Hi- I’m interested in working with you guys at Compound to help you create a version of the protocol that can be used by poor people in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Would you have an interest in this?
No. Poor people should spend their money on food, not computers and crypto. The poorest 3 bil make $1.90 or less a day they can’t even afford the electricity.
Hey @Cata, Sharp from Compound Growth Program here. Expanding Compound’s services to the developing regions is a recurring topic for us, if you have some actionable ideas, we could consider them. Iterating Compound’s codebase to cater a specific demographic is something that may not be possible, but building or encouraging other apps to use Compound for the users in developing countries is what I am after.
A certain telecom app in the Africa region has proposed some plans to integrate Compound pools which we are evaluating at this moment.
Can you please share some details on the idea/project? Or feel free to message me on my Forum account
Hi @sharp — I am not sure that I have “fully final” ideas but would love to have a talk to discuss (I’ve written to you via LinkedIn to see if we can organize a call). I’ve been working for almost 2 decades in access to finance for the world’s poor and I think the concept that Compound has would be tremendously useful for them.
- It is a misconception to think that poor do not save, as per a previous answer I saw to my initial post here. They do work very hard to be able to save but they have really poor saving mechanisms, ranging form lack of access to a simple bank account (and often when they have one, they have to save in a local currency that is very inflationary, like most African or Latin American currencies), to having to save in things like a cattle or a pig or literally bills and coins under a mattress, all of which can be lost or stolen.
- Moreover, whatever they can save, they can not leverage towards getting a loan, precisely because these savings are informal. Meaning they lack the ability to borrow for investing for example in their micro business or their farms (the poorest 3 billion people in the world are either micro-entrepreneurs or smallholder farmers).
- Thus, as you can see, the core mechanism of Compound would enable them to save either in a USD-denominated stable coin (hedging their local currency inflation) AND enable them to use that to borrow and thus invest and little by little grow their farms harvest or the turnover of their micro-business.
Now, off course the core issue is how to onboard all this people into crypto to begin with and many wallet builders are working on this, but I think the world’s majority will not onboard onto crypto until they find a truly useful application and this is where Compound comes in because you guys have something that is radically more useful than a simple wallet to just buy stablecoins and crypto tokens.
So, one idea could be to join efforts with wallets that are operationally in Asia, Africa and Latam and try to do marketing in which the wallet specifically promotes Compound’s functionalities, so that people can hear how this is useful in their day to day lives.
We could also try to do a pilot, in partnership with development organizations like the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank or a UN Agency.
I think the idea of partnering somehow with a mobile money provider would be great to, as a bridge to fully onboard on to crypto later.
In any case, I’d love to discuss further!