ACR #11: hey fren, meet me in the metaverse
This edition takes a look at the popularity of the metaverse in low income communities. Also, check out the product of the week and crypto personality of the week.
You’ll agree, the metaverse hype has cooled off. AI chatbots have taken all the love and attention. But since it’s love week, let’s give metaverse a little bit of attention.
In this week’s news, Nigeria ranks #4 in the list of countries that love the metaverse the most.
A company analyzed countries that love and hate the metaverse, and Nigeria takes the fourth spot among countries showing the most love for the concept.
CoinKickoff, a crypto data website analysed 1.6 million tweets from different parts of the world to determine which countries like or dislike the metaverse. The results showed that Vietnam topped the in-favour list, with 56.8% of the metaverse tweets coming from the southeast-Asian country being positive. Nigeria is the only African country on the in-favour list, occupying the fourth position with 51.4%.
Check out the full list:
What does this mean?
There’s only one takeaway when you look at the top countries in the list where metaverse is most liked: popularity is because of the metaverse play-to-earn games, especially popular in countries with low income.
Gamefi, NFT games, metaverse games or whatever you choose to call them peaked in 2021, led by Axie Infinity, and it allowed people in poor economies to play these not-fun-to-play games and earn above their country’s minimum wage.
The metaverse in the traditional space represented by Meta (fka Facebook) is quite different from the crypto metaverse. While Meta is investing in hardware and software infrastructure to enable the future of work, play and immersive social experiences. Axie Infinity-like crypto metaverses have mostly focused on the monetisation of virtual experiences and games.
In Nigeria, we have Metaverse Magna funded by Nestcoin. It organises competitions for gamers to earn crypto rewards while playing the games they love. Esports but for the crypto metaverse.
Though traditional gamers and developers I have spoken to don’t like this model as it has resulted in crappy gaming experiences with too much focus on trading tokens, so far play-to-earn models have been the best go-to-market strategy for crypto companies building virtual world experiences for low-income communities.
What else?
Nigeria Ranks Among the Top 15 World Crypto Hubs
A private crypto tracker, Recap, recently published a list of the top 50 major cities with infrastructures to experience mass adoption of cryptocurrencies. Based on eight data points, only one African city, Lagos, appeared in the ranking of the top 20.
As Monetary Policies Grow Complex, Nigeria Turns to Bitcoin
More Nigerians than ever are picking up interest in Bitcoin, according to trend results on Google. The nation set the record for the region with the highest search for keywords such as “buy Bitcoin” over the past 12 months. Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, and South Africa are other countries on the top five curious list.
Product of the week
Pan-African crypto exchange Yellow Card has a payment feature called Yellow Pay which allows customers to send and receive money across African countries through the Yellow Card platform.
Sending money to another African country is like driving in the cross-country race Casa Cristo, tough. Yellow Pay is a peer-to-peer money transfer product that allows anyone to send and receive fiat (local currency) across borders instantly. Yellow Card makes the process simple such that the transaction can be made with just the recipient's phone number.
Personality Spotlight
Ugochukwu Aronu
In 2016, a friend sat with Ugochukwu Aronu and gave him insights about blockchain technology. Since then, he has gone on to be the founder and CEO of two major crypto startups Xend Finance and Wicrypt.
This week, he received the Global Winner Prize of $150,000 in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the Wicrypt project. The award in the “Into the World Award Winner'' category was given at the LEAP event in Saudi Arabia.
What’s the meme?
Me last week:
What we are reading
Nigerians Are Fighting For Their Own Money And Bitcoin Can Help