Lynn Liss on Akoin’s mission to serve African entrepreneurs

0:00I'm Ashton addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have lynn lists the CEO and co-founder of the a coin project lynn thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show it's a pleasure to have you here you for having me very excited you're very welcome I'm really excited to dive into this project and I

0:21know that you're an expert in social impact and the blockchain for good movement so I'd love to hear about the goals of a coin project and how you've geared that towards making an impact yeah thank you it's been an exciting journey and for me it goes way back to my career back even in high school I was working with banks and financial institutions into management consulting

0:46and got to see some of the earlier financial hell evolutions that occurred that we take for granted here now so things like debit cards online banking image exchange of cheques and when blockchain came and really seen the opportunity especially in developing countries because they had really leapfrogged you know I'm staring at a computer they really only stare at cellphones they're

1:07actually quite familiar with cryptocurrencies and blockchain and to see that opportunity to take all the opportunities that could come from blockchain cryptocurrency to a developing country in Africa with a con you couldn't pass that up so right off the gate I was sold and ready to take on the next financial evolution bring those benefits to those individuals and rising

1:32economies like Africa the second piece that equally important which is really close to my heart is entrepreneurship again something we take for granted here were able to put together business and we have all the right tools and services available to us to launch a business overnight and that was really in terms of a business model it would sustain our

1:52currency it was about creating an ecosystem we call it our adapt ecosystem where our different tools and services partnered relationships would API into our platform and offer those entrepreneur building tools and services to rise in entrepreneurs so myself being a entrepreneurs startup geek at heart for many many years after my financial background world this

2:16got me very excited and I think most people know Africa's an addition such a huge amount of young youth individuals that really sparked a Connerly on it you could see they have everywhere they want to get you and they don't have the tools to get there so we are looking to bring that into the world into Africa with him with us with a coin that's amazing Lin

2:38and yeah there are so there's so much potential with all of the young people in Africa and being able to provide those tools I could see could make a gigantic impact so this really does touch close to me as well and I think this is a great project so I'd love to start and you touched on the blockchain ecosystem and apps and we're gonna dive into that but in terms

3:00of the platform I want to start start at the highest level you know the a coin projects motto is one Africa one coin you know with coin is in a que can you explain the meaning behind the motto yeah well you can't argue a con a coin up the gate we've got that what was really eye-opening to me when I first met Akon in his vision for this project was realizing how many currencies are

3:28within Africa so there's 54 countries each of which have their own currency or some you know various usages of many and I I'll keep referring back to we just here in the US we take it for granted we just use the dollar and it's no big deal his origin story of going from one country to the other and trying to you purchase something with currency had from just a few steps over another

3:53country and it couldn't that interoperability was really important to us but more importantly to unite around one currency and you can't put a number to the I'll say the amount of support passion inspiration again youths in particular that are behind a con to get behind a currency in his name a coin in addition to as I just described just a

4:21huge value of having one currency that can roll across all of these countries that is truly digital there's a huge inspiration behind the coin so a uniting message around one coin when Africa was really important to us definitely and blockchain is doing such a good job at breaking down borders making currency and exchanges international so can we dive a little

4:44bit into the platform on the financial side because you first start by giving an overview R of what are the blockchain based financial services that are available to these Africans in the platform yeah so one of the cornerstones of our solution it's been out there in the press pretty frequently was that we started with the idea of being able to convert between a coin and prepaid

5:09minutes that's something that again I opened for me across Africa people were choosing to hold their assets in prepaid minutes more safely than they felt in their local fiat currency there's such volatility and so for us out of the gate we have the ability to change between with our partnership with fit minutes in between a coin and the bit minute so you

5:31can chop up your cell phone great you can get into a coin so into cryptocurrency I think we all can attract what was going on with Libra over the past year and that idea of banking and Bank well how do you how do you even get them into cryptocurrency right if they don't have a bank account so we start with that level playing field and something that users and

5:50Africa are quite familiar with from there we move into things like micro lending crowdfunding financial services I'll say we'll have we have a stable currency that we're also offering so you sort of have something equal to what people receive here is a savings account and what I like to say when it comes to not just financial services but all of the services available within the

