we’re using crypto in two ways, explicitly people could acquire like retail amounts of crypto and implicitly we’re using crypto to solve problems like border cross, cross border remittance transfers and giving them virtual cards and all that.
So for people who are crypto savvy, they could just buy small amounts of crypto on the app directly. And people who were not crypto savvy, they would use the app to achieve other things, but crypto was what was pioneered, but they didn’t even have to know. So they were still benefiting from crypto without even have to realize that they were doing that.
So that was the new bitsecker that people came to know. So within about a full year, so we launched that in September of 2019. So after like the calendar year of 2020, that was the next year, we had processed about $40 million in transactions at the time.
So yeah, that was sort of like a good signifier of what we had built. Hmm. Oh, absolutely.
Getting traction was something that you’ve built and something so relevant, which is as, and I keep underlining the fact that in reemphasizing on the fact that, you know, it’s something that you were building, which was for your nation, for your continent. And I think that is just the easiest way to perhaps, like nothing is easy, but I mean, it’s like the quickest, perhaps an easy way to find a product market fit, right? Because who else would understand the problems better than somebody who’s actually living there and experiencing those problems themselves. Yeah, exactly.
So that was basically what we went through. So yeah. I was talking about the product right now, as you mentioned that, you know, obviously you’ve come a long way from a simple USD app.
And now, you know, you have a wallet and you have P2P trading. You also have virtual cards, like you mentioned. So there are a bunch of questions that I have vis-a-vis this, but my first question perhaps would be that, you know, regarding the kind of backlash.
Did you receive any backlash from the government or in terms of compliance? Because I am not very aware of the compliance and the laws and the policy that are in Ghana for crypto and, you know, even the African continent as a whole. So was there any backlash that you kind of received once these apps were live? And how did you come back? Yes. So I’m about to get some PTSD by discussing it.
So I think it’s also important to state that once our app started like seeing some traction, we didn’t waste time to remain in Ghana. We started expanding to other African countries. So we went to Nigeria, went to Cameroon.
We ended up going to about 11 countries where we have a presence. That’s within Africa. So, and I had to state that in order to answer your question, because the Africa, Africa is made up of many small countries that are very segmented.
They are segmented on like, you know, national lines, obviously, but also language lines. It’s a very diverse continent. Yeah.
Very, very diverse continent. So imagine it more like, imagine if every city in India had a different language and a different currency. That’s what Africa is basically.
So in a sense, that can be an advantage, but it can also be a disadvantage, because what if those barriers didn’t exist and it could be like one big country, you can see how India is developing and all that. Right. But I think what I really want to talk about is the fact that every country has their own policies on crypto.
Every country has their own policies on crypto. So it’s not like a situation whereby, oh, this is what the whole African thinks. Right.
Like I said, it’s just a bunch of small countries with each having their own central bank, each having their own policies and their own economic situation. So every country just has, you know, how they think about crypto, what they think about it, whether it should exist or not. And various countries have evolved over time, some progressively, some regressively.
It’s just sort of been like a myriad of sort of like different attitudes towards crypto, you know, across the continent. So we’ve just had like the worst time in terms of having to navigate the dynamics of every individual country. So our app, when we first launched it, it was an open app.
You could just come, download it and start working. But over time, we had to partition the app so that people in Nigeria would see this, but they wouldn’t see that. People in Ghana would see this, but they wouldn’t see that.
People in Cameroon would see this and they wouldn’t see that, if that makes sense. So there were different crypto regulations that we had to abide by in different countries. So I think most countries started off more like, we don’t understand this crypto thing and we’re just going to be spectators.
A lot of countries started out like that. So like I said, we had a very good year in 2020. And not just us, I think most crypto companies had made a killing in that year because people were just at home.
They were, you know, people were getting stimulus packages from either work or from the government or wherever. So they had liquidity to spend. So the crypto products and even like stock market products, they just went crazy.
If you remember how the Robinhood means from back in the day. Yeah. So all these products just went crazy.
So I think after the pandemic, after the various government realized that, okay, the pandemic has been managed or they’ve understood, you know, it’s peak or whatever the case may be. They put the focus back because initially their focus was on making sure their currencies were still strong during the pandemic. But after they realized that, okay, pandemic is receding or is being put under control, then they turned their focus back to the small fintechs who were doing crazy numbers in crypto.
