08 Jan A Status Update on World Affairs, The Internet of Value, and Online Payments

Posted at 17:54h

Isn’t life on our planet very interesting at the moment.  Our main area of focus is online payments. We do online payments and acquiring all over the world, our main focus being Africa.  The changing world around has an impact on how people pay and get paid and how online businesses expand around the globe.

I’m pleased to see a jump in the bitcoin price this past week, most likely as a result of the global instability and consequent flight of capital from fiat to hard assets like gold, silver, and bitcoin.  The large world economies seem to be in a state of economic stress and flux with unusually high debt levels in jurisdictions like USA, Europe and Japan for example, and declining exports adversely affecting country balance sheets.  Throw in Donald’s trade warring with Xi and attempt to neutralise Iran and things start to get interesting. 

From a payments perspective card is still dominant in most developed markets and mobile money in developing countries and particularly Africa which is home to almost 50% of all mobile payment transactions.  Having said that, there is increasing awareness that bitcoin and its underlying technologies are here to stay which is unnerving the hierarchy who are trying to work out how existing powerbases, centralised structures and systems will be disrupted, deconstructed or made redundant.  

The enlightened minority realise that this is the future and are getting their heads around how legacy can coexist with this new digital, decentralised, borderless way of being.  The even more enlightened (or shall we say the brave) are hypothesising how existing fiat, currency and payment systems can be transformed and enhanced with these new technologies.  Explorative adventuring for example with CBDCs and Stablecoins and private blockchains between countries of a region.  

Despite the recent protracted bear market, there has been unprecedented, large scale investment in the development of (to mention just a few) defi solutions, lending, identification, payments, tokenisation of assets, consumer based applications . .  the new internet of value infrastructure. This is going to completely transform the world as we know it. As someone once said “May we live in interesting times!”

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