My name is Alexandria “The Great”. I am a citizen of Zimbabwe and am in my second year of a bachelor’s degree at Liaoning Shuhua University in China. During my studies in business administration, I also hold two jobs within the bitcoin community. The first is with Money On Chain where we are building Defi on Bitcoin for Bitcoiners to allow them to improve the performance of their Bitcoins while maintaining full control of their private keys. The second is Global Bitcoin Fest where we are the first and only Podcast/Twitter space to interview personalities from Bitcoin communities from all countries.
My Bitcoin story begins at the age of 11 when I became one of many millions of Zimbabweans to achieve multi-billionaire status. As great as it sounds, you really couldn’t imagine the lifestyle of a multi-billionaire in Zimbabwe at that time. Our way of life included many luxuries, including waking up as early as 2:00 a.m. to line up to buy basic goods outside outlets across the country. In most queues, people could wait up to six hours for essentials such as bread and water. Those queuing outside banks or ATMs to make cash withdrawals would only be entitled to local cash withdrawals equivalent to the equivalent of US$2 and this was an imposed daily allowance. by our own banks. You see – around the year 2008, hyperinflation had reached a staggering 89.7 sextillion percent. It was a lifetime for many billionaires! Following this phase – we then had a few years of stability when the country became dollarized. Unfortunately, this did not last long as the government decided to return to a local currency by introducing a pseudo-currency known as the “Bond Note”. It has been deployed in both paper money and e-money. The electronic version of this became known as RTGS and could be used in interbank transfers as well as via e-wallet with the dominant e-wallet known as Ecocash. This bond currency is not offered in any other country. It can only be marketed locally. To discourage foreign currency trading on the black market, the government has introduced a 2% transaction fee on all payments and money transfers between local accounts. This has since increased to a total of around 6% transfer fee which includes the 2% tax levy as well as bank charges.
Given the backdrop illustrated above as well as many other reasons not mentioned in this article – I think Zimbabwe, by far, has the biggest use case for Bitcoin.
Solution: My primary goal through my employment with Global Bitcoin Fest and Money On Chain is to improve the scalability of Bitcoin in Zimbabwe. By creating the first Bitcoin community that exchanges, collaborates and supports each other. I’m also working with a few Bitcoiners on our first bitcoin mining operation which will create local access to bitcoin at the lowest possible cost ratio of 1:1, which could then enable the most affordable medium of exchange and allow bitcoin to gain market share in remittance payment terms and bottom-up support.