The Bantu Foundation is a not-for-profit organization founded to support the development of the Bantu blockchain.
The mission of the foundation is to empower humanity across all industry sectors, both public and private using blockchain and other 4th Industrial Revolution (IR) technologies.
Bantu Foundation achieves this by developing decentralized and scalable blockchain infrastructure, applications, and services that empower humanity.
The Bantu blockchain combines speed, security, reliability and includes human elements of fairness and sharing to empower participants on the network while lowering the entry barriers for participation.
“We are changing that narrative and we are set to become a conduit for positive socio-economic impact in the emerging economies around the world.”, a statement reads on Bantu Foundation’s website.
In a chat with Ernest Mbenkum, Founder of Bantu Blockchain Foundation, he explained how the Foundation is changing the concept around blockchain to empower even the unbanked.
Why Bantu Blockchain Foundation?
Through its foundation, the Bantu blockchain’s mission sets to empower the African continent by cutting across all industries within the public and private sectors using blockchain technology.
This process will be enabled by other Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) tools for wealth creation and economic sovereignty for the Africa people and by extension the rest of the world.
The springboard to the world for Bantu Blockchain Foundation is an indigenous blockchain technology that seeks to re-orientate Africans and other people from other parts of the world towards a new technology paradigm that embodies the spirit of sharing and equality.
This invariably translates to a unique inward-looking into Africa-led solutions that address the continent’s unique problems and challenges.
How does a blockchain-based financial inclusion solution solve Africa’s unique challenges?
Despite the ratification of the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement, Africa’s framework for technological transformation remains weak based on the following:
- Coordinating investment and other development policies
- Mobilizing resources and reducing aid dependence over time
- Securing fiscal sustainability by establishing fiscal legitimacy
- Implementing a unified pan-African platform for real-time, affordable, cross-border value transfer
However, the expected goal of Bantu Blockchain Foundation is to enable a pan-African blockchain market infrastructure that unifies the secure issuance, trading, settlement, clearing and custody of blockchain-based digital-assets in all their manifestations and mutations in real-time.
This is expected to help unlock liquidity trapped in the continent’s very rich reserve of natural and human resources, thus fostering financial empowerment among Africa’s hardworking, resourceful and youthful populace.
How is Bantu catering for the banked and underbanked?
Bantu Foundation has built a technology infrastructure that is dramatically improving how the value of real-life assets are represented digitally and transferred across emerging economies especially in a peer-to-peer fashion.
This means that even people who are unbanked will be able to acquire and exchange value in the form of tokenized assets across Bantu’s blockchain network right from their mobile devices even if they are unable to meet up to the basic requirements needed to access banking services in their local jurisdictions.
What has been Bantu Foundation’s journey?
- 2018 – R&D work started with core team of engineers
- 2019 – Blockchain testnet deployed
- 2020 – Increased core working teams, spread out across 7 work streams,
- 2020 – Identified the following partners: Sterling Bank, Interstellar, Speratech, Convexity, SystemSpecs
- 2020 – Deployed the following services: BantuPay, Dashboard, Explorer, Laboratory and Bantu Blockchain Mainnet
2021 so far has seen the following:
- Developer community expansion
- Bantu Internship Program Launch
- Release of Bantu APIs and SDKs for third-party developers
- Bantu Token Creator
- First generation Bantu Blockchain DApps released by our developer communities and partners e.g Mitambo, (and others undergoing final stages of testing before their public releases)
“Many of the well-known blockchains, for all their popularity, have mostly benefited early adopters. We are changing that narrative”, so how is Bantu changing the narrative?
We have set up Bantu Blockchain in a way that almost anyone will be able to participate in the network at any point in time and earn rewards for doing so, without the need for very expensive computing devices or technical knowledge.
Most blockchains launch by inviting developers first, however, our approach was to build tools to help the non-technical users onboard first before the developers’ community was invited.
Our suite of apps were made available to everyone from day one, especially the BantuPay mobile apps that are user-friendly and are available in 24 languages. Other tools and community engagement platforms like BantuTalk were also made available to everyone.
Everyone was given an equal opportunity to earn their free XBN utility token at no cost. The Bantu blockchain also allows anyone to issue their own tokenized assets, stablecoins or security tokens at almost no cost and also build out their own ecosystem.
What is BantuPay?
BantuPay is Bantu Blockchain’s flagship product. It is a simple, secure and non-custodial wallet for sending, receiving, swapping and storing digital assets built on the Bantu Blockchain.
BantuPay will be a means by which people will be able to store tokenized real-world assets also known as asset-backed tokens such as real estate, gold, coffee, corn, other commodities as well as stablecoins, security tokens, utility tokens and other types of assets.
These assets will be interchangeable with others for their fair value on decentralized marketplaces built around the Bantu Blockchain.
BantuPay has a very simple, intuitive and elegant user interface that uncomplicates the process of transacting on the blockchain and exchanging assets on decentralized markets. It is also available in 24 different languages.
The effectiveness of peer-to-peer solutions for global digital asset transfer?
Simply put, peer-to-peer solutions remove friction and the need for intermediaries between two transacting partners. This makes them censorship-resistant while also cutting off other risks associated with middlemen (such as cost, speed, censorship, transaction confidentiality etc).
The effectiveness of blockchain-based applications in improving financial services compared to other technologies?
Not every solution that will improve financial services will be blockchain-based. Other 4IR technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data analytics and even natural language processing can vastly improve the quality of financial services rendered today.
But Blockchain (and hence blockchain-based solutions) adds value not only in transaction speeds but also in cost-effectiveness, feasibility for microfinance solutions, and transparency of transactions that can give visibility and intelligence into the flow of value within an ecosystem, among other benefits.
Beyond cryptocurrencies, what are the other importance of the technology?
Other blockchain use cases include but are not limited to Real-estate management, Cross-border payments, Supply chain and logistics management, tracking music/movie royalties, secure storage of healthcare data, secure identity management solutions, anti-money laundering tracking services, Enhanced IoT services, Smart Contracts (in many facets of digital business operations) Decentralised Finance (DeFi), Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)
Featured Image: Ernest Mbenkum, Founder, Bantu Blockchain Foundation
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