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The Bineta Story
BN: My story begins on October 31 like Bitcoin. I was born on October 31, 1993 in a peaceful village called Ngerigne in Mbour department. I did all my schooling in this city. I got a scientific baccalaureate at Lycée Demba Diop but I chose to stay in Mbour to study management. I never wanted or maybe afraid to go to our public universities. And today I continue to live here with my company Bleu Comme La MER that I launched two years ago which is the first company in Senegal that accepts payment in crypto currencies: Bitcoin, Ethereum or Tezos. I also co-founded Game Of Trade with friends to make access to crypto easier.
“Blockchain promises transparency, crypto promises freedom and that’s all Africa needs to keep its head above water.”
The Crypto Journey
BN: I got into this sector through Bitcoin. It’s a long story but I’ll sum it up in a few lines. It began on April 2017. I worked as a secretary in a school, but this job did not enchant me. I wrote a business plan for my project and started to search in my family for people who could help me finance this project but apparently I was the only one who believed in my project. I joined a MLM (multi-level marketing) business that an old classmate had introduced me to, it was in order to get money I needed to self-finance my project. Self-financing because banks have never been an option for me, I’ve always been anti-bank. But I realized very quickly that MLM was not for me, and through this experience I met the person who introduced me to Bitcoin. He was Cameroonian, I told him why I was in this MLM and how complicated it was to find myself. He asked me if I knew Bitcoin. I had never heard of this word. He asked me to Google it and come back to him once I was done. Since then, I have never stopped studying Bitcoin and everything that revolves around it. Yes, at first it was a way to make money; now it’s for a greater mission: changing the world.
Current Projects
BN: I am currently the Co-founder of Tezos Senegal Community, which has existed for 2 years now.
About Tezos
BN: Tezos is a 3rd generation blockchain with a crypto (XTZ). It allows us to host decentralized applications in the same way as Ethereum with major improvements such as its low-energy consensus, its self-governance or the formal verification it brings to all smart-contracts deployed on the Tezos Blockchain.
Tezos in Africa
BN: Tezos is doing a great job in Africa. It is present in 9 countries: Senegal, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Tunisia and Kenya. There are expansion plans to enter more countries. In Senegal the Tezos foundation allowed us to organize crypto events in order to educate more people in these new forms of money but especially on blockchain technology. We launched free training for young school children and even developers so that they can become blockchain developers who will work on high value-added blockchain projects in Africa. We could not have done this without the support of the Tezos Foundation.
Passionate about Blockchain and Crypto
BN: I am convinced that crypto and blockchain can radically change the face of Africa and make it the most prosperous continent in the world. We already are [prosperous], but our systems are opaque and only benefits a small number of people, to the detriment of the majority. Blockchain promises transparency, crypto promises freedom and that’s all Africa needs to keep its head above water.
The Future
BN: My intuition tells me that this technology will change a lot of things, maybe faster than we might think. But the first battle is education. Africans need to understand crypto and blockchain and be able to integrate it into our everyday lives, as we did with Whatsapp or even with mobile money. It should be integrated so that my grandmother in the village can use it with ease despite her never attending school. When Africans, especially young people, understand the issues and all the advantages that Africa has in appropriating crypto and blockchain technology, they will understand that Africa is the promise land of crypto and blockchain.