Mobile Money Was Africa's Original Stablecoin - How M-Pesa Predicted Crypto by 20 Years

Aaron Markowitz-Shulman: Yeah, it's something that we think about a lot, actually. ⁓ We see it really as an evolution, much less than a revolution. ⁓ I think if you think about it, mobile money is really Africa's original stable coin. If you think about what M-Pesa did back in 2007. Adrian: Mmm. Aaron Markowitz-Shulman: know, I never stopped getting excited or like amazed when I about this, but you had economies that were almost entirely cash-based for the transfer of value. And you had a realization that as mobile penetration grew and people were handing over, ⁓ you shillings or ⁓ kwacha cedis to a company to buy airtime or to buy data, you had digital store of value. You had this brilliant idea to Adrian: Yeah. Aaron Markowitz-Shulman: use the same infrastructure to store financial value and make it easily transferable. So what you have is you have a form of digital money that is held in custody with mobile network operators instead of banks. You have this form of ⁓ transferability which happens instantly across a ledger. ⁓ know immediately whether a transaction is successful. It's more secure than banking. It's natively digital. like, holy cow, like all of a sudden, what am I describing? I'm describing to you the same things that people talk about the advantages of stablecoin. So I think that's how we approach it. we see that the continent was 20 years ahead in terms of building this infrastructure. Before, we were talking about crypto and digital assets and stablecoin and non-conferences and then podcasts. and kind of all of the rest of it. So to kind of continue that thread is that mobile money digitized. a lot of economic activity within countries. Aggregators and payment companies like Pawa Pay have come along to kind of connect that ⁓ to itself and to each ⁓ to start ⁓ opening up. this network to ⁓ local merchants, to Pan-African merchants, to international merchants. And then the next step that we see is the kind of continuance of this digitization with stablecoin, which ⁓ makes the... international or global movement of kind of follow the same path. It's just giving us more speed. It's giving us more security. It's reducing costs and it's reducing friction. And therefore, you know, we've had stable coins as part of our settlement flow ⁓ for four years since, you know, since before. Yeah, since before they were cool. ⁓ Adrian: Mmm. Really? Wow. First movers advantage. ⁓ Aaron Markowitz-Shulman: You know, it's not something that like we've ever felt the need to kind of like, maybe we should have like market or we don't push it so hard. And of course there's lots of, you know, discussion around compliance and making sure you do it in jurisdictions where it's acceptable and all of the rest of it. But it's, ⁓ for us, it's just kind of an evolutionary piece that... Adrian: Yeah. Aaron Markowitz-Shulman: We've built into the digital payments infrastructure that we already operate. And it's all about just making it easier to do business across the continent.