coindesk.com
South Africa’s Sun Exchange, a solar power investing community that uses bitcoin to raise capital and to make payments to its investors, says it has completed the highest value crowdsourced project of any kind in Africa.
The Nhimbe Fresh project in Zimbabwe, a grower of berries and vegetables comprising 250 smallholder farmers, raised investment for approximately $1.4 million worth of solar cells, bought by over 1,905 individuals across 98 countries, with most of them transacting in bitcoin.
Sun Exchange deployed the first bitcoin-funded solar project back in 2016, which was presented at CoinDesk’s Consensus event in New York that year. Today, Sun Exchange has funded over 50 solar projects, raising over $9 million, and it’s one of the few ambitious projects from these early days to still be around and thriving.
Read more: Blockchain Startup Sun Exchange Raises $1.6 Million in New Seed Funding
“These projects are mainly in schools, farms, supermarkets and retirement homes, many of them in South Africa,” Sun Exchange founder Abe Cambridge said in an interview. “These are organizations which otherwise wouldn’t have the capital available to build their solar plant, nor would they really want to go and raise debt.”
