Hello Celo community, my name is SERGE KIEMA and I am the Founder and CEO of Dunia.
After almost 2 years of research, we are ready to launch eXOF on Celo via the Mento Platform, a stablecoin tied to the CFA franc which is shared by 14 countries in Africa.
As a part of the connect the world initiative, Dunia will support on/off ramping of eXOF once it’s launched on chain. With eXOF launching, we want to share our vision of a Decentralized mobile money service leveraging eXOF, Valora & Dunia. Our users will now be able to cash in/out of Valora and access the broader DeFi ecosystem through eXOF and Dunia’s cash network across francophone Africa (integrated with fiat connect).
Team Background :
We built DuniaPay, a mobile app that grew to 45k monthly active users across Francophone Africa with +6m$ in monthly volume. The company recently pivoted to focus on building their payment infrastructure and grow an ecosystem around eXOF. Specifically we offer payment API to businesses looking for cash in/out services across Francophone Africa
We are active in all major markets across Francophone Africa (Burkina, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, MALI, Togo, Benin, Guinea, Cameroon) and are aggressively working on growing our cash network.
Context around eXOF :
Originally envisaged as cXOF, the stablecoin will be denominated eXOF. Dunia as a company is transitioning into a lab called ECOLab with the goal of supporting an ecosystem around eXOF. The XOF is a currency shared by 14 countries in francophone Africa and they also share common regulation frameworks around e money or mobile money. With the growth around mobile money in francophone Africa, Dunia is proposing a mobile friendly crypto solution combining a wallet + a native stablecoin that could unlock a range of use cases for locals in Francophone Africa. With Dunia access to cash networks around francophone Africa, we will be serving as the main on/off Ramp providers for eXOF through Valora & fiat connect. The goal is to give users an experience that would be similar to mobile money where they can on/off ramp through cash agents and access a range of services (Dapps) through Valora.
We started work on eXOF 2 years ago with the launch of the DuniaPay wallet. The goal was to build a stablecoin that would power a mobile money ecosystem with merchants, agents and end users interacting seamlessly on the Celo blockchain. Fast forward 2 years now we have grown our cash network to more than +25k merchants and +10 banks & micro finance institutions across francophone Africa. Our goal is to progressively transition to eXOF as the base currency for our cash network. With fiat connect, Valora, eXOF and Dunia (soon EcoLabs), we are launching a stablecoin powered mobile money service. For this, we partnered with Mento Labs, who helped us with the technical setup and the overall integration into the Mento Platform.
TIMELINE.
Once the development part is completed by Mento Labs (expected September), we will start the deployment stage that consists of series Celo Governance Proposals:
CGP to add XOF/EUR exchange rates to Sorted Oracles
Deployment of eXOF smart contract;
Main CGP that will propose:
Enabling axlEUROC as new Reserve collateral;
Adding eXOF/EUROC constant sum and eXOF/CELO exchange pairs to the Broker
We welcome any feedback from the community and would love to also hear from partners interested in integrating our solution!