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The few government forays there have been into the digital finance space for consumers have been lackluster. Ghana’s e-Zwich payment system covers less than 10% of the population, and usage has dropped precipitously. Kenya’s Huduma Card has only 12.5% coverage of the population, and more than 40% of the cards that have been issued haven’t been collected. The launches of Tunisia’s e-Dinar in 2015 and Senegal’s eCFA in 2016, precursors to today’s CBDCs, also failed to garner significant traction among citizens. Senegal’s government eventually dropped the eCFA after receiving pressure from West Africa’s regional central bank.

From African governments can’t run consumer fintech, digital currencies.

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Take the case of Senegal’s Wave, a payment service provider operating in the country’s mobile money segment. While eCFA, the country’s ill-fated national digital currency project, was struggling to sign up a few thousand users, Wave grew its subscriber base to nearly 5 million, helped in no small part by one of the largest payment ecosystems interoperability projects in Africa, created by the West African Economic and Monetary Union.

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While the government estimates that over four million people downloaded the national bitcoin wallet Chivo, motivated by a $30 sign-up bonus, usage remains low. An April study by economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 61% of people abandoned the digital wallet after receiving the initial incentive.

Factbox

COMPANY NAME: n1co
FOUNDERS: Alejandro Argumedo, Ricardo Cuellar, and Juan Maceda
HEADQUARTERS: San Salvador, El Salvador
FOUNDED: 2022
AFFILIATED BRANDS: Hugo App
FUNDING: $12 million
VALUATION: $64.8 million
Ingrid Weil, the owner of a bakery in San Salvador, told Rest of World that while she accepts bitcoin — which is legally mandated — she has only received six payments in the cryptocurrency, and none over the past six months. In contrast, she estimates that she receives around four or five payments through n1co payment links every day.

From For all the hype around Bitcoin, Salvadorans just want digital banking – Rest of World.

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Trying to own the consumer payments space isn’t just inefficient, it carries risks. Even if CBDCs could grow to scale, they could end up creating liquidity crunches in the traditional commercial sector, by making it easy to move large amounts of money out of the traditional banking system and into the new digital wallets. (Mobile money and private sector–built digital wallets have to keep their floats in traditional custodian banks). If, on the other hand, commercial banks are brought in as intermediaries, they will add margins and defeat the whole purpose of a low-cost, universal wallet for the bottom of the pyramid.

From African governments can’t run consumer fintech, digital currencies.

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Adoption of the eNaira (the digital version of the naira) has so far been relatively sluggish. The eNaira app has accumulated 700,000 downloads as of April 2022. That’s equal to 0.35% of the population, though not all of the downloads are users in Nigeria.

Conversely, 33.4 million Nigerians were reported to be trading or owning crypto assets, despite the Central Bank of Nigeria’s attempts to restrict usage.

From Visualized: The State of Central Bank Digital Currencies.

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Nigeria is currently implementing a large-scale digital ID project with the government planning to issue at least 148 million digital ID numbers to citizens by 2024.
Many stakeholders have been in the fray to help Africa’s most populous country (with a population now estimated at over 220 million) attain this and other digital transformation ambitions. Further collaboration is expected.
The country’s Digital Identification for Development (ID4D) agency National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), which recently formed a partnership to advance Nigeria’s digital ID ecosystem, discussed the ecosystem model and the need for involvement from the private sector and civil society in an interview with the Independent this week.
As of May 2022, 82.7 million digital IDs had been issued, according to government figures, with over 80 percent of IDs issued after 2015.

From Integrated Biometrics sees financial inclusion gains from Nigeria’s digital ID | Biometric Update.

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The company says the breakthrough in enrolling citizens has put the federal government on the right trajectory in enabling financial inclusion, and also in curbing security concerns as exemplified with the controversial linking of SIM cards to the NIN.

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But here is a caveat. Africa’s over-dependence on the US for cloud services is breeding data colonialism, where developed economies prey on Africa’s large-scale data resources from which they extract economic value.

A digital scramble for Africa by global tech companies is on, and the prize is Africa’s data, which is being used to inform solutions for the continent’s numerous challenges.

“Big tech offers Africans the most affordable cloud services and go ahead to train rural citizens on digital skills for free and even offer free online courses to university students. But nothing comes for free, Africans pay with their private data,” Mustafa Sheik, deputy director general of Somalia’s communications authority told Quartz.

From The scramble for Africa’s data is taking place on the cloud — Quartz Africa.

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Led by these clues, and more, our team was able to obtain a fresh photograph of Olga Kolobova from a whistleblower with access to Russia’s database of drivers’ licences.

From (1) Bellingcat on Twitter: “Led by these clues, and more, our team was able to obtain a fresh photograph of Olga Kolobova from a whistleblower with access to Russia’s database of drivers’ licences.” / Twitter:

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Block is facing a Class Action lawsuit over a Cash App Investing data breach last year that impacted 8.2 million customers.

Block in April informed the SEC that a former employee had downloaded reports, without permission, containing customer information on US Cash App users.

From Block faces lawsuit over Cash App breach:

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A set of hackers managed to impersonate Binance chief communications officer (CCO) Patrick Hillmann in a series of video calls with several representatives of cryptocurrency projects. The attackers used what Hillman described as an AI hologram, a deepfake of his image for this objective, and managed to fool some representatives of these projects, making them think Hillmann was helping them get listed on the exchange.

From Hackers Used Deepfake of Binance CCO to Perform Exchange Listing Scams – Exchanges Bitcoin News:

What is to be done? Unless Zoom clients check the digital signatures of the participants, how can anyone know who they are really talking to? But wait a minute… why don’t Zoom clients check the digital signatures of the participants?

If you come from the computer science department, it seems easy

Well, let me tell you what happens in practice. A while back, I was involved in a project for bank. A Swiss bank, as it happens. And the project was of a somewhat sensitive nature, so the bank asked me and other consultants to digitally sign and encrypt all mail. It took about two days for all of us to figure out how to get the relevant S/MIME certificates and configure our mail packages to use them properly. It was really difficult to get it working, and we knew what we were doing. The world of high security communications lasted about a day and then the bank called up and told us to stop encrypting thing because their anti-spam system was quarantining all of our messages (because it couldn’t read them). So we turned off the encryption and just signed the messages. After another day we were asked to stop doing that because the business managers were reading the messages on their phones, not their laptops, and their phones were reporting all of the signatures as invalid. We never found out why.

Look, PGP has been around for years. You can send me secure e-mail any time you want to by using PGP. The public key for dave@15Mb.ltd is on the PGP key servers and the fingerprint is B97A F576 4458 B23C 67EF 38E D91E AE41 896F E501. That’s a 4096 bit key. If you want to send me some juicy whistleblowing or insider trading tips, you can do it using a key that the NSA can’t break (for at least a decade or so, until they get their hands on a cool quantum computer).

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Mercado Libre (MELI), Latin America’s largest e-commerce company by market cap, started rolling out its own cryptocurrency in Brazil, the firm said Thursday.
The currency, Mercado coin, can be used to make purchases on Mercado Libre and receive it as cash back on purchases, the company said.

From E-Commerce Giant Mercado Libre Introduces Cryptocurrency in Brazil, Plans Wider Latin America Use:

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The cryptocurrency was developed using the ERC-20 token standard on the Ethereum blockchain, the company said. During the first stage, users will not be able to transfer it to external wallets.