January 21st, 2022 - The Algorand Foundation announces today that it has awarded a grant to Safariblocks Ltd, to develop the Jasiri Protocol, a financial system for African entrepreneurs, leveraging the Algorand blockchain to offer Africans costless, regenerative, and transparent financial services.
The JASIRI Financial System aims to provide a financial protocol for African entrepreneurs that is transparent, costless, regenerative and community-owned. It includes a core crypto-asset that secures transactions in the protocol in a peer to peer fashion to exchange value, and secures decentralized finance(DeFi) applications built on the protocol to derive and create value. The JASIRI Protocol, works as a crypto-economic primitive built using Algorand off-chain smart contracts and a smart-contractible crypto-asset, secured by agency networks operated by partner African entrepreneurs, that enables the unlocking of value from real-world assets and commodities and simultaneously lowers the cost of transferring and settling value among businesses, individuals, and communities with a focus on Africa.
Through its custom asset tokenization offering, the JASIRI Protocol unlocks this dead capital for its users in Africa, radically defining new asset types and classes, and opening up new forms of recurrent financing through debt-free capital, especially crucial for a continent where most governments have overcrowded domestic debt for the sake of large infrastructure projects, unintentionally pushing most Africans to seek financing from unregulated digital lenders, shylocks, and loan sharks.
Jasiri will use the grant funding from the Foundation to build out a non-custodial, ussd-optioned (aids transfer of crypto-assets in areas with low or non-existent internet access), cross-platform mobile wallet to transact crypto-assets (Algos, stablecoins, JASIRI crypto-asset) in a permissionless way, together with a web dapp for custom real-world asset tokenization, and a couple of layer-2 smart contracts to facilitate on-chain logic.
“The Algorand way of doing things provides unique leadership to the crypto and blockchain community cutting across industrial, academic, and social angles. Having personally iterated solutions on 4 other major blockchain ecosystems before coming to Algorand, I can only say with conviction that such leadership is a once in a blue moon thing yet remains indispensable for global adoption, and trust. As the JASIRI Protocol, we are profoundly humbled for the Algorand Foundation’s decision to work with us to solve real-world problems using blockchain technology, and build the future of finance” - Celestine Kariuki - Founder, JASIRI Protocol
“Africans experience very high fees for sending and receiving payments and have difficulties accessing credit, limiting access to traditional payment and financial services. The Jasiri Protocol will avail of the extremely low fees and fast transaction finality on the Algorand Blockchain which will enable them to offer low fees for peer-to-peer micropayments. Supporting the Jasiri protocol through our grant program opens up new opportunities for better financial inclusion and participation for Africans. It will also serve to increase awareness and educate people on blockchain technology, and the opportunities available to build decentralized applications on Algorand’. - Addie Wagenknecht, Head of Global Ecosystems and Technical Operations
For more information on Jasiri please visit http://jasiriprotocol.org/ or follow them on Twitter. If you are interested in submitting a project for support from the Algorand Foundation Grant program, please apply here.
