Payourse CEO, Bashir Aminu says Africans need access to cryptos after $600k pre-seed raise

Payourse, a Lagos-based blockchain startup that develops products and tools to accelerate cryptocurrency adoption in Africa, announced on Wednesday that it has raised $600,000 in pre-seed funding to scale its products, hire more talent, and expand into new markets.

Micheal Ugwu, one of Africa’s largest NFT collectors, Flori Ventures, Olumide Soyombo’s Voltron Capital, and Allegory Capital facilitated the financing round. These investors join CELO Co-Founders Marek Olszewski and Rene Reinsberg, Kola Aina of Ventures Platform, Angel Touch Holdings, and Oluwatobi Anisere as angel investors.

Because financial services in Africa are notoriously fragmented, blockchain-enabled cryptocurrencies provide better financial mobility to Africa’s largely youthful population. As a result, crypto adoption on the continent has been increasing, and Payourse wants to ensure that everyone has access to it.

Bashir Aminu, the company’s CEO, spoke with us about his journey and Payourse.

According to your business description, you provide tools that assist businesses in developing crypto products. Could you please elaborate on what these tools are and how they assist businesses in developing crypto products? Tell us about the Payourse vision.

As a result, at Payourse, we are committed to accelerating the adoption of cryptocurrency in Africa by making it more accessible to Africans. We accomplish this in a variety of ways, one of which is CoinProfile. CoinProfile enables users to send money from anywhere in the world to a bank account in Nigeria or a mobile money account in Africa.

With the success of CoinProfile, we realized that many businesses wanted to incorporate cryptocurrency into their existing apps. We also discovered new companies that want to develop crypto-related products but lack access to the necessary tools, so we saw an opportunity. In our experience, the crypto UX is also broken, making crypto-related products very complicated and unfriendly to users.

So, for us, the goal is to accelerate the growth of cryptocurrency by providing the necessary tools for the development of user-friendly products. Using the tools that we developed for CoinProfile, we make it easier, faster, and less expensive for businesses to create user-friendly crypto products. We provide three main tools as a service: the Payment tool, which allows users to integrate payment or easily accept payments; the Wallet tool, which allows you to integrate wallets in your app; and the Liquidity tool, which allows users to buy and sell cryptocurrency in your app. These are significant products, but there are more on the way.

According to surveys, at least 32% of Nigerian internet users will be dealing in cryptos by 2020, making us the world’s second largest crypto market. What are your thoughts on the growth of cryptocurrency and your concerns about it?

I believe that crypto has come a long way since I first started in 2016, that there are a lot more people who are informed and aware of crypto, and that the growth is here to stay. To be honest, it is still in its early stages because many people still regard cryptocurrency as a myth.

One of the bottlenecks to crypto’s acceleration, in my opinion, is its user experience. It’s a little difficult for less tech-savvy people to use a standard crypto product. While some platforms are attempting to simplify their processes, the majority of crypto products remain complicated and difficult for many people.

Another major stumbling block is regulation; it is unclear what the government’s position on cryptocurrency is. Most countries are still trying to figure out how it works, and some are outright hostile to it. In my opinion, cryptocurrency is the future of finance. Every day, crypto solves a lot of my problems, and I know that if a lot more people knew about and understood it, it would be even more valuable. Because many people in developing countries are financially excluded, I believe crypto is more of a need than a want for Africa.

How has Payourse dealt with regulation, particularly in our environment, and how do you think the crypto community and regulators can work together?

I believe regulators can be much better and less stringent because the government can achieve so much more with cryptocurrency. Since the ban on cryptocurrency, adoption has increased, and now a lot more people are interested, which is ironic.

The government should concentrate on how to generate value from cryptocurrency. They can accomplish this by first creating an enabling environment for crypto-related businesses to thrive, followed by taxing these businesses.

The CBN governor and most analysts have argued that cryptocurrency is being used to facilitate anonymous transactions and will be used for money laundering and terrorist financing. The reality is that the vast majority of these criminals, nearly 90%, conduct their business in fiat currencies.

Transparency and easy adoption of cryptocurrency are the best ways to combat this. Working closely with crypto exchanges can help to solve many fraud-related issues. We need more open-minded regulators to collaborate with exchanges and crypto companies to create an enabling environment for crypto to grow.

Payourse has received a total of $207k in funding from investors since its inception in 2019. What should we expect from your team now that you’ve successfully raised $600,000 in pre-seed funding?

We are excited about this new funding because it will allow us to improve our existing use-cases and then build new ones as we expand into new markets and accelerate crypto adoption on the continent. We will expand our team and develop more use cases for CoinProfile.

CoinProfile is a platform that enables crypto-to-fiat exchange by allowing users from all over the world to send crypto and receive fiat/naira value in any bank account within minutes. CoinProfile currently has over 5,000 users and has processed millions of dollars on the platform. Since its inception, the exchange has grown 15,000 percent across all touchpoints and has maintained a monthly growth rate of 150 percent.