Secretum: Riding Africa and Asia’s Crypto and Messaging Boom

When it comes to the growth of crypto adoption, Africa and Asia lead the world:

• Of the top 10 countries ranked by crypto adoption in 2021, six are in either Africa or Asia.

• A total of $105.6 billion worth of crypto assets were traded in Africa between July 2020 and June 2021, a growth rate of 1,200% year-on-year. P2P trading dominates transaction volumes:

• An astonishing 32% of Nigerians and 21% of Vietnamese owned cryptocurrency in 2020 – the first and second highest rates in the world, and significantly higher than the USA’s 6%.

The main drivers of this boom are the clear and unmet needs of these markets, including:

Lack of financial infrastructure – Africa and Asia are the most unbanked continents. Almost 70% of adults in countries like Vietnam and Morocco do not have a bank account:

At the same time, the mobile penetration rate in Africa is 44% and in the Asia-Pacific region, it is 42%. The decentralized nature of crypto makes financial infrastructure redundant, while people use their mobiles to make direct payments and trade with other crypto wallet owners.

Unstable currencies – Many Asian and African countries have seen significant currency depreciation in the last 5 years. On the other hand, during the same period, Bitcoin and Ether rose over 500% and 2,900% respectively. Many people have turned to crypto-assets to beat inflation, boost their incomes, and maintain the purchasing power of their assets.

Expensive Remittances – Remittances from abroad are an important part of the economies of many Asian and African countries – constituting 10% of GDP in the Philippines and 8% in Egypt. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest remittance costs in the world, at over 8%. This has led many to bypass the high fees and transfer remittances directly P2P via crypto wallets.

This phenomenal growth has been accompanied by an equally powerful trend – the boom in mobile penetration and mobile app usage rates:

• Asia now accounts for 64% of global mobile app downloads.
• The number of African mobile subscribers will grow from 477 million in 2019 to 678 million in 2025 – a more than 40% increase, equivalent to an additional 201 million
• From H1 2020 to H1 2021, the number of mobile app installs in Africa increased by 41%.

At the top of the mobile app pyramid are messaging apps:

• WhatsApp is Africa’s most popular app, with a penetration rate of 97% in Kenya and 95% in Nigeria.
• WeChat is Asia’s most popular app, with over 23 billion monthly active users.

With crypto adoption and mobile use booming, an innovative startup is betting on the convergence of these two megatrends by harnessing the power of Blockchain to offer an unprecedentedly secure and user-friendly messaging app:  Secretum.

Secretum is a fully decentralized, encrypted, and secure messaging DApp (Decentralised App), built on the Solana Blockchain. It allows users to both exchange messages and trade crypto assets as easily as sending an SMS. The advantages are significant:

• All messages are fully encrypted and stored on verified nodes in the Secretum network – meaning hackers can’t access them like in cloud-based messaging services like WhatsApp.
• The most secure and anonymous sign-up process, which only needs the user’s crypto wallet address – no more risks of private data leaks or government interference, an especially relevant danger in many African and Asian countries.
• Staking and rewards with the native SER token for users who message and provide nodes to expand the Secretum network.
• An easy, intuitive, and purely P2P trading interface to send and receive cryptocurrencies and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).
• Record low fees and almost instant trades, thanks to Solana’s capacity for 50,000 transactions per second and an average cost per transaction of only $0.00025.

The combination of a superior messaging app in terms of safety with highly versatile crypto trading capabilities is the key to Secretum’s strategic vision: to become the go-to messaging and crypto app for Asia and Africa.

As Secretum’s Blockchain-messaging capabilities revolutionize communications, its over the counter (OTC) P2P trading capabilities bring unique benefits to crypto-asset owners in Africa and Asia:

High Liquidity – Traders are able to contact each other directly and find hidden liquidity in crypto markets, improving execution times and reducing slippage.

NFT Trading – Secretum lets NFT owners and traders contact each other via their wallet address alone – securely, directly, and at the lowest fees on the market. This would open a completely new asset class for African and Asian crypto owners to diversify their assets and protect their wealth.

High User Friendliness – Asians and Africans are the world’s most assiduous users of mobile money. There are an estimated 243 million mobile money accounts in Asia and an estimated $490 billion was exchanged by African mobile money providers in 2020. Furthermore,  P2P is already the dominant form of crypto trading. The market is therefore accustomed to using P2P mobile solutions to exchange money, trade, and communicate. Secretum taps into this well-established market – only with a technologically superior solution.

As mobile and crypto penetration continues to grow in Africa and Asia, Secretum will provide a never seen before crypto trading and messaging solution – serving two markets that are day after day quickly merging into a single one. By leveraging this solution, Secretum is positioning itself as the app of choice for 3 billion people in the world’s youngest and most dynamic markets.