Peter Adekeye, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Boom said the e-commerce platform is leveraging Ethereum blockchain technology to drive financial inclusion in Africa and beyond.
The ecosystem will enable the unbanked, as well as those seeking a safe alternative to commerce, to buy, sell and pay for everything online, without a bank account.
Drawing on his deep knowledge of blockchain, creating Boom was possible. Also, he founded the Pingsta intellectual network for engineers, cryptographers, and scientists in 2007; its members included the late renowned cryptographer Hal Finney, who was integral to the birth of bitcoin.
According to Adekeye, he spent over a decade pondering how Africa’s millions of cellphone-owning but unbanked people can get online, so they can become part of the global economy and improve their life chances and decided to create Boom.
Blockchain is a system of recording information in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack, or cheat the system. A blockchain is essentially a digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems on the blockchain.
Drawing on his deep knowledge of blockchain, creating Boom was possible. Also, he founded the Pingsta intellectual network for engineers, cryptographers, and scientists in 2007; its members included the late renowned cryptographer Hal Finney, who was integral to the birth of bitcoin.
Boom consists of the Boom Marketplace where consumers discover products and services from merchants; the Boom Wallet for payments and Boom Messaging for communication.
He said all users on Boom are KYC’d at sign-up to ensure compliance with EU regulations and eliminate spam, scams, and online abuse.
Boom enables consumers to shop online without needing a bank account or credit/debit cards. To shop on Boom, simply top up your Boom wallet with Multicoins, which can be purchased over-the-counter with cash at certified Multicoin resellers worldwide.
The Boom App will be available from July 4 and will have an interface in three major Nigerian languages, Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo; it is also available in Spanish and French.
Quoting the World Bank, Adekeye said 1 billion women and 700 million men have no bank account and are referred to as the unbanked.
“These people have never shopped online and neither have they ever been able to offer their goods and services for sale on the Internet.”
Estimated at over 40 million, Nigeria’s unbanked adult population, who are mostly in the hard-to-reach rural communities, are expected to have access to Boom.
Digital Currency
Multicoin, a cryptocurrency with the symbol, ‘MTCN’, is the medium of exchange for all transactions on Boom. As such, consumers will need to top up their Boom wallets with Multicoins to make purchases, and merchants that receive Multicoins for payments, can instantly convert them into euros, their local currencies, and very soon, into Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) too.
The Multicoin sets itself apart as the first cryptocurrency with a true utility because it powers the Boom.market ecosystem.
“Boom enables customers to shop online, not necessarily having a bank account, they can only top up the Boom wallet buying from Aboki who will exchange to Multicoin who can resell.”
Security
All communication and transactions on Boom are secured with bank-grade features that harden all correspondence with strong cryptography.
About Boom Founder
Peter Adekeye was raised in Lagos by his British-Nigerian Royal Navy veteran father.
Peter holds a BSc in engineering from the University of Ife and has completed executive education in leadership, strategic planning, management, business development, and entrepreneurship from Stanford University.
Peter has enjoyed an incredible career, from his first startup, which exported sustainable teak wood from Nigeria to India in his 20s, to evangelizing about technology in Palo Alto, California, to being name-checked in the pages of UK Vogue.
He is also the Founder and CEO of Multiven – the world’s leading provider of independent software maintenance, management, and monetization services for all Internet network devices.
He is also the inventor of Multiven’s cloud-based elastic engineering workforce — Pingsta, and mySolvr — its knowledge engine.
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