Where Cryptocurrency is Vital to Everyday Life

Yellow Card’s stablecoin exchanges and payment rails in Africa deliver real world benefits that enable essential financial transactions and empower economic growth  

Since its inception, the cryptocurrency industry has struggled to identify real use cases for their technology. Beset with wild price volatility, rampant regulatory uncertainty and predatory investment schemes that create the impression of a fickle, erratic marketplace only the most aggressive speculators could stomach, the hype factor at play in the U.S. and European media dominates what most people think about cryptocurrency – that it is a speculative, risky technology. 

“That impression misses a lot,” says Chris Maurice, co-founder and CEO of Yellow Card, the largest Stablecoin on/off ramp in Africa. “It is simply not an accurate depiction of the tremendously powerful value cryptocurrency offers businesses and individuals in emerging economies on the African continent and across other underserved – underbanked – countries and regions.”  

Maurice, who graduated from Auburn with a degree in Finance, and classmate Justin Poiroux founded Yellow Card in their dorm room at Auburn before moving to Lagos, Nigeria in 2019 to launch their extraordinarily successful startup. The company recently reported the closing of a $33 million Series C round of financing led by existing and new investors. To date, Yellow Card has secured equity financing totaling $85 million, thanks in part to Auburn’s New Venture Accelerator (NVA). 

The NVA sat down with Maurice to get an update on the progress his company is making to realize the true value of cryptocurrencies – specifically, stablecoins – and what their work means for businesses and individuals in emerging economies across the globe. 

NVA: Let’s start with something mentioned in the TechCrunch article about your recent funding, that it marked a strategic pivot from Yellow Card focusing on individuals to almost exclusively businesses. Can you tell us why you made that shift? 

Maurice: The TechCrunch piece accurately portrayed the evolution in our business from a primarily business-to-consumer (B2C) company to one now driven by business applications. But that doesn’t quite tell the whole story. We aren’t abandoning B2C – not by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just that we have come to recognize a shift in how our customers are using our app – businesses are embracing our technology in numbers we didn’t imagine when we first started. 

The number of businesses moving large sums of money across our exchange has increased our transaction volumes from $1.7 billion early last year to over $3 billion today. That adoption generates increased revenue from the spreads we charge for these high-volume transactions, which also gives us tremendous pricing latitude when it comes to small business- and consumer-based transactions. 

But that’s not a move away from consumers nor is it a deviation from our mission to bring the value of cryptocurrency to the masses, to the world. In fact, the unprecedented adoption of our platform by businesses will accelerate the growth of Yellow Card – and crypto – because of one simple factor: utility. We follow the use cases – those applications of our platform that are providing the benefits we have always envisioned. 

We need to understand that in Africa, small businesses and their customers are often one and the same. When you consider that many small businesses there are what we here in the Western world call “mom-and-pop” enterprises operating out of a kiosk on a street corner, the line blurs – as it should. Business and personal use of our platform on the African continent go hand-in-hand to form essential payment rails – the networks and infrastructure that allow funds to move between parties without the need to transfer physical money. 

NVA: Another shift mentioned in your announcement is that stablecoins now dominate the type of cryptocurrency exchanged across the Yellow Card platform, accounting for more than 99% of transactions today. That wasn’t always the case, right? And what exactly is a “stablecoin?”  

Maurice: Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies whose price is pegged to the price of the U.S. dollar – the world’s reserve currency. Stablecoins offer businesses and retail customers a way to store value that hedges their money against inflation and currency devaluation while facilitating international payments and cross-border trade. Many parts of the world have volatile local currencies, extreme inflation and limited access to the U.S. dollar. 

As with the growth of our business customer base, our decision regarding stablecoins is a response to where our platform has the most utility – where it is being used to conduct the most basic transactions critical to everyday life. Businesses and individuals both value the stability, security and access to commerce that stablecoin-based exchanges provide. We go where our customers go – it really is that simple.  

And I don’t see these moves by Yellow Card as a response to a change in market factors, either. For us, it’s really just a renewed focus on who is actually using the platform, which is predominantly businesses. Across the continent, businesses have a need to pay invoices to facilitate transactions that they otherwise have not been able to execute. And I think that’s why this technology is so powerful. It’s the first technology that actually enables these businesses to conduct financial transactions that keep their business running, to continue to invest, to hire more, to do more on the continent that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. 

