Kotani Pay attends Celo Connect 2022
Kotani Pay was among the 700 Celo community members who attended the first Global Celo connect. The two-day event that was held in the historic La Llotja de Mar in Barcelona, Spain was a mix of keynotes, fireside chats, tech talks, workshops, panel discussions, and more.
Our CEO, Felix Macharia attended the event and was part of a panel that discussed on-ramp and Off-ramp. He dived deep into the topic and explained why Kotani Pay is considered Africa’s most reliable off-ramp Blockchain.
Our Origin story
Mr. Macharia expounded on how Kotani Pay came to the decision to bring more African users to the Blockchain space.
“As we were educating the community about Blockchain technology, apart from the complication of trying to explain the technology to common users there is this whole other aspect where the technology is disconnected in Africa from the interfaces people use and the local payment channels they are used to.”
In response to this, first, the team had to take the SMS and USSD interfaces and connect them to the Blockchain so that a user can create an account from an SMS with either a feature phone or a smartphone. Secondly, the Kotani Pay team set out to enable a cash-in, cash-out to mobile money channels.
The Celo Affair
For this year, the conference focused on four topics primarily, Universal Basic Income and Universal Access to Financial Tools which Kotani Pay is a big advocate on. Another topic was on community commerce by highlighting creator platforms, community currencies, and efforts in the space happening across the Celo ecosystem. The third topic was on NFT and creators for those interested in minting NFT on Celo. The fourth topic is on regenerative economics and climate and how community projects built on Celo have created NFTs and tokenized representations of natural capital and carbon credits.
Day 1 of the event started with a keynote from the founder of Celo, Sep Kamvar, Rene Reinsberg, Co-founder and president of Celo and Marek Olszewski, President at Valora. This was followed by an envision stage that is mostly tech talks, a create hub that is the workshop, Ideate hub where hot topics were discussed, and an experience stage which was the NFT lounge.
Felix Macharia engaged in a panel discussion on day 2 at the envision stage discussing on/off ramp. The panel consisted of Alpha Fortress CEO, Kunbi Oguneye, Cobru’s Co-founder Franco Niebles and the Co-founder of Ramp’s, Szymon Sienkiewicz.
Not only did the participants get to experience the city of Barcelona reputed as a trading city, the event was crowned by an after party like no other. Participants were treated to food trucks, a full bar and a DJ.
