Founded in 2013, AZA Finance is a fintech company offering several financial services, including foreign exchange, facilitating payments across Africa, and the trade of digital currencies. The company has already managed more than $2 billion in transactions for companies and enterprises, including SMEs in over 115 countries. AZA utilises its web platform and API to make sending money and payments easier in Africa and worldwide. FTX is a crypto exchange giant valued at about $32 billion and allows users to buy, sell and store cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum and many others.
The two companies, FTX and AZA, have created a digital infrastructure that will allow the continent to access Web3 and reap the financial benefits linked to the Web3 economy. What is Web3? This is the next evolution of the internet and will be decentralised and built on blockchain technology. The internet has profoundly changed the way we live. We rely on the internet for almost everything, including communication, banking, trade, purchases, etc. Today we rely on different platforms owned by big companies such as Google, Facebook e.t.c to do anything online.
It is believed that Web3 will change the dependency on tech giants, and the net will be user-based. That means users will own and maintain the internet and rely on blockchain transactions. Simply put, Web3 is about ownership. It will enable content creators to have full ownership of their content. This will surely change how revenue is distributed by large tech firms that depend on content created by users, for example, Twitter, Tik Tok and other social platforms.
Apart from developing an infrastructure for Web3, the partnership between FTX and AZA will help increase the adoption and use of digital currencies in Africa. The continent has the world’s highest adoption rate of cryptocurrency, with the crypto market growing by 1200% in one year. Although the continent has the highest growth rate, its crypto economy is still small compared to other regions. This is because the two companies are behind the large steps in digital currency transactions already experienced in the region.
The African population is also expected to double by 2050; this leaves space for growth, making Africa a prime destination for crypto and digital-based financial solutions to increase the number of users. The partnership between the crypto exchange giant and AZA seeks to make it easier to make payments and deposit funds on FTX.com by integrating local banks and mobile money into the platform.
Collaboration between the two companies will also show that African NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and artists are signed up on the FTX NFT marketplace. AZA finance was among the first companies to enable the trade of digital currencies using mobile money and created a market for directly exchanging digital currencies and African currencies. The partnership will further improve and diversify the use of mobile money to exchange digital currencies in African countries where many people remain unbanked and cannot access the existing traditional financial services.
