Author: David Itopite

The metaverse is coming. Or maybe it is already here. But interest in the concept has soared higher than ever before after Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his newly renamed company, Meta Systems Inc., would take up the task of building a metaverse within the next few years. The metaverse, which started out as a fictional concept in the 1992 book “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson, is a virtual reality built on top of the real one in which people live, interact and do what people do. Meta Inc. hopes to bring this vision to life by “rendering the…

Hello everyone. For a while now, this space has been silent, quiet. The operations of Decentralize Africa had been paused in December 2021. But not to worry, we are resuming activities fully this February. So a Happy New Year! is in order. In any case, it is important to note that a few changes have been made to the core of Decentralize Africa. Since it’s inception, Decentralize Africa had been about the reportage of Bitcoin, Crypto, Blockchain and AI amongst other things and how these technologies impact the African economic scene. Now, Decentralize Africa wishes to turn its focus more…

What is the underlying philosophy behind decentralized cryptocurrencies? In a word, democratization of finances, hence their being decentralized. Cryptocurrencies came to remove, in a sense, the middle man of the finance world, banks, and place the power over finances in the hands of the individual. The second point would be to usurp the reach and influence of government backed fiat money, effectively becoming the medium of value exchange for most. Cryptocurrencies have been called the currencies of the future for many of their innovative qualities. Evidently, the crypto world is still quite in its infancy, relatively speaking, and this is…

CHRISTIE’S/BEEPLE The crypto world is buzzing with a lot of projects with many different aims and flavors. But notorious amongst these projects are the ones that do not have an iota of serious minded business backing them. Yes. The memecoins, cryptocurrencies based on jokes, memes and levity. Never before in human history would jokes and satire come to have so much value. Creators of the various memecoins base them off of internet jokes or even other coins based on jokes. Wild it is truly. But for things that begin as a play on public market perception, things can get serious…

Coming off the heels of China’s now infamous crypto crackdown, the mining rate in the U.S. has now surpassed that of China for the very first time. With a hashrate – a term used to describe collective computing power of miners around 35.4% in July, the hashrate in the U.S. is up 428% compared to September 2020. In a move dubbed the “great mining migration”, miners in China had been moving towards more crypto friendly countries since May, when the Chinese government called for a crackdown on bitcoin mining and trading. Some of the locations thought favorable enough to entice…

On Friday, October 15, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that American fintech company, Square, would be looking to get into Bitcoin mining. Jack Dorsey who is also Square’s CEO announced this on Twitter which subsequently sent waves through the bitcoin market, surging its price to almost a record high, rising over $62,000 over the weekend. According to the Twitter boss, Square is looking to building an open source Bitcoin mining system that would be available to individuals and businesses. Sharing his thoughts further on the initiative, he stated that “Mining needs to be more distributed” and that “the more decentralized…

Source: Getty Images (modified) In 2019, Facebook Inc. announced the Libra, a digital currency project being developed by the company. Libra was unveiled to be a blockchain based stablecoin backed by bank deposits and short-term government securities and was to be integrated into Facebook’s services like Messenger and WhatsApp. The Libra blockchain was said to be able to handle 1000 transactions per second, in stark contrast to Bitcoin’s 7 transactions per second. Needless to say, the news that the largest social media company was working on a cryptocurrency rocked the market for a while. But for some reason, we haven’t…

Governments and authority figures have existed throughout history to serve many purposes amongst which trust is central. In matters of social and economic concern, some form of trust and/or distrust has enabled people in all cultures across all times to transact and interact, to exchange value and advance cultural agenda. This is so important that our very concept of money is built on trust or value induced by trust. However, for most of history up till now, authorities have wielded central power and that has always been an avenue for corruption, a lack of transparency which leads to wastage of…

Everyone who dabbles in the crypto industry learns almost immediately that the market is very volatile and oftentimes things can change very quickly. That volatility is the fundamental reason why some investors make absolutely stunning gains in so short a time and others lose a lot of money as well. Trading in crypto is one of the riskiest ventures any person can undertake and as they say, it’s not for the faint of heart. The risks can be mitigated of course and sometimes depends specifically on the coin or crypto asset being traded on, barring general market trends. Nevertheless, to…

Proof of work, proof of stake, ledger, cryptography, mining and other buzzwords are a feature of the crypto community. However, for a kind of tech that hopes to achieve more mainstream adoption, blockchain has to be put in simpler terms for larger groups of people to understand it enough to want to adopt or use it. The current pundits of blockchain tech are more likely to be starry eyed (and equally cynical) tech enthusiasts as well as traders of different calibers and experiences who are obviously all trying to make profit rather than the layman on the street who’s trying…