And it’s like, oh, this crypto thing, we thought it was going nowhere. We thought we could just stand on the sidelines and just let these kids do what they wanted to do. But based on how kids are performing and just how much progress all these small applications are doing, we have to have a strong stance because there were situations where like in Nigeria, especially I heard about reports where the central banks were not seeing as much revenue from remittances as they were seeing in previous years.
Because a lot of the remittances were now passing through, you know, crypto applications that they couldn’t control, that were distributed, you know, working with decentralized products that they couldn’t put taxes on or they couldn’t take a cut from. So there were a few reports like that, if that makes sense. So like they were just seeing that, oh, their revenues are dwindling.
And I think they obviously want to forecast their minds like, okay, if our revenues are reducing like right now, what would it look like 10 years from now, right? So a lot of central banks started putting just outright bans. So Nigeria literally banned crypto, banned all the API providers and banks from dealing with crypto companies. They literally put an outright ban.
I think Ghana did the same. Ghana did the same, but did not announce it. Nigeria did it, but announced it.
There were other smaller countries that were exploring doing the same, like Cameroon. And so it’s been a battle. It’s been a battle.
So we were more like a cross-border product, like I said, dealing with a lot of fiat ramps, off ramps and on ramps. But all these problems, all these problems with the various central banks, the various countries, it got us thinking, right? Because it’s like, oh, you’re in this country. Then they are like, oh, take all these features out.
Then you take it out. And now you’ve lost your users in that country. And that happens in this country, then happens in that country.
But then I’m like, even in the presence of all these things, there are other crypto apps that are thriving. So like, you know, Trust Wallet, right? Trust Wallet is always doing well, no matter what government is saying. Or like PancakeSwap, or Uniswap, or Binance P2P.
So I was just monitoring and I was observing that in the crypto world, there are products that interface with fiat directly. And these products are always at the mercy of whatever local central bank they’re dealing with. And then there are crypto products that they don’t interface with fiat directly.
So no matter the regulatory landscape in their local communities, they are still able to thrive. Yeah, they’re able to function, right? Because unless you’re touching fiat, it is something that doesn’t really come under the ambit. Unless there are very strict regulations in place already.
Yeah. Yes, yes. And even if I could use like an Indian example, like Polygon.
Polygon is a decentralized system, decentralized platform. And it’s used without permission, it’s used without control, as you know, it’s under Ethereum. So no matter what the Indian central bank says about crypto, I know India has gone back and forth a lot of times, right? With crypto.
Polygon as a product, you know, Polygon, right? Matic, as a product. Yeah, they are going to thrive regardless, right? That’s my guess. They’re going to do well regardless of whether, even if India brings a crypto ban tomorrow, people are not going to stop using Polygon.
Exactly, it’s the technology, right? Because it’s an infrastructure technology. But then, yeah. It’s usually the consumer apps that kind of have like a harder time, and especially if they’re dealing with fiat when it comes to any policy being created.
And then you can see a product like WazirX who had numbers crash after there were restrictions on crypto in India. So for me, those are always like lessons. I’ve had those lessons personally, but to see it on an even bigger scale, it reinforces those lessons as well.
It’s like, if you could find a way to build products that can withstand government control, especially because they are connected to fiat, then you have to maybe improve your circumstances so that you don’t get caught off guard in the future. So that is what led our thinking and shifted us towards building for P2P.
Because we saw that P2P platforms, especially like Binance P2P, that was like the biggest one in Africa. They do not, they do not connect to fiat ramps directly. Users just trade between themselves and transfer fiat between themselves P2P and no fiat passes through the Binance platform itself.
So what this does is that there’s a level of immunity that that provides because you cannot threaten Binance P2P that, hey, we’re going to cut off your UPI lines or we’re going to cut off your MTN or mobile money lines because they are not connected to those platforms directly, as in for the P2P market. So I’m like, like Bitsikan needs to become a product that could resist those pressures, could resist those pressures of like, hey, we’re shutting you down in this country or we’re shutting down. What if, you know, what if we became a global product? What if we became a product that was more focused on crypto on the infrastructure side where even if there’s going to be fiat, we will not install fiat ramps.
Users can transfer fiat directly to each other. And that cannot be necessarily shut down at scale. Right.
So that’s where that thinking came from. It was more like I think having to think quick on your feet so as you could keep surviving as a company. So that’s where that came from.
Right. Yeah, absolutely. I think varied policy across different countries have made it difficult to create a truly a global facing consumer app for crypto.