6:14ecosystem and this is where early days so I also want to reach out anyone watching this program please connect with us if you have a tool their service that you'd like to see in the hands of an Africa entrepreneur rising economies such as Africa and but step back and say to yourself most people watching this are most likely entrepreneurs what do you use every day right so every

6:37financial sir as I just named and then all the way into healthcare all the way into you know we're looking at solutions around let all the way to land rights we're looking at all the social media services and have some cool partnerships that we'll be announcing shortly again around the same tools we use online here but really bringing them in as blockchain

6:56base and again as long as they're willing to trade in and out of a coin for their to land service which is great then we welcome you so yeah the entrepreneur building blocks anything that you can imagine you need is an entrepreneur here we want to replicate that there and starting with the best curated apps and apps I want to say not just crypto based apps were also looking

7:19at Wi-Fi solutions for instance and so you can have mesh Wi-Fi amongst users it's sort of an earning opportunity where they can set up a a tool where they can sell out Wi-Fi to those near them um so that's that's not a DAP it's just it will be perceived as sort of an app or a service offering so just technically how we integrate but we do attract a lot of depth so hence the deaf

7:41ecosystem mm-hmm that's great and there's so much potential in terms of different industries in different ways that blockchain can help in Africa so I'm glad that you guys are reaching out for that support and those partnerships and what's really interesting that you touched on is the fact that these people in Africa are holding their prepaid minutes as opposed to their centralized

8:03currency because of the volatility and it seems like that is one of the stepping stones to move into a digital currency or a blockchain based currency so that's really cool and speaking on you know they're perfectly yeah that's super cool and you know on the blockchain side I was looking into the technical part of it a little bit more and I saw that a coin is utilizing the

8:25stellar blockchain which is been around for a long time it's really large but it's not as popular as theoria more so a couple other ones right so it's in I'm curious if there's a reason or you know why use stellar I know it's a great blockchain but I'd love to hear the the reasoning behind it yeah I touched on that word interoperability that's a big

8:47stellar word we we looked at all of the majors can imagine and feel really honored the access working with Akon brings me we were approached and spoke with really all of the majors and two things I'll say on the ecosystem the good news is through our atomic swap we can interchange between really any currencies we don't need to care what protocol they're on so that out of the

9:12gate was good but for our our backbone on stellar as we go then more deeply two things came to light well number one it hadn't Jed met and just had you know a real connection in terms of their vision for Africa and economic inclusion so that the highest level was very important when we drove into the technology and how its structured and they made a leap in creating something

9:38called the anchor network and through that they established really endpoints and in Africa in particular the most financial institution different currency endpoints that supplement interchangeability for us fiat isn't going away yes we talked about minutes that helped get the mention cryptocurrency but we want them to be able to go in and out of their local

10:00currency as needed also and Stellar's less known for that they it's something I always say isn't marketed as strongly but it was really important to us because not only it allows for more interoperability in that exchange between currencies but also we get introduced to those endpoints right so the more that we can do business with those other anchors right which we are

10:23the more exchange we can do the more business we can do together so that was really key to us and thirdly and this is just something that just proves you made the right decision as we continue to build and you know the roadmap is long and ever ending there there they've been very open with their resources their team their code their knowledge their learnings and that's amazing that allows

10:49us to leapfrog even further and move more swiftly so it's been a Jewish post decision it's been a joyous partnership and relationship in that way yeah well I'm glad to hear that everything's going well and interoperability is definitely a key moving forward and I think that's going to be a common theme throughout most of the major block chains and I hope it is

11:10because really we need to work together to make a change it's much harder if people are competing against each other so yeah so and the atomic swaps part that you mentioned about being able to switch between coins flawlessly and not having any counterparty risk using atomic swaps is definitely a key to getting people into the currencies that they need to be able to purchase the

11:31tools they need so yeah I like to say and this isn't new people speak a lot about the user experience and our key is just to make sure everything is behind the scenes I think we all in the blockchain your self included community feel like the easier gets on the front end right everything else is just done behind the scenes we're all better off I think there's so many people friends of

11:54mine who are like I need to learn about blockchain show me where to go and I'm thinking that's gonna go away you know like people are not going to become blockchain experts just to use the technology so I think the more we have those type of yes interoperability yes atomic swaps everything is just click behind the scenes you know it you know it's seamless and streamlined and

