As per the announcement made on April 23, Bundle currently permits its users to demand, remit and receive cash or crypto from their competitors in Nigeria.
By the end of 2020, the company intends to widen to more than 30 African nations and offer a simple fiat on and off-ram for cryptocurrency in the continent.
Bundle backs Bitcoin (BTC), Binance Coin (BNB) and Ether (ETH) and also domestic fiat currency, the Nigerial naira, but there are intentions to start supporting additional fiat currencies in the weeks ahead.
Payments can be made via cards, bank transfers and held in the application’s wallet. The service will be launched without any kind of payment, but KYC (know your customer) validation and fiat deposit and withdrawal range will be implemented.
The mobile app can be downloaded from the Google Play Android application store, and the iOS variant will be made available on the Apple’s app shop in the weeks ahead. Currently, no desktop variant is offered.
Bundle successfully completed a pre-seed fundraising in September 2019, amassing $450,000 from Binance. Yele Bademosi, the CEO and co-founder of Bundle, stated that Binance developed a range of application programming interfaces helpful for programmers in the cryptocurrency sector, proposing that the application may utilize a few of them.
According to the announcement, roughly 40% of Africans who have bank accounts pick online transaction platforms and utilize state-of-the-art financial tools, somewhat because of the continent’s low average age of 19. This young, tech-savvy population is the focus of Bundle’s financial facilities.
Bademosi stated:
“We built Bundle with the digitally native African user in mind. They are social, online, and connected across geographical boundaries. They prefer their financial services delivered digitally via mobile apps as opposed to visiting brick and mortar bank branches. We built Bundle as a mobile wallet that supports cash and crypto, and makes using crypto feel like just another digital financial transaction done on a mobile app like Venmo.”
Bundle CTO Taiwo Orilogbon detailed that Africa offers favorable conditions for crypto powered financial development. He further stated: “Currently, only 1.4 million people out of 1.2 billion people in Africa use crypto today. This is a worthwhile mission because making the blockchain ecosystem more accessible unlocks economic opportunity on and for the continent.”
Africa, which has several emerging economies, faces a dearth of robust and highly improved financial framework. Even though it has become a major burden for domestic economic development until now, it also paves way for quicker technological development in several developed nations.
Notably, in mid-April, cryptocurrency trading platform CryptoLocally is trying to resolve the financial inequity in the African continent by collaborating with payment system Sesacash and offering unique trans-border payment facilities.