Please describe your proposed solution.
Context
Real Cardano adoption will only happen once we focus on building dapps or systems that bring real values to local users. Local fiat currencies in Cameroon as in most African countries are still prominent and are not going away anytime soon. Cryptocurrencies are a new paradigm and the adoption curve will be steep unless we provide local communities with useful and usable interfaces to interact with their finances.
The mobile money industry (banking through mobile phones) has witnessed a staggering growth in Cameroon and in many other countries in Africa over the past few years. This trend seems to be keeping up. In fact they are now widely used and accepted by a considerable number of people in Cameroon and in most countries in Africa.
In Cameroon for example, mobile money services (deposit, withdrawal and transfers ) are mostly handled through call box operators. These operators build small kiosks that can be seen everywhere across cities and villages; They have brought specific answers to a lot of concerns and issues people had transferring money in the past.
Cryptocurrencies on the other hand are new and a bit scary to most people. Most people have fair reasons to question their utility as most blockchain / cryptocurrency proponents turned out to be scammers taking advantage of local communities' ignorance by offering fake get rich schemes that have caused a lot of harm to them but also to blockchain adoption, more specifically cryptomonney.
In addition to the concerns highlighted above, One question we get asked all the time is: “If I were to get some ADA token, how can I be assured that I will be able to convert it back to the local currency (FCFA) whenever I want to do so? What can I buy with it?”
We aim to address this by building a bridge between the mobile money industry and the cardano blockchain ecosystem as a first step to ease ADA integration here on the ground in Cameroon.
Solution
At its core, our solution consists of building a very simple and extendable DEX to facilitate the integration of the cardano ecosystem (ADA specifically), the mobile money industry, and the FCFA (local Cameroonian fiat currency). The core components of our platform are:
A digital token:
A digital token (DCFA) pegged to the value of the local fiat currency (FCFA). The token is intended to be the digital representation of the local fiat currency and will be used for trading and other transactions within the platform.
A liquidity pool:
A very simple liquidity pool with two tokens: Ada and the digital FCFA. Providers of the pool will stake their money and in return will be rewarded proportionally in respect to the fees generated from trading digital local currencies to ADA and vice versa.
Partners micro-finance institutions:
They are needed to guarantee the availability of local fiat currency. Digital FCFA are sold to them. They then stake it into the DEX in order to earn profit from fees generated from trading.
Mobile money operator:
Mobile money kiosks are present everywhere in big cities and we will use them as go to points to collect local Fiat currencies.
More specifically we are offering to build an exchange mechanism to allow the conversion from one system to another. The core functionalities o implement are:
- Trading digital CFAs (DCFA) with local fiat CFAs with a small fee
- Trading Ada with digital CFA and vice versa with a small fee
- Selling digital CFAs and collecting physical CFAs from partners (microfinance or call box operator)
- Providing liquidity to the liquidity pool (Staking) and getting reward proportional to the amount contributed.
The digital token will be initially sold to microfinance institutions and call box operators kiosks. They will then be able to stake their asset in the platform and will earn a portion of the fees generated from tradings proportional to their stake. This will allow us to guarantee the availability of the liquidity pool.
Sold digital CFA will be collected from multiple locations such as call box operators kiosks, and microfinance institutions, corners stores.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
Our dapp at its core is addressing creating a platform to integrate cardano with the mobile money world in Cameroon. The main idea here is to build a bridge between two monetary ecosystems. On one hand we have the mobile money industry which is very prominent in Cameroon and on the other hand we have ADA which is making its debut in the local community with so many questions and concerns on how to go from one to another. The main deliverable is a DEX allowing a conversion from one system to another, and leveraging the infrastructure offered by the well established mobile money industry.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
The main key metric for this proposal will be the traffic generated on the exchange:
- How much ADA is being converted to Local CFA and vice versa
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
All our output and result will be shared on our social media platforms (YouTube, Git …etc)
1- Youtube
<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEtUe-ihSwlCXwu1Er3ZUyg>2- Github