A Look at Fonbnk – A Decentralized App Enabling Africans Onramp into DeFi via Mobile Airtime

Fintechs in Africa have been taking advantage of the smartphone’s importance in daily acitivities of Africans by creating more use cases for mobile airtime. Fonbnk, a decentralized application (dApp) is one of these interesting solutions for how to get fiat currency onto a crypto wallet.

The decenralized market making dApp lets users convert the value on their existing prepaid mobile SIM cards into cryptocurrency. Another way to understand it is that it lets users turn any prepaid mobile SIM into a virtual debit card using the blockchain.

To achieve this, the dApp enables transacting with a network of airtime liquidity providers or market makers for their respective mobile carriers prepaid airtime credits.

According to Fonbnk, users can convert airtime from more than 1, 000 international phone networks into $MIN tokens, a dollar-pegged cryptocurency that exchanges at 1 MIB = $0.01

______________________________________________________________________

SEE ALSO: Why Redeemable Crypto Airtime is a Big Opportunity in Kenya and Sub-Saharan Africa
______________________________________________________________________

According to Fonbnk:

“If a user in Nigeria wants to convert 411 NGN MTN mobile airtime credit into $1.00 USD of ETH, a user can swap their credit for Fonbnk’s ERC20 token, $MIN, which can currently be used to mint USDC and then be traded for ETH on select exchanges.”

– Fonbnk

In addition, Fonbnk has built a simple bridge to Celo wallets from its dApp enabling Fonbnk dApp users to convert their fiat-based prepaid airtime credits directly into Celo Dollars ($cUSD) from anywhere in the world regardless of their banking status.

Fonbnk was one of the blockchain solutions selected for a Celo Accelerator program with Celo being a blockchain focused on bringing the blockchain to billions of users through mobile phones.

Since its inception in 2020, the company has trading activity across all the leading Sub-Saharan African countries, generating:

• Over $5 million in Gross Airtime Transactions
• Nearly 100k transactions and
• Over 50k new wallets

This represents an intriguing solution given that Africa has so far not had many easy solutions to help onboard Africans onto DeFi as they usually may need to use their credit cards to purchase crypto on an exchange first.

______________________________________________________________________

RECOMMENDED READING: [WATCH] Users in South Africa Can Now Buy Mobile Airtime and Data With Bitcoin SV

______________________________________________________________________

Thank you for your support by helping us create content:

BTC address: 3CW75kjLYu7WpELdaqTv722vbobUswVtxT

ERC20 Address: 0xBc11cFa590C6CC465248D77d399C3106B881cC0E

SOL address: 9cC65AWFHj848kntcoyiT8av3jiRQEqyTTmBR1GvVUb

____________________________________________________________________

Follow us on Twitter for latest posts and updates

Join and interact with our Telegram community

_____________________

Subscribe to our YouTube channel below for more updates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwDSTXUVKDA?enablejsapi=1&autoplay=0&cc_load_policy=0&cc_lang_pref=&iv_load_policy=1&loop=0&modestbranding=0&rel=1&fs=1&playsinline=0&autohide=2&theme=dark&color=red&controls=1&

_____________________________________________________________

Related