This very first episode is a tweet read of Yoseph Ayele's personal take on his learning trip across 4 African countries. In the tweet, he references Vitalik's 2022 post on stablecoins and touches on the increasing interest in ZK proofs. 

Unbarred is written, narrated, produced and edited by Miss Purple.

Theme Music: "Countdown to Apocalypse" by Soundridemusic
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[TRANSCRIPT]

Welcome to Unbarred with Miss Purple. The weekly podcast on global culture, technology’s evolution and the financial revolutions taking Africa and the rest of the world by storm. Unbarred is produced with intention by Purple Pages.

GM, GE or good day to you all, today is Friday the 10th of March and I think it is quite serendipitous that the very first official episode is a long read of a thread that talks about the impact of decentralisation in Africa. The thread was written by Yoseph Ayele, whom I got the chance to meet on 2 separate occasions at crypto events in Africa. If you would like to read the thread yourself, I will include the link to the tweet in the shownote.

{read Tweet}

I was particularly moved by this tweet because I live all this as truth. The issues Yoseph touched on, namely currency, trust and simple finance, are issues many of us still live in. As it stands, the loti - which is the currency of Lesotho - to the dollar sits at 18.53, that is insane to me, in 2021, it went as low as 13.57. The globally unspoken truths are that African currencies are on a constant downward spiral, the leaders we have in charge do not often put the people first and making a living for yourself is hard. The globalisation and digitalisation of work has in the past few years changed many lives, mine included.

Decentralisation is not just a fun trend we want to try on, it is a response to the problems that have plagued us for a very long time, it offers solutions to our needs in a way that neither sidelines nor intentionally devalues our worth as a people. As I like to say on the Bankless Africa podcast, there is a new revolution happening, and this time, Africa refuses to be left behind. To close, I would like to reiterate 2 points from Yoseph’s thread, the first is 'wen DevCon Africa', and the second, is nowhere in the world can one find a region's economy that will be able to 10-20x in a few decades!

Thank you for listening. Stay rooted, and wherever you are, remember to dream bigger. I’ll see you next week.