Blockchain Spotlight on Nurucoin

In season 1 of the Crackle original series StartUp, one of the main characters created a new cryptocurrency to rival Bitcoin that they called GenCoin. The discussion in the show was to bring currency and banking to parts of the world that didn’t have it and to take government control from it. What Nurucoin plans to do is address this in a very real way across Africa.

Africa is rather notorious for its volatile political and economic landscape. Nurucoin is being developed by BlazeBay which is kind of like Amazon by way of comparison and currently works with about 200 manufacturers. I spoke with CEO Isaac Muthui to get an idea of the problem he is facing and the solution he is proposing. What follows is distilled from that conversation and from information in their white paper and on their websites.

What Isaac wants to do is nothing less than to completely change the way business happens in Africa through the use of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. He is starting in East and Central Africa with a solution to deal with the volatile currency situation, especially in countries like Zimbabwe and Congo where their currency is crippled. His objective is to eliminate as many of the corrupt middlemen that always get involved and create something that is modular, scalable and simple to facilitate intra-African trade. To that end, they’ve already built up an impressive suite of businesses.

Many ICO’s only have a white paper and a website without even having any proof of concept code. In the case of Nurucoin, they have a big business already running and have already built all sorts of financial products to support that business, now they are just implementing the blockchain and cryptocurrency functions into it. There doesn’t seem to be any question that they can do it, and there does appear to be a large potential market with pent up demand to cater to.

In addition to Blazebay, they have a retail shopping system called Nunua254 with over 10,000 active users. They own a local payment gateway NuruPay and finally, a financial and shopping services portal called Nunur. All of this gives Nurucoin the ready made market and tools needed to adopt cryptocurrency and blockchain technology quickly, and with a lot of users. So what is it Nurucoin is doing specifically?

With an enormous disparity in exchange rates for currencies between the various African nations, and the very real possibility of surveillance of purchases for potentially nefarious use, the wider markets are difficult to work with outside of a particular country. Nurucoin is first being deployed in a version of BlazeBay called BlazeBayBlock (B3) and a B2C to provide SME businesses in Africa a simple channel to grow their business. Phase 2 will encompase B2B functionality to facilitate supply chain.

Nurucoin also plans to address the “unbanked” with a mobile payment system. By some accounts, about 70% of the 1.26 billion people in Africa do not have access to banking. The opportunity to create a stable financial system across Africa that is outside the control of the ever changing leadership and borders is quite large. The Nurucoin ICO will be selling 100 million tokens at a start price of $.10 with various discounts available in the pre-sale. The token will be tied to the price of the US dollar to a certain extent, although the value will float on the open exchanges. The utility of the token is as a currency within that Blazebay ecosystem initially. It isn’t clear if more can be mined later, but that would create potential inflation. This ICO has a real potential to be life changing for a lot of people and there is a lot of passion with the team and established history in this market space.