I think especially the one that deals with fiat and considering not everybody is very comfortable with crypto right now and to get them into the system, there has to be there are certain touch points with fiat and that kind of creates definitely creates problems. So, you know, you’ve mentioned that it has been quite a journey and it’s been a journey with its own ups and downs while you’ve been trying to push for this solution. But if you had to give me like a ballpark figure about the kind of traction you have seen and like the number of users in terms of users and the kind of geographies that you’re currently available in with your applications, can you shed some light on that? You might repeat in the last but like, what should I shed a light on? Basically, the number of users that you have seen for all of these, because there has been, as you mentioned that, you know, there is like a little push from the government and as well in terms of policy and that kind of makes it a little harder to find depth in terms of traction, right? So users as well as the countries in which your apps and your tools are available.
All right. So we’ve reached about 300,000 users. So not hitting a million yet, 300,000, but I’m sort of like, I’m happy about the speed at which we’ve grown.
Like we’ve grown decently for our market, but not too quickly, because I think when you grow too quickly, you usually exhaust the attention of your users in the sense that, okay, everyone who would possibly download your app has already tried it once and whatever impression they may have had about it three years ago, they still have that in mind. So I don’t know, you’ve exhausted that opportunity to make a new first impression. So I think that when, and this is more like an advice to consumer products, because consumer products usually, they just believe in growth at all costs, even from the beginning, but they end up hurting themselves when they grow too quickly, because you exhaust that attention.
So right now, as we’re here with our new P2P direction, there’s just, so we can decide to grow a million users per year now, and then there’ll be always new people who would come discover our product and use it. I think that’s a better position to be in than to have exhausted like all the options of people who could try your app. So we have about 300K users now.
Awesome. Yes. So my new plan is to now with the P2P, with the USDT virtual cards, we are planning to add prediction markets by the end of the year, the platform, and then expansion to Indian audiences, maybe even starting next month, or by the end of next month, that’s like campaigns in the Indian community as well.
So with these, my aim, my new aim is to maybe attract like a million users annually. So we reached a point where we want to grow even bigger than that. So yeah, that’s where we are now.
And in terms of countries, so we were in 11 countries as far as fiat ramps are concerned, but now that we have products that are going to be very crypto native, we are even doing our way with that concept of quote unquote countries where we are at. We just want to be a crypto product that people can just use, right? Like let’s say Trust Wallet. Trust Wallet, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think they even have an idea which countries people are when they use a product.
It’s just a crypto product that people can use anyway. So that’s, that’s how I’m trying to think about it. Right.
This is wonderful. And you know, you’re, I’m more proud of the kind of goals that you’ve set for yourself and the platform. Can you tell me a little about the products that you’re thinking of launching in India? Like is it going to be a whole suite of products with the P2P wallet, cards, everything, or are you going to be doing it in a, you know, staggered way? No.
So I think any country we decide to go to in terms of focus of campaigns, those countries will get a complete suite of what we have. So they are like, like you mentioned, like the wallets, obviously the wallets does not have to be geographically restricted. Indians will have that on day one.
They would have USDT virtual cards on day one. I think that’s like one of the big things that I want to promote to the Indian community. And then also like to build out the USSD, sorry, the P2P marketplace for India as well.
So I know that P2P market being a marketplace tool, it usually takes like time and efforts in order to aggregate like a crowd around it. So that will be a more like effortful and maybe more strategic journey. But yeah, so the USDT virtual cards and the wallet will be, you know, readily available to Indians on day one.
And then P2P as well, but we’ll gradually grow the P2P market. But the P2P market, we will have to get like P2P traders, people who trade Indian currency for USDT and vice versa with, you know, fast accounting tools like UPI, Paytm, just products like that. So yeah, I’m on the lookout for people like that.
We just need a couple of them, maybe just 10 or 20 of such people in order to kickstart the product. So I’m on the lookout for that as well. So if you know people who can connect me to traders or, you know, traders yourself, I’ll be happy to make that connection.
Yes. And one then very big to come in is the prediction market as well. It’s already in the works.
So open to launch by the end of the year. And then that would also be a big as well. So I’m looking out for Indian expansion and looking to make connections as well.
Awesome. You know, I’m going to help you out there probably after this recording and make a few connects for you. Now, you know, we’ve talked a little, we’ve talked about the milestones and what you’re building.
Can you also touch a little upon the virtual card and how does the user flow work for that? Okay. So the virtual card, we’ve already seen massive success with virtual card over the years. We launched our virtual card for the very first time in like 2020, like early 2020.
