Hoskinson talks Cardano's potential in Africa

Cardano’s “Africa Special” is about to be announced “very soon”.
IOG is merging its Ethiopia office with SingularityNet to merge efforts in the country.

In a highly recommendable interview with LunarCRUSH, Cardano inventor Charles Hoskinson talked about numerous topics, including the hottest of them all at the moment – the efforts for Cardano in Africa and specifically Ethiopia. The Input Output Global CEO explained that “there’s so much going on in Africa” that there will be a special episode of Cardano 360 – the “Africa Special.” “Hopefully we’ll be able to announce that very soon,” Hoskinson continued.

Further, Hoskinson said that IOG has recently partnered with SingularityNET, and the two teams will be merging their offices in Ethiopia to combine their efforts:

We’ve been running around the continent for quite some time. Our biggest office in Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa. And actually, we just partnered with SingularityNet to merge our office in their office, and we’ll be probably 30 to 50 people that are in the office.

Talking about what Cardano can be used for anywhere on the continent, Hoskinson continued:

And we do everything, we’re on one side fintech, on one side gov tech, and then we also think about supply chains and agricultural technology, and it could be everything from “let’s get land on our ledger” cause thieves are a huge problem in Africa, to voting, to identify people, so let’s create an identity layer and when you have that, you can talk about a reputation and credit system, then payment systems, all these types of things.[…] and it’s good to be there early. So We’re all across the continent, in Nigeria, we have people in Kenya, we have been to Rwanda, Uganda. And we have a lot of partners like IceAddis.

Africa is the new China

According to the IOG chief, the African continent offers the world’s greatest potential, both for economic growth and for the use of blockchain. Everything related to government and administration could be “upgraded” in the next 10 years in most African countries, which is why Africa is “like China in the 1980s.” In Ethiopia, for example, 70% of the population is under 30. Most of them are “digital natives” and “pro-crypto.”

The really clever people look at the social dynamics, seeing the policy changes and saying this is a rocket ship. They are right now loading fuel to it, so you don’t see it, but I want to be in the ship when it takes off.

In addition, Hoskinson also emphasized that most African political leaders currently the age of U.S. President Joe Biden have either already been replaced or are being replaced with “younger guys” who are “pretty tech-savvy.” For example, the prime minister of Ethiopia is a cryptographer.