Rebirth of England

Just when the BitC conference was held, Anchorage, a subsidiary of Matrix Capital, announced that it would issue an additional 400 million USDA.

Because USDA is pegged to the US dollar at a 1:1 ratio, it also means that they will add $400 million in reserve funds.

One of the reasons why Anchorage issued more USDA this time was naturally because the bull market of BitC had started, and the global related transaction volume had soared.

Especially in markets outside the United States, the demand for USDA, a digital coin pegged to the US dollar, has increased. The 100 million USDA originally issued by Anchorage is no longer sufficient and needs to be issued again.

Another reason was something they did not expect...

That is, in Africa, especially in many countries in West Africa, people actually exchanged part of their deposits for USDA and stored them in their mobile phone accounts.

According to estimates, the number of USDA deposited in mobile phone accounts has exceeded 30 million...

This has to start with the cooperation between the United Bank of Africa and Klarna Pay.

As early as 2011, the United Bank of Africa cooperated with Klarna Pay to launch a mobile payment application in Colo and surrounding countries.

With the development in the past two years, especially after Kolo Telecom entered the Nigerian market this year, the number of Klarna Pay users in West Africa began to grow exponentially...

At the beginning of this year, Kolo Telecom entered Nigeria, the largest market in Africa, through acquisitions as Kolo and Nigeria signed an agreement to further deepen economic cooperation between the two countries.

In February, Kolo Telecom successfully completed the acquisition of Globecom, making it a wholly-owned subsidiary, thus entering the Nigerian market.

Currently, there are 26 telecom operators in Nigeria, but most of them are fixed-line operators, and there are only four mobile operators, namely NITEL, MTN, Globacom, and Vmobile.

Nigeria issued four 3G licenses in 2007, which were issued to these four companies.

Globecom, which was acquired by Kolo Telecom this time, obtained Nigeria's second full-service telecommunications license as early as 2002. It is the only operator with full-service qualifications besides the state-owned operator NITEL.

At present, Globecom's market share in Nigeria is 27%, second only to the state-owned operator NITEL, ranking second among the four major operators.

After completing the acquisition of Globecom, Kolo Telecom began to improve its 3G network in major cities and surrounding areas in Nigeria. At the same time, in order to compete for the domestic telecommunications market in Nigeria, they started the "select a package and get a free phone" business.

Of course, this activity is not only carried out in Nigeria, but also in Kolo and neighboring West African Free Trade Zone countries.

The mobile phones given away are mostly mobile phone models produced by Dopod, a brand under Honor Electronics, in Kolo.

This can be regarded as Kolo Telecom's contribution to the popularization of smartphones in West Africa...

At the same time, the United Bank of Africa has also opened many branches in West Africa, including Nigeria, because the share of smartphones in this region has increased. As mentioned before, many countries in Africa are very disadvantaged, resulting in high electricity bills. For some families with good conditions, it is better to use a more convenient and low-power smartphone than to buy a computer that consumes more power.

This has also led to a high penetration rate of mobile payments, mainly Klarna Pay, in a considerable area of ​​West Africa...

In addition, many African countries have another characteristic...

That is, the degree of depreciation of their currencies is relatively high.

For example, Nigeria, whose legal currency is called Naira, has soared from an average of 1 US dollar to 117 Naira in 2007 to the current 1 US dollar to 165 Naira since the outbreak of the subprime mortgage crisis...

You should know that the US dollar has also depreciated significantly in this process due to its quantitative easing policy.

Although after the subprime mortgage crisis, due to the quantitative easing policy of the United States, most other countries in the world have to "print money" together, resulting in different degrees of depreciation, but in comparison, the degree of currency depreciation in some African countries is a bit exaggerated.

You should know that although the Caulo Shilling (CS) has also depreciated due to related financial policies...

But this is mainly because the Caulo government has taken the issue of exports into consideration and has carried out "active depreciation". Generally speaking, the Caulo Shilling still maintains an exchange rate of 10 CS=1 USD with the US dollar, and has not depreciated significantly relative to the US dollar.

It is also for this reason that when the currencies of countries around Caulo are relatively depreciated, and the magnitude is not small, many people have converted part of their deposits from their own currencies to Caulo Shillings in order to maintain the purchasing power of their property.

But the problem is that although Caulo has relevant financial cooperation agreements with the countries in the West African Free Trade Zone and Nigeria.

However, for the sake of protecting their own financial security, although their acceptance of the Kolo shilling is slightly more relaxed than that of foreign currencies such as the US dollar and the euro, there are still restrictions on the total amount of Kolo shillings that their citizens can exchange.

This also leads to the black market price of the Kolo shilling in these countries, like the US dollar, having a relatively high premium.

At this time, many people have found another way to exchange "foreign currency", that is, USDA.

As mentioned earlier, since this year, many websites and applications have begun to support BitC payment. In fact, earlier, in January this year, Bitpay, which is used for BitC payment, received $500,000 in financing and wanted to become the PayPal of the BitC industry.

Although Klarna Pay does not support BitC payment-because Barron understands that a coin like BitC, whose price is still unstable and will have a huge increase, is not suitable for payment.

The instability of the price is secondary. The key is that due to the decentralized operation mode of BitC, its transfer efficiency is not high, especially when the network needs to process more transfer information...

Can you bear to wait for more than ten minutes or even half an hour for the transfer to wait for the block confirmation to buy a cup of coffee?

Not to mention that as the price of BitC rises, the mining fee required for its transfer (which can be understood as the transfer fee) will become more and more "expensive" - ​​it is possible that the mining fee you need to buy a cup of coffee is much higher than the price of this cup of coffee.

Therefore, if BitC is used as a "currency", it will definitely not be this decentralized way.

But soon after the launch of USDA, which is anchored to the US dollar, Klarna Pay has supported USDA in quite a few countries.

The most important thing is that USDA, as a digital coin anchored to the US dollar, is not regarded as a "foreign currency" in the current supervision of almost all countries.

At the beginning, some people who came into contact with BitC transactions found that if USDA can really remain stable, it can be used as a substitute for the US dollar in many ways.

Then, starting this year, some West African users who had never come into contact with digital coins like BitC but understood the significance of USDS anchoring the US dollar on Klarna Pay began to try to exchange part of their own national currency assets for USDA and store them in Klarna Pay...

So far, more and more West African users have used this method to fight against the sharp depreciation of their national currencies.

More than 30 million USDA have been deposited in Klarna Pay user wallets, which means that assets worth more than 30 million US dollars have been exchanged for USDA.

If USDA had not been issued for a long time and its trustworthiness was still questionable, then this number would be higher...