And since then we’ve just done countless virtual cards, countless virtual card transactions for our users. So like we’ve done very well on but I now want to, and by those who are off yet, virtual cards in the sense of people put African currency deposits onto the app and then they get to generate dollar virtual cards, right? That was a service we’re offering. And we still offer that today.
It’s still being used today, but I want to transition to the more global audience of USDT virtual cards. So USDT virtual card serves a specific community of people who already have crypto and they want ways to spend it. Because if you think about it, when you put USDT on a virtual card, on a Visa card, you’re essentially spending USDT on all the shops you paid the card on.
So let’s say if I put a hundred dollar USDT on a Bitsika Visa card, I can use the card to pay on Amazon, on Spotify, on Netflix, on Chad GPT. So you are basically indirectly using USDT to pay on all these platforms. So when people talk about, oh, I wish crypto would be spendable one day, or those kinds of comments, I’m like, you can already do that now, right? I think usually the way we picture a solution might not be how the solution actually materializes in real life, but our goal may still be achieved, right? People want to get to a point where they want to spend USDT on everyday things.
I’m like, you can already do that now. You can just put USDT on a Bitsika card and go spend it anywhere. So I think that’s the vision I’m going for.
So with that, it opens up a global market. I don’t care where you’re coming from in any country in the world. As long as you can deposit USDT onto the app, you can create a card and then you can keep going.
Awesome. That’s brilliant. That makes it easy, right? And I think ease of use, it becomes a very big factor for getting people onto new solutions, be it web 3 or not.
So this is good. It’s straightforward and very least resistive. We’ve touched upon the compliance-related issues in terms of the challenges that you have felt while building Bitsika, but if you had to think from the user’s perspective, what are the kind of challenges that the typical African national of any of the countries of the continent would feel when it comes to the economy in general? What kind of challenges are they facing so that the builders who are listening in can get some ideas and perhaps build in the right direction? The challenges.
So I think people, the African consumers, they just want to be able to do very simple things with their crypto or with their fiat-to-crypto. So I think a lot of people in Africa or India or in the developing world, the founders, we get brainwashed by the products we see in the West. Like we are always on Twitter, we see all these European and American products that focus a lot on very idealistic projects.
And then sometimes you may feel like that’s the direction you have to build. This very fancy NFT marketplace built on top of this obscure blockchain. A lot of African founders feel like they have to do something like that to thrive or to be respected or to gain traction.
But we need to build for the realities of the societies that we live in. So for our developing societies, like Africa and India and the rest of the developing world, we have very basic needs that we want to be able to achieve. People around these countries, they may belong to a country where their currency is struggling.
So their local currency is struggling. So in that case, what do they need? They need access to quick USDT and access from back to their local currency. So in that sense, what happens is that if you can build a very simple tool for in developing countries, let’s say in Ghana or in India or Nigeria to access USDT and to move from USDT back to their local currencies, you’ve probably built something that a hundred million people would use.
So for the young founders coming up, it’s not about building the most fancy idea you can think about. The real place where your talents could shine as a founder in a developing country is to build the most simple tools for your people, because we still need those tools. The local people still need those tools.
Especially in Africa, we have a lot of countries, even my country, we’ve had our own struggles with our currency fluctuating, our currency dropping. So building a tool where people can access USDT, it’s just such a game changer. It’s just such a game changer for everybody.
So simple tools like that or prediction markets where anyone can get involved in accurately predicting sports events or political events or future events. It’s a good pastime. It’s a way for people to make some sight change and also prediction markets become like a good source of information as a research tool for information as well.
So we need these kinds of simple products. So that’s what I want to focus on. The very simple products.
So like a simple crypto wallet where you can withdraw money or a simple virtual card product, right? Where you can deposit USDT and get a virtual card for shopping. Or if you don’t have USDT, a simple P2P market where you can get USDT and then use it for a virtual card or for predictions or for other things. So I want to keep going back to the basics.
I think we have at least 10, 20 years of still having to onboard everyday people gradually into crypto. So that’s what I’m here to do. And I want to, yeah.
So I always love building for just the everyday people. I don’t, I’m not seduced by like building for like the corporations or like B2B. No, I just want to focus on consumer.
That’s always my focus. Right. Simple products that basically do solve a real problem that the consumer is facing on a day-to-day basis.
Those are the kinds of products you feel entrepreneurs and builders should be focusing on. Yes. So, you know, you do feel very strongly about how Africans should stay back in Africa and solve the problems of the continent.
