Grace Ashiru
Block, the company behind Cash App and Square, has teamed up with Yellow Card, one of the biggest Bitcoin exchanges in Africa, to allow payments between 16 African countries, including Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa.
The World Bank says that sending money from one country to another costs the most in Africa, as this Techloy map shows.
Yellow Card and TBD tried their cross-border payment infrastructure in March by sending money between the US, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya. TBD wants developers other than Yellow Card to use its cross-border payment infrastructure.
The system leverages Bitcoin and Stablecoins to reduce the fees to send money across borders, according to Block’s TBD, a developer platform focused on making the decentralized financial world accessible for everyone.
TBD built a “bridge” that complied with the law to connect all 16 countries, and Yellow Card made the software to connect the banking networks of each country. The relationship comes after Jack Dorsey, who helped start Block and is now its CEO, put money into Yellow Card two years ago.
Block has been growing its cross-border payments strategy, including remittances, and sponsoring a funding round for Gridless, a Kenyan Bitcoin mining startup aiming to encourage renewable energy development. According to Chris Maurice, CEO of Yellow Card, the alliance addresses the demand for new solutions in the international payments industry.
