Continental Crypto Is Launching In South Africa. Another Attempt To Ride A Hype?
South Africa has launched its own cryptocurrency. It is assumed that Safcoin will focus on the African market. The brothers Neil and Tony FERREIRA have taken on the role of the creators of the cryptocurrency.
Neil Ferreira, СЕО of Safcoin says: “We want to educate people into what the cryptocurrency is about. [...] It is a scary place. Especially if it comes to money and investment people are scared and they are skeptical. We want to change this. We want to help people because bitcoin is a future”.
Africans themselves see the initiative as more controversial than promising. Juan ENGELBRECHT, CEO and Founder of decentralized ICO-platform Mobu strongly doubts the success of Safcoin:
“My opinion is that however their intention seems good they don’t understand tokenomics very well. No premium feature or exclusive feature of a token. Just another token. They don’t seem to have merchants so bitcoin or ethereum can offer the same function in the market in terms of liquidity. No real problem being solved or actual blockchain use that current bitcoin or ethereum can’t offer. I would be surprised if they raise enough capital to list on exchanges”.
“Their proposition is so vague and anti-crypto philosophically. They are creating a centralized coin for a specific region when the whole point of Crypto is decentralization and borderless. Why not use Bitcoin, Ethereum or Monero. SAFCOIN is centralized and I'm not sure what problem is being solved. Claiming South Africa's own coin is not enough”.
However, there are more optimistic views on Safcoin and its prospects in the African market. For example, Shireen RAMJOO, СЕО Liquid Crypto-Money says:
“There is optimism by the creators of new cryptocurrencies in the market to position their coin as a leading coin. All coins generally aim to be leading coins. However, it will be the demand and use of the coin that will ultimately see its success. Whether Safcoin will be in demand is dependent on the company’s strategy to infiltrate and educate the market on the coin and its purpose. There is still a significant percentage of the market that does not understand the cryptocurrency. The purpose of the coin as per the company’s website and reports is to be the African global trading currency. If successful it could be used to trade across Africa that will make it easy to carry on the intra-Africa trade”.
At the exclusive stage of pre-sales, the company released 500.000 ICO tokens available for purchase. The company's founders expect that all of them will be sold by October 31 this year. After that, it is planned to launch its own Safcoin crypto-exchange, where investors will be able to start trading.