How has this philosophy influenced your work and how you’ve, you know, the kind of decisions you’ve taken? I think that you’ve kind of already that our conversation can kind of show that already, but how does it really, you know, have a day-to-day impact on the work that you do and how has it, you know, had an impact on the kind of team that you’ve curated to build on this vision? Yeah. So our team has been fully Ghana, Nigeria throughout our history. We’ve had over, maybe up to 60 people walk through the halls of our company up to this point.
And it’s all been Ghana. It’s all been Ghana or Nigerians. Yes.
I think 99% of everybody. So I really believe in the future of Africa. I believe that Africans need to build our products for ourselves.
Because we think about the mobile one that the app that came out, it was built so that we didn’t want to lose out on the gold rush. We didn’t want, you know, our African mobile marketplace to be dominated by foreign applications. Foreign applications are good, but Africa has some of the best developers, designers out there.
Why can’t we build something for our own markets where it does well and it thrives, right? So I do believe that Africans should be the ones to build our own future. So there’s a very interesting phenomenon happening. There’s this mass migration of talented Africans going to Europe or Canada or the United States, just migrating out of the country.
And it’s costing so much brain drain, not just in the tech industry, even like doctors or like lawyers. And they just, you know, after their education in Africa, they just go to stay in the United Kingdom or, you know, in the United States or Canada has become like a big destination. It’s pretty much very similar with India as well.
I think there’s that we see as well. Yeah. Yeah.
So there’s just so much brain drain and that breaks my heart every talented African thinks that that’s just the part they have to take that. Oh, after school, they just go into Canada and stay at. Yeah.
But, you know, I guess I took the opposite approach. I’m down, but I feel like you can’t really blame people who also decide to migrate out because it’s based on the conditions they’re experiencing locally, right? If you cannot improve their conditions, then you can’t judge them for leaving. So I think what we have to focus on is improving the conditions here.
So I always keep thinking, I always keep thinking of like, you know, if a crypto product like, you know, I’m into crypto and software. So if I built a software product that maybe I got to a billion users, right. A hundred million.
Could there be a way where people can earn revenue from the app where I don’t know about just, you know, you know, the thing about creating jobs. We since we’re kids growing up, we always heard about, you know, we want the government to create jobs so that people could decide to stay in their countries by creating jobs used to mean like building an office building for people to come sit and work. But what if in the new digital age, creating jobs could mean just giving people value on an application that you built, right? What if other young people in India, young people in Ghana and Nigeria could earn from a local crypto app in their own country and they can make a sizable living or whether it’s from referrals or from earning or staking or whatever the case may be.
I mean, if they could have that disposable income from a product like that working, like doing actual work, I think the brain drain would be reduced because people would be living comfortably in their own countries. But I think if you want to think about how to support the future in terms of creating opportunities, we have to start thinking in terms of the digital age, right? Creating jobs should not just mean building an office for people to come and work. That’s not the only way you can create a quote unquote job.
There can be ways to create opportunities for people on a massive scale online. So we also have to start thinking in that direction as well. So yeah, it’s not an easy task to achieve, but yeah, we have to focus on it if we want to get there.
Absolutely. I think you’re right. I think it’s very important to look at creating opportunities which are relevant to the newer generation to keep them motivated and to keep them within the nation so that they can keep doing and adding value towards the nation.
There can be nation building that can actively happen. And we should find ways to motivate these young individuals to stay back in the country. And they’ll only do that when they feel like they’re getting a good return perhaps on their say and they’re getting well compensated and they have a professional vocation where they feel that they’re valued and they’re adding value.
This has been a very, very wonderful conversation. I think I’ve had a lot of fun understanding about the landscape, the financial landscape of the entire African continent, what you’re building. But sadly, we are running out of time and we are actually going over time, but I would love to ask you two more questions.
One is, what is your outlook on the market right now? Are there certain niches or sectors that you think are doing well and they’re here to stay in Web3? So what is your opinion on that? And once you answer that, I’ll ask you my last question. All right. Sectors and niches.
So I think a lot of the big sectors in crypto, we’ve seen how they’ve played out and some of them may have appeared like a flash in the pan, but some of them are just hitting a plateau. I think it’s important for projects to hit a plateau and then grow gradually from there. It happened with the tech that dotcom bubble like 10 years ago where there was just so much hype and then the bubble burst.
And now it’s that same industry is now the biggest industry on earth. So we need to look out for such experiences of phenomenon in crypto as well. So a good example may be like the NFT market.
