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A lot of the world’s consideration round blockchain is on the highs and lows of cryptocurrency values. Startups like FlexID remind us that distributed ledger expertise has the potential to play different roles, together with providing trusted data of identities with out the necessity for a centralized authority.
One of many startups working in direction of this imaginative and prescient is Zimbabwe’s FlexID, which is constructing a blockchain-based identification system for these excluded from the banking system as a consequence of their lack of identification paperwork. FlexID’s concept has received it funding from Algorand, a blockchain protocol created by Turing Award-winning cryptographer Silvio Mical. The 2 events didn’t disclose the scale of the funding.
African international locations have made nice strides in selling monetary inclusion over the previous decade, however it’s nonetheless early days. Greater than 60% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa are unbanked, based on World Financial institution estimates for 2021.
A number of years in the past the numbers had been starker. In Zimbabwe, as an example, solely 30% of the grownup inhabitants had entry to any monetary providers as of 2014. The variety of financial institution accounts within the nation stood at 1.5 million in 2016.
There’s a basic conception that rising entry to monetary providers in a rustic results in enchancment in folks’s financial welfare. And that’s what the Zimbabwean authorities sought to perform when it launched a monetary inclusion scheme from 2016 to 2020.
The hassle achieved some success: the proportion of the Zimbabwean grownup inhabitants with entry to monetary providers elevated to 55% whereas the variety of financial institution accounts rose to eight.5 million in 2020.
Nonetheless, there’s nonetheless loads of work to be accomplished on this regard. When folks have little or no confidence within the monetary system, or they don’t know sure monetary providers that meet their wants exist or they don’t have formal identification paperwork to hunt these providers, attaining optimum monetary inclusion can show herculean.
These are points that have an effect on Africa and rising markets, not simply Zimbabwe. FlexID’s self-sovereign identification (SSI) platform takes a decentralized strategy and offers customers management over their private info — not frequent in Africa the place different upstarts present centralized options, akin to Smile Id, YC-backed Identitypass and Dojah.
With funding from Algorand, FlexID goals to make its decentralized identification community out there in rising markets the place over one billion individuals are estimated to lack formal identification, the startup mentioned in an announcement. Zimbabwean serial entrepreneur Victor Mapunga based FlexID in 2018 out of his frustration with the banking system.
FlexID is giving customers a blockchain pockets that shops their verificable credentials. Verification is finished on-chain via Algorand, which payments itself as an answer to the blockchain trilemma of safety, scalability, and decentralization. FlexID may also be integrating with different Algorand decentralized apps (dApps).
FlexID’s funding from Algorand comes at a time when African blockchain startups are pulling in enormous sums from traders. A latest report mentioned over 40 African blockchain startups raised a complete of $127 million in 2021. This yr has already seen some eye-popping investments akin to Mara’s $23 million seed spherical from traders like crypto change giants Coinbase and FTX.
Although FlexID gives service within the identification area, the overarching sector its answer and most blockchain platforms fall below is fintech. Corporations like FlexID are decreasing folks’s dependency on money and remittance charges through crypto, reducing boundaries to establishing an account through crypto wallets, and addressing the continent’s documentation problem.
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