Why the Zapata hardfork might be a roaring success

As you might have heart the Zapata hardfork from Steem has (sort of) launched. Under the leadership of Justin Sun the Steem blockchain keeps on creating decentralized spin-off’s...

There is no website yet, although zapatasocial.com is mentioned. But this is not the main focus of the project. It won’t be an improved hive/steem blockchain. So do not expect a hive-like user experience anytime soon with integrations with an zapata-engine, zapata-peakd or even being able to easily access the wallet. Instead it will be hyper-focussed on small business entrepreneurs in Nigeria.

Now, why is this such an interesting market? A quick search on Wikipedia shows that Nigeria is the most populous nation of Africa with more than 200 million people. Also the official language is English, which is very convenient.

How many of these 200+ million people have a pc? Not many I can tell you. But they do often have a cheap Chinese smartphone for which they can buy cheap data in small little shops everywhere. In the big cities at least. Nothing fancy, but it does work every once in a while.

What they also usually don’t have is a bank account. Instead they use a very interesting test massage payment system. The phone prepaid credit for making calls has become the bank account and you pay for products and services with your phone through text messages. This has become a huge shadow economy and a great way for African small-business entrepreneurs to save a little money when a bank account is not something that they can get.

Can you think of another group of people that is more primed for a crypto blockchain with 0% transaction cost and micro-payments through a simple app on your mobile phone? I mean, if your income is $2 per day, you won’t be buying bitcoin anytime soon.

If the Zapata team does it right, then Zapata might be bigger than Hive before we know it.

However, in the Zapata discord I see talk about keeping it exclusive, making it hard to post and no easy access to the wallet. I’m not sure if that is a good idea.

If you want to onboard the unbanked small-business entrepreneurs of Nigeria, then you should make it simple and cheap. Just be better than the current heavily used text-message economy and I think you have a winner.

Still, we’ll have to see. This is still a very small crypto project. A lot can go wrong, but I won’t sell all my Zapata when the option is available to do so.

Thanks for reading.