In todays’ final spotlight of speakers at The Converge event, we will share the thoughts of Ugochukwu Aronu, Founder and CEO of Xend Finance.
Ugochukwu commenced with an overview of what Xend Finance is all about.
As explained by Ugochukwu, Xend Finance is a decentralized financial platform that enables individuals, institutions cooperatives, credit unions, to protect themselves against devaluations or inflations by earning very high yields in stable currencies.
Stating further Ugochukwu said that the company has a protocol that enables their users to deposit stable currencies on the Xend platforms and then take the deposits and get them distributed to different defy lending and borrowing protocols.
Breaking it down in a simplified language, Ugochukwu explained that, Xend Finance allows users to convert local currency into cryptocurrency that is stable and non-volatile. When users deposit them on the Xend platform, they gain very high yields.
“And we do that by leveraging existing protocols that enable people to gain yields, or when people lend money, they actually earn interest on the money that they’ve lent.”
In simple terms according to Ugochukwu, Xend Finance helps people to protect against devaluations, which is extremely essential in this present economy.
“So with Xend Finance, you’re actually able to earn very, very high interest based on the way we’ve been able to build our technology.”
Speaking on the impact and value of blockchain, Ugochukwu asserted that now is the best time for Africans to actually contribute globally when it comes to technology.
“Since the.com, boom, when you talk about the information era, where you had the likes of Google Facebook, you realize that we’ve not really made any major contributions in the technological space. And that’s because we’ve always been consumers of technology rather than developers or pillars.”
As a Blockchain Engineer, Ugochukwu decried the short supply of people who can actually develop these things in the blockchain ecosystem.
Ugochukwu gave an instance during the time he held a blockchain meetup in 2017. He started building on blockchain about that time however, many people who were even engineers never really understood what he was doing.
He realized that the only way for people to understand this technology and encourage their interest is by organizing a hackathon, an event that saw engineers bag prize money.
According to Ugochukwu, some of these winners are still part of the Xend Finance development team. However, there is still a shortfall in the number of smart contract engineers or developers.
“Even in Nigeria, they are extremely few, so the demand is really huge for people in this industry and also for us in Africa it’s as if we like to depend on other foreign companies to build stuff and then we just follow, but now we have a level playing field.
Everybody can move quickly, people can learn, you can make mistakes or you can continue to develop. So and I believe that with our young population, we should be able to do a whole lot more than other countries or other continents.
So I strongly believe that the blockchain has given us a lot of opportunities, to be able to express ourselves contribute to this technology
And we can actually reach at scale now, without any form of restrictions, which is, I mean, why the blockchain was created with really doesn’t have restrictions or any form or anything preventing you really from being a part of that you don’t need to talk to anybody, you don’t need to know anybody, you just plug in and begin to build or to develop.”
Explaining further, Ugochukwu said that another very important aspect of the blockchain is that it has unlocked massive wealth.
According to him, wealth was sort of siloed such that people in a specific part of the world could only invest in that part of the world they reside and not in other continents
However, with cryptocurrency and people doing things like initial exchange offerings or initial coin offerings, projects anywhere in the world can get funded.
Unlocking the wealth is extremely important for founders and for innovators to build. So that’s like another really important application of the blockchain that has solved a lot of problems for founders in different parts of the world.
“Before now surely founders wouldn’t even be able to access funds. But now, you can just have a great project, talk about it, and people see the value to invest in it from anywhere, without any form of restrictions.”, Ugochukwu concluded
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