Lorien Gamaroff: Bitcoin will drive Africa’s digital payments transformation

Satoshi Nakamoto defined Bitcoin in the white paper as a “pure peer-to-peer version of electronic cash” for online payments, and it is this vision that Centbee has been built on. At the Digital Nigeria International Conference, Centbee co-founder Lorien Gamaroff spoke about how his company is making easy, fast and cheap online payments a reality for the 1.4 billion Africans.

Bitcoin has been around for over a decade, but even today the same myths and misconceptions that plagued it in the early 2010s still abound. For Lorien, Bitcoin has followed the same path that the Internet did. In its early days, many believed that it would be made of several inter-networks for specific tasks and niches. But as it evolved, the world settled on a single protocol that we still use today. The same will happen with blockchain, and the world will settle on Bitcoin in the long run.

“In my mind, I believe very strongly that we will have a world that has a single blockchain simply because of the necessity of creating an efficient communication and transaction network,” Lorien told attendees.

Having been a university graduate when the Internet was in its infancy, Lorien has observed its explosive growth over the past two decades. According to him, the one thing that has failed to evolve is the notoriously expensive and slow payments.

“That is the promise of the BSV blockchain. Centbee itself demonstrates the success of a low-cost transaction network capable of facilitating micropayments and small random payments for Africa,” Lorien pointed out.

In a previous presentation, Ahmed Yousif of the BSV Blockchain for Government Initiative had urged the youth of Nigeria to build their own on the blockchain and stop relying on the West. Building on this, Lorien told attendees that one of the low-hanging fruits of the blockchain world is building micropayments-powered businesses.

“If you want to find an opportunity, provide a service that requires micropayments, and I’m talking about very low-value, low-cost transactions. If you can find a way that takes advantage of the low-cost nature of BSV, there’s going to be a lot of fruit there, he noted.

While its products are global, Centbee is an African company and it has continued to address the region’s unique challenges using Bitcoin SV. With Africa, just like the rest of the world, moving towards digital payments, Lorien believes that only BSV can anchor this development.

“The BSV blockchain can create this [a cashless society] a reality, he said.

Nigeria is one of the world’s digital asset hubs. Chainalysis ranked the country 11th in its latest adoption index and first in Africa. However, most of this adoption has been focused on speculative trading. With Centbee, Nigerians can now go beyond speculation and use Bitcoin for payments. The wallet allows users to make payments to hundreds of stores globally, and as Lorien pointed out, merchants in Nigeria can very easily register on the app and start accepting Bitcoin payments. And it’s not just BSV, with Lorien announcing that the wallet would soon support stablecoins.

Nigeria has been a key target for Centbee for some time now. When it launched Minit Money’s cross-border transfer platform, the South Africa-Nigeria corridor was the first it served. Minit Money has since been integrated into the Centbee wallet, making it easier to send and receive money from anywhere around the globe.

The cross-border remittance is particularly important for Nigeria. The West African country receives the highest remittances in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2021, it received $19.2 billion, ranking among the top ten globally. However, money transfer costs in the region remain the highest in the world and many Nigerians still do not have access to these services.

With Centbee, Nigerians in the diaspora can send money home at the touch of a button and for a fraction of what they are charged today.

See: BSV Global Blockchain Convention presentation, BSV for Retail Payments, Remittances & Rewards

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