The Nigerian government has signed a 3-year exclusive IPR (intellectual property right) agreement with Developing Africa Group to launch a nation-wide wallet which will enable the international commercialization of all IP forms being created and registered within the country, both locally and internationally. In this context, the IPR exclusivity agreement consists in the government granting Developing Africa Group – a regional software development company – to build the country’s official platform for its people to be able to upload any form IP rights and trade, sell or exchange them abroad, while collecting the royalties and proceeds of these operations on their wallets.
IP forms reached by the above mentioned agreement include trademarks, patents and all forms of copyrights such as songs, lyrics, videos, shows, lectures, podcasts and all forms of streamable content.
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The Developing Africa Group has chosen Koibanx, with the Government’s approval, as the tokenization and payments engine to be utilized in the country and the Algorand Blockchain the protocol to build on top of. Koibanx, the leading Latin American asset tokenization and Blockchain financial infrastructure company, will be in charge of implementing the wallet, the token both for the IP being sold and stable token (equivalent to the Naira) to pay the creators in addition to the overall technical integration of the different vendors in play, which include one of the top card issuing companies worldwide, a content streaming platform and top firms both legal and data mining, they will all be announced before launch date.
All tokens will be launched on top of the Algorand Blockchain. “Algorand’s protocol not only provides the performance, scalability, security and functionality required to implement such a large scale project but is also environment-friendly which is important for the Government and has a huge philosophical match with the `creators economy industry´ we’re targeting here,” stated Ben Oguntala, CEO of Developing Africa Group.
This is not the first “Koibanx-Algorand” implementation, the synergy already extends to several recent national public and private initiatives across Latin America, including a national blockchain-based citizens ID and information program in Colombia (which currently has +12M users), El Salvador’s National Registration platform (which comprehends IP but aso land, vehicles and legal entities titles) and over 10 different payments implementation for banks in the region. Koibanx-Algorand are making strides across Latin America to bring more efficient infrastructure and tools to the region’s burgeoning digital economy.
“What the Developing Africa Group has achieved is truly amazing. The Nigerian IPR Wallet is probably the largest crypto project world-wide. When we took El Salvador´s challenge (Koibanx also managed Chivo´s Lightning Network implementation) we impacted the life of millions of citizens, after this experience we embarked on the Colombian government platform handling tens of millions…I believe this initiative could change the life of +50M people easily. Since we launched Koibanx back in 2015 we were convinced Blockchain tech and cryptocurrencies were the foundational building blocks for economic development in emerging markets, being able to have an active part in how is happening is definitely a privilege,” commented Leo Elduayen, Koibanx´s CEO.
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The initiative itself speaks to two big facts the crypto industry has been assuming since its beginnings. Firstly, it is not just by coincidence that crypto adoption and tokenized assets take place in “emerging markets” (El Salvador, Nigeria, Colombia, Panamá, Paraguay). Secondly, Latin America and Africa share much more than one can appreciate first hand in terms of socio-economic conditions, demographies, inflationary currencies, crypto adoption, financially sub-attended population and a rapidly increasing smartphone penetration.
Executives from the above mentioned companies already confirmed that as the initiative begins to develop (will be launched before January 2023) conversations to replicate the functioning in Colombia and Central America (countries and a region with huge African ascendance) are already in place. We´re on the verge of seeing Latam and Africa convert themselves into the epicenter of the crypto world.
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