When the sell was confirmed the Nigerian car buyer would ask the American bitcoin buyer to transfer the money to the auction’s account. The central bank’s restrictions hit these businesses, so to get around it people would buy bitcoin and then sell enough for the value of the car at the American auction. He then bought the iPhone off AliExpress.Īnother example he saw is Nigerian people buying used American cars online and selling them for 5,000 percent profit. He bought bitcoin, put it into his Paxful wallet, then sold the bitcoin to a guy on Paxful who put $1,200 into his Alipay. Youssef gave the example of a Nigerian man that wanted to buy an iPhone X. “Even if you had a million bucks in your account, you could only spend around 100 bucks,” Youssef says.īitcoin: the answer to money restrictions? Flickr / wuestenigel This came after an oil price crash in 2014 that led to government restrictions on international spending. Until last summer, banks in Nigeria placed restrictions of $100 online spending via credit card per month. “That’s the first use case, they just wanna preserve the value of their wealth,” Youssef says.

Other countries have experienced worse instability: Zimbabwe’s dollar famously hit a hyperinflation rate of 500 billion percent before the country abandoned the currency in 2009.

Youssef points to Nigeria, where 1,000 naira has moved from being worth $8 in 2005 to just $3 over the past 12 months. People need a stable currencyĭeveloping economies with currency instability are an ideal use case for bitcoin. Here’s why Africa is the perfect continent for a cryptocurrency boom. The service allows users to trade a wide number of goods for cryptocurrency: $10 million per week goes from Nigeria to China in iTunes gift cards alone. Nigeria is fighting with the United States for number one in terms of transactions on the exchange, with Ghana third. At some times in Nigeria and Angola, the price has jumped to 100 percent more than global value as eager customers snap up crypto. Adewale Bankole, president of the Bastiat Society and Humaniq ambassador of Nigeria, told CCN in June 2017 that Africa is “most fertile land for cryptocurrencies.” In fact, demand for crypto in Africa has been so high that the Zimbabwe-based Golix exchange saw the price of one bitcoin peak at $34,000 in December 2017, 40 percent higher than its price elsewhere. It’s not just Youssef that’s spotted the opportunities. In the beginning we had no idea what was going on, why do these folks want Bitcoin so badly?” “We’re growing pretty fast, especially into Africa,” Youssef, whose company has traded over 40,000 bitcoins since its founding two-and-a-half years ago, tells Inverse. Ray Youssef, head of cryptocurrency exchange platform Paxful, has found himself at the heart of one of cryptocurrency’s most promising use cases: using technology to help people in developing countries. Bitcoin is revolutionizing markets in Africa.

Need bitcoin expert