12:14adoption increases so that's really priority for us definitely user experience should be at the top priority and it should be very easy and I guess that leads me to the next question about the DAP ecosystem you have the bit minutes tap out and you're looking at creating more Japs you know how easy is it for developers to come to the a coin ecosystem start developing similar

12:39adapts to bit minutes so that you can expand the ecosystem yeah sir I'll say our goal is to within the first quarter even get up to about 10 dots available again one in each lane you can see in our white paper that entrepreneur building blocks you can sort of see our target roadmap there and again I welcome people to reach out and simultaneously we have a partnership not yet announced

13:07to create a DAP builder tool this is something a Kahn has always been 20 steps ahead of all of us and he mentioned early on that it was such a priority to have exactly as you suggest the ability for individuals to build their own depths and we know we could go the sdk open code toolkit down the road we'll get there but our initial step and this gets back to the point

13:30about ease of use for the users this is super slick I'm I can't say the name yet but basically it's a dragging and dropping of all the screens you need for an app right so you need to check out screen you need a video to show your product you need some graphic placement all those pieces that we again whip up overnight as apps on the Apple Store this job builder tool is very cool and

13:57it's on our very near-term roadmap because the vision icon set out very early on was someone has any product or service but let's use you know someone's making these beautiful rugs and Uganda and wants to get more marketing bump for that it should be so easy you don't need them to be coders to be able to go out and do this so we're really excited to

14:17introduce that coming soon coming soon very exciting and definitely not you know I could see how it would make it super easy to be able to on board all these entrepreneurs without a single line of code as long as you create a proper system development kit you know ecosystem for the developers to be able to just have people on board the equine platform and his plug-and-play

14:42yes yes yes it is awesome and I guess one of my last questions is about the a coin coin itself you know how does it interact with the daps and is there other utility within the ecosystem yeah so going back to the atomic swap our our main goal is just simply a coin is the main currency that is the business model that is the utility right we're offering

15:05them access into these tools and services we've created their relationships and the business deals with these jab snaps as they on board and you can look at our demo I think is online where that atomic swap literally is just I have this amount of a coin how many eight points do I want to use to go into bit minutes top of my phone how many do I want to go into healthcare

15:28services that I may want to take part in all the way to we have a really cool earner Depp that is coming out so the ability to earn for almost I don't know say TaskRabbit but when you're doing small services that are digital you know scanning for images or confirming written language or etc just small earning opportunities that's really important to us we want we like to say

15:52learn earn spend and save so you'll see education you'll see more earning opportunities and so yes the utility in a coin out to the DAP snaps and then I just want to mention when we speak about utility the the deaf ecosystem is the business model that sustains the currency but what's really important is that the local community starts to see the value in holding a coin and spending

16:20it in their local environment so I brought up – before in a few interviews where their model and this is really high priority in our roadmap is to establish those both local vendor relationships but also this is where a spends a lot of time working with more strategic enterprise relationships like utility partners etc to allow for payment in a coin so it's not just on

16:44our platform we're looking to be a story value in the local community and so it's through both those relationships and then I always also state this story because it reminds me where we're going and paces obviously one of the more known experiences in Kenya in particular in Africa and this story of partnership of ours was saying they were in a cab and the cab driver was willing to be

17:11paid in M paisa well that's cool that starts to show that's a growing story value and the cab driver even would be willing to hold on to that more than the local currency much Mike liked the prepaid minutes example I gave so for us it's utility in the ecosystem but absolutely in the local environment that is our success pathway and we feel really excited to get there it's a long

17:34journey but we are on it and couldn't be more thrilled very nice and that's really exciting Lin and if the viewers are looking to learn more about the project follow along and reach out for partnerships and everything what's the best way for them to learn more yeah please a coin ako I n dot IO and please join our telegram channel we're also launching a pretty cool blocked

17:58blockchain telegram experience you'll see it shortly on the wires so yet another place for people even more intimate to engage in the project so we have some more community experiences coming out so yes join us join the journey and help March this alone thanks for your time Lyn let's follow up in the near future please thank you very much have a great day