How Bitpowr is building blockchain-powered solutions in Africa

Blockchain technology offers African businesses a path to participate in the global economy. Problems like limited cross-border infrastructure, slow money transfer, lack of transparency, and corruption exclude the continent from the global economy.

Entrepreneurs across the continent have been embracing various emerging technologies to solve these problems. In recent years, the adoption of blockchain-powered solutions has grown in leaps and bounds in Africa.

These solutions created or hosted on the technology include cryptocurrencies, decentralised finance, NFTs, exchanges, digital wallets, identity management, and data management, among others.

These emerging technologies offer a faster, cheaper and less complex solution. Blockchain technology provides myriad benefits that could be an enabler of Africa’s growth across multiple sectors.

Some of the benefits are faster payment processing time, data protection and management, payment transparency, borderless transfers, improved digital security, supply chain tracking, smart contracts, and a ton of more benefits.

However, blockchain technology is still an emerging technology which is out of the reach of most African businesses. The average time it takes to launch an application on the blockchain is 3 - 4 months. Also, building a blockchain infrastructure can be complex.

In addition, setting up and maintaining a blockchain infrastructure is expensive. Startups need a team of experienced developers to build a crypto solution from scratch can be expensive and time-consuming.

According to Toby Oyetoke the founder of Bitpowr, this puts the technology out of the reach of most African businesses and is the primary reason why he founded the startup. Bitpowr aims to improve access to blockchain technology solutions for ambitious businesses.

What is Bitpowr?

Bitpowr is a modular ecosystem of Web3 and blockchain infrastructure built for businesses and developers to build a blockchain-powered solution quickly. Whether you are building an exchange, a payment gateway, a wallet, fintech or web3 applications, Bitpowr is the go-to platform that helps you go live in days with little cost and scale successfully.

Bitpowr’s blockchain infrastructure and developer APIs enable businesses to build and scale their crypto-enabled solutions with ease quickly.

Speaking on Bitpowr’s mission, Toby Oyetoke adds, "The blockchain is revolutionising every important aspect of life and business as we know it, and that acceptance will only increase over time. We are experiencing an upsurge in companies that manage digital assets. This includes crypto-native companies, consumer fintech companies, and traditional financial institutions."

Bitpowr is positioned to become the leading back-end blockchain infrastructure for businesses of all sizes and across different industry verticals to securely manage digital assets at scale. "Through our API-based infrastructure and growing network of integrated blockchains, we are positioned properly to help businesses figure out DeFi, trade settlement, lending, tokenization and other touchpoints that businesses may want to do with digital assets," said Amarachi Amaechi, co-founder and COO at Bitpowr.

How does Bitpowr work?

One of Bitpowr’s services is its Wallet infrastructure, an institutional wallet and digital assets management solution that helps businesses set up crypto wallets across multiple blockchains. The platform safely stores manages and transfers digital assets seamlessly.

Bitpowr’s wallet infrastructure provides a different suite of wallets such as Non-Custodial, Custodial, Stablecoin, Defi and Smart Contract Wallet for powering multiple use cases such as Crypto Exchange, Stablecoin Payment Gateway, Non-Custodial Mobile Wallet, Digital Investment and Savings Apps, and more.

With Bitpowr’s simple wallet APIs and software development kit (SDKS), anyone can create and manage crypto wallets in a matter of seconds.

Regarding Bitpowr’s smart contract wallet, Toby Oyetoke the CEO, said “Our smart contract wallet is built to help businesses cut down on high transaction fees and operation costs on Ethereum and similar chains like Polygon and Tron.

Other smart contract wallets would typically cost $50 to operate while Bitpowr helps you reduce this by 80% with its gasless smart contract wallet generation and when you are ready to operate the wallet, it costs around $4. That’s saving over $46.”

This way, we can build and manage a global blockchain infrastructure at scale and pass the cost-saving benefits onto you in the form of lower prices that help businesses launch quickly, and scale successfully. Other services Bitpowr offers are DeFi infrastructure that provides single APIs to interact with DeFi protocols, Web3 Token Infrastructure and Bitpowr cloud.

In the interview with Bendada.com, Amaechi stated that Bitpowr wants to be Africa’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) for blockchain services.

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"Our goal is to help businesses replace the up-front infrastructure expenses you need to power your blockchain-enabled business. With Bitpowr, your businesses no longer need to plan for infrastructure needs, weeks or months in advance. Instead, you can set up your solutions and deliver results faster," she added.

Blockchain provides huge opportunities to solve systemic problems that can in turn create measurable benefits for businesses. With Bitpowr, we want businesses to keep their eyes peeled on innovation and all the multiple use cases they may have, we’ll handle the infrastructure.

Bitpowr wants businesses to quickly innovate, experiment and iterate as they go rather than waiting months before deploying applications and new business solutions. "Our current focus is Africa. One of the ways we are looking to expand to other African countries is by building out our settlement infrastructure. Our goal is to spend the next 2 years empowering African businesses to build crypto solutions," Toby said.

Since its launch in January 2022, Bitpowr has processed over $5 million worth of transactions and hopes to do more by onboarding more enterprise clients before the year is over.