Since crypto market cap dropped 80% from its all time high, emerging markets have generated a revival of hope and opportunity in the space. In this panel we want to do a deep dive with our guest speakers to figure out what will be the narrative for crypto in emerging markets in 2019 – the year of Building for Adoption.

We have an excellent panel of leading stakeholders who will provide their point of view on the opportunities, challenges and the realities of crypto in emerging markets from diverse perspectives.

From George Harrap, the co-founder and CEO of Bitspark providing bankless money transfer solutions to businesses and people in Asia and Africa using cryptocurrency and fiat stablecoins.

To Simon Dixon, who’s investment platform BNKTOTHEFUTURE Global Online Investment Platform has helped investors world wide invest over 740M in cryptocurrency, and fintech projects and companies.

To Brain Norton, the COO of MyEtherWallet aka MEW. Ethereum’s first ever, user-friendly wallet that bridged the gap between Ethereum owners and Ethereum’s command line.

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Here are the questions that were discussed and a few key takeaways.

Questions:

1. How is your company, project and platform specifically targeting emerging markets and why? And what’s the success metric for crypto adoption?

2. What’s so important about getting crypto adopted in emerging markets?

3. Bitcoin is being used as a hedge against the Venezuela Bolivar & Venezuela is often widely covered as a model country for crypto adoption. Do the opportunities only lie in using crypto as a hedge against currencies or are there other applications?

4. How’s adoption of MEW in emerging markets and the use cases?

5. What are some of the unique opportunities and challenges of getting money transfers using cryptocurrency adopted in emerging markets?

6. All emerging and frontier markets have successfully reached decentralised crypto adoption. How do you predict governments react when their fiat currency is no longer being used?  

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Highlights

• Often when we talk about finance in emerging markets, it’s difficult because many countries in the world people don’t have access to banking, they never going to have access in banking and banks are not interested in banking them. If you make 30 dollars a month and you will never get a bank account.
• A new class of investors have emerged that have become wealthy and you got lots of companies looking at different ways to use crypto and offer financial services. The next thing, is emerging markets that don’t have established stock exchanges, that are now looking into to leapfrog stock exchanges and going straight to securities tokens.
• Providing simple user-friendly solutions towards onboarding, even for small amounts of capital to facilitate payments, we see that as a huge step to getting people to take that risk of converting they money into digital assets.
• Often there’s a limitation that their technology can be fantastic but if you’re not actually building something that’s relevant to global customers it can be a problem.
• The interesting thing that came out of 2017 bull market, was for the first time people started thinking of savings and investing. While we call that speculation, these young people would not have bought traditional financial products – stocks, bonds, commodities. Yet crypto gave people the first thought of “actually maybe I need to do something, speculate with my money in order to try to make more money.
• With all the boom and bust, we are going back to basics and peer to peer cash payments. For a wider crypto adoption, it really comes down to convenience.
  

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Watch the full video to hear all the details and answers to all questions!