AFRO Whitepaper

The goal of AFRO is to bring decentralized finance to the continent of Africa, allowing Africans, and international actors with interests in Africa, to leverage the full potential of decentralized tokens and blockchain for everyday transactions and payments. We understand that there are disparities between the economic abilities of local and international actors. AFRO aims to bridge that gap by incentivizing international actors to stake tokens and earn transaction fees and tokens, while driving local adoption through means such as airdrops, and rewards.

AFRO will facilitate adoption by subsidizing prohibitive costs and lowering barriers to entry. AFRO differs from other Africa focused token ecosystems with its bottom up approach to building its token economy. This philosophy is implicit in our economic model and initial token pricing. We are not building cities but rather focused on fast tracking decentralized token usage across the continent.

The AFRO project is as audacious as it is ambitious, a multi-year project that will also require some philanthropic effort, underpinned by strong commercial incentives, to become a reality. We believe that blockchain offers Africans, and other interested parties, a unique opportunity to participate in the rejuvenation of the African continent. AFRICA MATTERS. Our aim is to also support the efforts of governments, institutions, and organizations by empowering the people of Africa to achieve more than is currently possible.

It is arguable that no other region of the world needs the utility of decentralized tokens more than Africa. A diverse region of 1.3 billion people, expected to reach 2 billion by 2050, the continent is plagued by high inflation, inadequate banking infrastructure, high transaction fees and remittance costs, unstable currencies, and heavy reliance on cash.

Inefficient centralized finance and, in a number of countries, questionable economic policies, place Africans at a huge disadvantage vis-a-vis the rest of the world. Africa's economic problems, and blockchain adoption challenges, are excellently documented in the research paper "The State of Crypto Africa", by Arcane Research, in collaboration with Luno.

We propose AFRO as a viable solution to fast-track blockchain and decentralized finance in Africa, enabling new markets and use cases, and facilitating a gradual decoupling from inequitable and inefficient legacy systems.

AFRO offers a decentralized token ecosystem designed specifically to incentivize sophisticated actors to provide liquidity for the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) applications, such as payments, transfers, remittances, savings, loans, and investment products, that Africans need to go about their daily lives.

In the process, AFRO also solves some of the challenges of crypto adoption for Africa by essentially eliminating barriers to entry. Key to the AFRO ecosystem is AFRO token holders who stake tokens across the ecosystem, providing liquidity for a multitude of use cases. In the process they earn a portion of transaction fees and receive governance tokens.

The launch of a new token, especially one aimed at the complex African market, is fraught with challenges and risks:

• Regulatory Environment: Future regulations in various jurisdictions may not be conducive to the development of the AFRO ecosystem in certain countries.
• Lack of Adoption: The AFRO token may not be able to gain significant traction in markets for reasons beyond our control.
• High Transaction Fees: Even after taking into account incentives and subsidies, transaction fees may be too high to gain significant usage traction.
• Relatively Low Internet Coverage: Internet coverage and smartphone penetration in certain areas might hinder significant portions of the target market from using our services.
• Preference for Established Tokens: African users may prefer to use established tokens such as Bitcoin and Ethereum for decentralized transactions.
• Third Party Platform Risks: The AFRO ecosystem is built on a third-party blockchain platform, inheriting all its scalability, security and performance features.

We believe that governance tokens are an important component of decentralized ecosystems. AFRO aims to nurture good actors to do the right thing for the ecosystem. While we strongly believe in the power of community governance, our approach is to hold off on the launch of governance features of the AFROX token until the ecosystem is fully operational, and we have received adequate feedback from the market and the community.

Initial governance of the AFRO ecosystem will be carried out by the founders in conjunction with our Advisors, while we collect user feedback and ensure the stability of the ecosystem. In the event that there is demand for community governance, governance features will be added to AFROX thereby ceding governance to the AFRO community.

AFRO is a decentralized token ecosystem built on top of the Stellar platform. As such, the AFRO ecosystem can leverage all that is good about Stellar, decentralized tokens, instant currency exchange between crypto and fiat, DeFi applications, and more, to fast-track access to the decentralized world for Africans.

International token holders form the bedrock of the ecosystem providing liquidity by staking tokens to earn transaction fees and future governance tokens. We acknowledge that the current state of development of decentralized tokens and ecosystems, and challenges on the ground in Africa, place many Africans at a disadvantage in terms of access.

AFRO aims to bridge that gap with custom tokens, DAPPs and an ecosystem that facilitates access to the decentralized world for Africans while allowing international actors to transact with the continent more efficiently. Africa is a great test case for decentralized tokens, as we have described in this whitepaper.

The goal of AFRO is to accelerate usage of decentralized tokens in Africa through powerful market-driven incentives, including creating new income-generating opportunities. In the process, it is hoped that Africans will be freed from banklessness, currency instability, high transaction costs, and inflation.

We hope that you will join us on this journey by participating in the crowdsale and staying with us as we roll out our ecosystem of DAPPs and marketplaces, driving adoption across the continent.