Binance has stepped into Uganda with a flourish as 40,000 new users signed up to the exchange in the hope of bypassing the Ugandan Shilling (UGX).
Many citizens of African countries are unbanked, either by choice or due to complicated prohibitive rules which make it hard to open an account. Uganda is no different, with a recorded 3/4 of the population without any form of conventional banking.
This is Binance’s first fiat-crypto exchange with UGX, the primary fiat currency and comes less than a month after the company acquired an EUR bank account in Malta, with more exchanges to come, according to CEO Changpeng Zhao. Binance’s enigmatic boss clearly realises the potential of Africa as a new investment hub due to the unbanked nature of much of its population:
“Uganda is a really interesting situation, only 11% of the population has bank accounts. It’s both a challenge and an opportunity. So it may be easier to adopt cryptocurrency as a form of currency instead of trying to push for bank adoption”.
Africans have been clever in dealing with financial barriers, and using cryptocurrency is increasingly becoming a go-to way in order to sidestep banking restrictions or weak state currencies. Corruption is also another factor never far from the surface in some African economies often necessitating the need for a clever approach by locals in order to conduct their everyday business.
Recently, neigbouring Kenyan Distributed Ledgers and Artificial Intelligence task force chairman Bitange Ndemo said that that government should consider tokenizing the economy to deal with “increasing” rates of corruption and uncertainties-such is Africa’s increasing faith in crypto ahead of local fiat currencies.
Wei Zhou, Binance’s chief financial officer, suggested that one reason for the exchange’s surge of clientele in the first week is the fact that it is so easy for Uganda’s unbanked to access the system, commenting, “They [users] just have to have money within the mobile payment system. They don’t have to have bank accounts.”
The country’s president, Yoweri Museveni, said recently that he welcomed and embraced blockchain technology in Uganda since it provides full transparency, and added that he was aware how businesses were being negatively impacted by what he called “secrets and deceit.”
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