It had its bubble, the bubble crashed, but then there were interesting NFL projects that are just creeping up slowly. So I find that very interesting. But I think the most fascinating sector to look at now is prediction markets with polymarket.
I don’t know if you’ve been following polymarket. I’m sure you have. Yeah.
Yeah. I have an account in everything. So yeah, it’s very interesting.
So yeah. That could be a very interesting segment as well. So polymarket is very well.
So it has basically validated the thesis of what a large scale crypto based prediction market could look like. But I’ve been reading a lot in that space. And I think people have basically like different ideas of how they think prediction markets can be improved.
They’ve seen like shortcomings in polymarket thinking about how they think they can make it better if they attempted one. So we need competition in the space, right? It doesn’t just have to be one product, right? Like you think about like exchanges, right? There was just one or two exchanges like Mt. Gox, but Mt.
Gox did not become the flagship exchange, right? People thought it was the biggest thing ever, but now it’s nowhere to be found. And now we have a million other exchanges out there. So polymarket, I’m not saying they’re going to die now.
Hopefully they keep going forever, but I’m saying that- There’s always room for other folks to build something. So that’s what’s most interesting to me is prediction markets, but I’m glad they already took that step of like validating the idea. People always talk about first mover advantage, but I think second mover advantage is always better.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. You have all the lesser, perhaps the risk that comes without any validation. You know that, okay, the idea works, and now you just need to find a PMF.
So it’s like half the challenge has already been taken care of. Brilliant. I think I truly concur.
I think NFTs, they started off with a bit of a sputter, then there was a bang, and then there was another bang, which was not so good. But the technology itself behind NFTs is very robust, and we are seeing a lot more use cases come up. Hopefully we’ll find a product market fit soon there.
And production markets, definitely, I think Polymarket is doing splendidly well, especially with the US presidential debate. I think it has, again, been able to go on a center stage there. So yeah, they’re here to stay, and more power to you that you guys are also trying to build something in that space, and all the luck there.
So now to my last question, which is something I ask everybody who comes on the show. You did take a bit of a leap. You dropped out of college, and you moved back and kept building till you came across crypto, Bitcoin, because it wasn’t really called Web3 then, back in 2017.
But when you did, it was quite a leap for you. What would be your suggestions for people who are facing perhaps a similar dilemma for them to be able to start on blockchain? So I think every time you tell a story like this, so I’ve done other interviews, and I’ve told the story, and people come, they come to you, or they come comment and talk about how inspiring or brave you were for taking that leap, as you called it, to leave like a very cushy education in America, come back to Africa, just to strive and build something. So what I would say is that in the moment you’re making that decision, it’s never brave during that time.
It always looks brave in hindsight, right? But at the moment making that decision, it’s always a very difficult decision to make, because you just know that to give up other stuff you are doing to pursue your passion or to pursue whatever blind vision you have, you may be as well throwing your life away or throwing certain opportunities away. So you talk to a lot of young founders who, having to face difficult decisions, because they do not feel brave in the moment, they sometimes feel that they may be doing something wrong, or they sometimes feel that whatever experience they are having is different from what they heard you talk about on a podcast or something. But I think if I’m to offer any clarification to the future founders, the current founders, the young founders, whatever the case may be, my only advice would be that, yes, when you’re making your difficult decisions, you are not going to feel brave in the moment.
It’s only going to sound brave five years later when you have to discuss on a podcast. So if it’s something you really want to do, you can still go ahead and do it. Brave things never feel brave in the moment, they feel brave afterwards.
So yeah, just keep going. That’s wonderful advice. I think that’s something that you don’t hear often, and it should be talked about more often.
Because when you’re in the moment, you’re taking a decision, obviously, you know, you’re not, you’re acting despite your fear. You’re not doing it because you’re feeling very confident, right? You know, you always have a lot of doubts. And only it is, it only starts making sense when you’re looking back.
And all of these labels that get attached that, okay, you’re a super success. And you know, you must have been so courageous and so brave. I think that only happens in retrospect, only, you know, in that moment, you’re just flailing about, right? And you’re just trying to see what really works.
I know, I’ve been in the space and entrepreneur for 15 odd years now. So I know this is something that I could truly resonate with. And I think it should be talked about more often.
This is wonderful. And this is a wonderful way to end this particular recording. Thank you so much, Atsu, for taking out the time to speak to us today.
This has been truly enlightening. And I’m very grateful that you could make the time. Thank you so, so much.