Afropolitan co-founder, Chika Uwazie, recently joined leading figures in the blockchain space at SALT New York to discuss community and access in Web3. They talked about their companies' efforts around Web3 marketing, crypto-enabled universal income, and a Web3 digital African country empowering those within the diaspora.
SALT is a global thought leadership and networking forum encompassing finance, technology, and geopolitics. The brand’s global events create a platform for leading asset managers and entrepreneurs to collaborate with top asset owners, investment advisors, and policy experts.
This time, on 4th October 2022, in SALT’s headquarters New York, at an event moderated by Zack Guzmán (the Founder of Trustless Media and Coinage) SALT invited three speakers to the stage stage to talk about issues relating to fintech and geopolitics themed Building Community & Broadening Access in Web3.
Having very different but vast experiences in unique projects, these 3 leading women in tech had the following opening remarks:
Chika Uwazie | Co-Founder, Afropolitan:
“I am the co-founder of Afropolitan, and we are building the first digital country for the African diaspora, also known as the network state, a term coined by Balaji. I've been in tech for over 10 years and this is my second startup. My first was in a completely different industry, HR tech, but I truly believe that Web3 is the future, and I always tell people that I believe Web3 was made for Africa. We are building a digital country because we feel that the nation-states across Africa have failed. The African population has huge potential and you can see this when you look at the diaspora. They send about 70 billion dollars back to Africa annually. Our strategy is to take all that economy and put it into a treasury that could become really powerful. The other thing a lot of people don't realize is that globally, Nigeria is the third largest adopter of cryptocurrency; there’s so many different things that we are looking to unlock, whether it's through the investment ecosystem or the developer ecosystem. This is a long-term project for us and we are looking to build this digital country first online, and eventually on land. I’m super excited because this has never been done before and we are learning so much in the process.”
Amanda Cassatt | Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Serotonin:
“I started working on Ethereum back in 2015 and was chief marketing officer at Consensys (which played a big role in bringing Ethereum to the market). I built the first Web3 marketing team in my role there and after four years, I started a company called Serotonin. Since then, Serotonin has grown to become the largest Web3 Marketing firm. We’ve expanded into other professional services and have spun out several products from our product studio. Last year, we started with Mojito , which is now the leading NFT e-commerce backend used by Sotheby, CAA, and others. This year, we started a company called Franklin, a Web3 crypto native payroll. We also have a third one in the works that would be probably launching next year.”
Lule Demmissie | Chief Executive Officer, US, eToro:
“I am the US CEO of Etoro, an online trading platform for individual investors. We have assets ranging from just classic capital market assets to fractional shares and stocks ETFS, as well as a wide array of digital assets that we offer our customers. We also have a non-profit digital asset that allows for universal income distribution. It’s really interesting and purposeful work for the digital asset space and I think it is a very important use case to solve (the need for a universal income.) I came to crypto by way of being in finance for many years. I was in traditional finance running different kinds of investment businesses until about 3 years ago when I saw the light in terms of how blockchain and smart contracts were gonna transform our industry. They have the power to transform not just our industry but our economy and the opportunity for capital formation in communities that didn’t have it before. I am really excited to be in this space and glad to be here with you today ”
Here are the major takeaways from SALT’s event in New York:
It’s no longer news that Web3 will change our lives forever, what’s more important now is that a decentralized world creates a healthy community and empowers the people to control their own lives.
—
Founded by Chika Uwazie and Eche Emole, Afropolitan offers a different approach to the status quo. In response to frustrations with Black mobility and our community’s inability to access the perks of today’s globalized world, Afropolitan provides a new vista of opportunities to the endless possibilities in the world.
A new model of governance is one of the core principles of Afropolitan. A genuinely democratic state where the welfare of citizens trumps individual gain; a nation that champions the success of Black talent by providing citizens access to capital, employment, information, and experiences that enable us to thrive and create infinite futures. A new dawn for Africa is here — the Afropolitan Network State.
Join the network of abundance.
Learn the strategies behind tech and crypto within the African diaspora. We demystify the pathways to limitless value creation within these emerging technologies and the communities around them.