Our customers don’t really care about stablecoins or Bitcoins or anything like that – they care about solving their problems. The most important thing for them is they have a problem and need a way to fix it. They need to make or accept a payment – simply, easily and securely. 

The best way to think of us is that we’re the stablecoin and payment infrastructure for Africa and the broader emerging world. 

NVA: Getting back to what you said about how Western financial pundits and business media reports generate a level of negative hype that doesn’t necessarily represent the underlying value of cryptocurrencies in the developing world – what do they get wrong? 

Maurice: The most important message I want to get across is that there are real world applications of cryptocurrency that are being obscured by everything that’s going on with the Securities Exchange Commission, Coinbase being allowed to go public and then being sued, etc. This sort of focus and prevailing narrative is not helpful, depicting cryptocurrency as all about speculative trading. 

Some of the most disparaging comments have come from some fairly high-level politicians, including U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) at a hearing of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, who called crypto “the preferred tool for terrorists, for ransomware gangs, for drug dealers, and for rogue states that want to launder funds.” 

That’s just a very American- or Western-centric view of a technology that has so many critically beneficial applications outside of the U.S., outside of Europe and East Asia. There are a lot of very practical applications of this technology that really make a difference in people’s lives in the emerging world. It is very U.S.-centric to look at this technology and say that there’s no real applications for it. 

The main difference for us is that ours is not a speculative use case. It’s not “how do I buy Dogecoin, or Bitcoin or Ethereum and hope the price goes up?” It’s a payments use case, utilizing this powerful technology in real world, practical applications. It is applying this technology the way that it was intended to be applied – to solve actual financial infrastructure problems for those who need those solutions most. 

NVA: In your announcement of your most recent funding, you mentioned this investment will allow you to develop new products, strengthen your team and systems, and continue to lead engagement with regulators across the continent. That also includes entering new markets, new countries in Africa, right? Can you tell us what that expansion process entails? How it happens?  

Maurice: When we’re looking at a new country, the most important thing is spending time there on the ground. I go in and meet with several types of key stakeholders, regulators, commercial banks, businesses, and then just people on the street.  

That last part is one thing that a lot of people forget – you need to understand the problem from the ground up. It’s one thing to go in and talk to banks and go sit in the ivory tower – the largest commercial bank in the country – and have those meetings. But you also need to get out on the street. You need to talk to people, you need to understand how things work in their community, their culture – how does life work for the average merchant in that country? 

So, take somebody that sells shoes on the side of the road in Nigeria or Kenya or Uganda, what does that whole flow look like for them? How are they importing those shoes? Who are they importing them from? How do they make that payment?  

 Or, if they’re receiving money from friends and family overseas or even from an adjacent country, how does someone get that money to them? If they’re sending money to friends and family, how are they getting that money out? Just trying to understand – end-to-end – how things actually work there is the first and most critical piece. Once you have that understanding, it makes it a little bit easier to tweak the product, tweak the offering for that particular market. 

NVA: What is the overarching message you want to send to the financial and business community here in the U.S., Europe and around the world when it comes to cryptocurrency adoption, regulation and engagement? 

Maurice: The bottom line is that cryptocurrency isn’t going anywhere, it is here to stay. And here’s why: 

• Banks and businesses across the globe recognize that cryptocurrency is a powerful force making transactions easier – and in many cases, making those transactions even possible.  

• It is already starting to happen in Africa, and you’re going to see it happen more and more as the technology improves, as the regulation becomes more and more friendly over time, as more transactions from banks flow through these powerfully efficient financial platforms. 

• While transitioning from existing services like SWIFT – the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications – will take time, these platforms eventually will be replaced by crypto-based stablecoin exchanges. 

In the end, it all comes down to value – for the banks, for businesses and for consumers in need of viable solutions to their everyday needs. 

I can’t predict exactly how long it will take. Maybe it’s ten years, maybe 15, but certainly within the next 20 years – within our lifetimes – you’re going to see a day where all international transactions are conducted on stablecoin-based cryptocurrency technology.  

That’s why we feel so optimistic about our own vision, our plans and the progress we have made to date. It’s an exciting place for us to be! 

To learn more about Cryptocurrency in Africa, visit Yellowcard.io.

To learn more about Auburn University’s New Venture Accelerator visit their website HERE.