Yellow Card, a pan-African cryptocurrency exchange, is now open to Ivorians who want to purchase and trade cryptocurrencies. This would be the sixteenth African country to host the pan-African platform, following its original launch in Nigeria in 2018. Sylvio Contayon, the general manager of Yellow Card Côte d’Ivoire, believes that there are numerous chances to be exploited in this new industry, particularly in terms of becoming a market leader.
‘‘It is the fact that bitcoin is a fresh and untapped territory in the Ivorian market that intrigues us. We have the opportunity to establish ourselves as the market leader by introducing something novel and original to the market. As of 2018, there are an estimated 343,000 bitcoin holders in Côte d’Ivoire, according to Sylvio Contayon. If we do things correctly, we have the potential to grow the figures and monopolize the market,” he says.
With the launch of Yellow Card in Côte d’Ivoire, the company has completed a funding round that began in September of last year and included contributions from Blockchain.com Ventures as well as Polychain Capital, BlockFi, Fabric Ventures and Square Inc. The round was led by Valar Ventures, Third Prime, and Castle Island Ventures, and it took seven months to complete. The $15 million in Series A financing that the company received was meant to be used for the development of its team, the introduction of new goods, and the pursuit of its African expansion.
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Cryptocurrency is currently generating a lot of interest in Africa, where regulations are slowly becoming more accommodating. Africans got $105.6 billion in cryptocurrency payments between July 2020 and June 2021, according to blockchain analytics platform Chainalysis, despite the fact that the continent still only receives 2% of the total global value of all cryptocurrencies. In a single year, this is a 1,200 percent gain.
Yellow Card intends to carry out financial education activities in parallel with its trading activities in Côte d’Ivoire in order to ensure the success of its operations and the enthusiasm of the Ivorians who will be involved.
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Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh