Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have come a long way since Hal Finney’s “running Bitcoin” tweet on January 11, 2009. Without all of you innovators and early adopters, that have relentlessly educated the world about how crypto is an enabler of financial freedom and sovereignty, adoption wont be as prevalent as it is today. 

In 2006, before Hal started working on creating Bitcoin, I felt that the Internet itself, the permissionless, decentralised layer zero infrastructure that enables Bitcoin and other blockchain nodes to communicate with each other, was under threat of centralisation due to geo-political pressures. I did two things to prevent this, the first was to protect the Internet technically and the other legally. 

(1) In 2007 I assembled 1000 of some of the world’s leading minds in Internet engineering, cryptography and security and invited them into an intellectual collaborative network I’d created with the mission of using their knowledge to safeguard the Internet. They all promptly signed up. Some of them included the late Dr Lawrence Roberts who designed the ARPAnet, the precursor to the Internet in 1969, and Hal Finney who was member no 62. 

(2) I initiated a series of successful legal action that ultimately set the Internet free, paving the way for Bitcoin, blockchain and the crypto industry to thrive. 

Thankfully, crypto's "wild west" decade-and-a-half ended this January 2024, ushering in a new era of true utility where cryptocurrencies and blockchain are used to solve real world issues while financial institutions are beginning to trade Bitcoin as a regulated spot ETF, gradually ushering in institutional liquidity into the markets. 

To fill the transitional gap between the end of the Wild West era and today, we are seeing an embrace of memecoins which, as fun as they sound, have no intrinsic value or utility and instead trade solely on sentiments which as can be imagined, results in sentimental trades leading to  volatile ups and downs in price and an increased network traffic that spikes up transaction fees which in turn render blockchains unusable for small transactions.

This “pump and dump” moment in crypto, which mainly benefits a few insiders at the expense of less informed masses seeking to participate in this revolution, is Satoshi’s nightmare because it gives crypto skeptics further reasons to deride the industry as lacking a use case and fraudulent.

Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, a country with a population of over 220 million where 90% of all commercial transactions are trustlessly settled instanty in cash, gave me a first hand exposure to the challenges faced by the unbanked. I’ve since spent a vast amount of time, capital and resources towards connecting the world’s 1.7 billion adults without a bank account to the global digital economy so they can realise their full economic potential.

The solution we’ve created is called Boom, an ecosystem that consist of a blockchain and its native currency the Boomcoin, a Boom superapp that enables the unbanked messes to buy, sell, pay and get paid online without requiring a financial institution for payment processing and Boomswap, a self-custodial decentralised digital asset exchange protocol where real world assets such as currencies, are traded.

The final pillar of the Boom ecosystem is the Boom Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to deploying its grant of 50 million Boomcoins towards social good initiatives.

The first being the a Boomcoin-to-meals program which starts on 14 April and aims to match Boomcoin donations 1:1 to feed 2 million Nigerians currenly facing food insecurity because of rising inflation. 

Boom is a fantastic use case of crypto solving a real world problem of connecting billions of unbanked adults to online commerce and enabling them to pay cross border, in their own local currencies.

Boom has turned Africa, and all emerging economies, into a single market without a single currency.

We, as an industry, should be proud of this milestone and come together to support it and other initiatives that are fulfilling Satoshi’s dream of a more equitable and financially just world.