On February 12, 2021, Twitter co-founder and then CEO Jack Dorsey announced that he would be collaborating with American rapper and Tidal Chief Shawn Carter, popularly known as Jay-Z to launch a new Bitcoin fund which would be focused on funding the cryptocurrency’s development in Africa & India. Dorsey has now announced the members of the fund’s trust board, three Nigerians and one South African.
Dorsey tweeted the news and shared a link for 3 board members to begin the operation.
Dorsey entered the partnership with Jay Z in a bid to empower Bitcoin in Africa and in India. When announced, it was also said that the fund would be a blind irrevocable trust. This means that neither Jay Z nor Dorsey would have a say in the operations of the fund, but would select members of the trust board to handle the entire operation.
The announcement of the fund would naturally mean that Nigeria would be excluded from any outright cryptocurrency dealings, seeing as the Central Bank of Nigeria had issued a circular banning all bank transactions including cryptocurrencies a week before the announcement was made.
The announcement also came at a time when the Indian government announced that it would ban cryptocurrencies after it gave investors a time frame to retract their holdings. It then coincided with Bitcoin recording the highest which it had ever recorded at the time, sitting at $47,450.
The former Twitter CEO announced the members of the board on Wednesday, after applications had been open since February. Although the initial tweet mentioned that three members were needed on the board, four members have been selected to spearhead operations.
In the statement released on Dorsey’s Twitter page, it was mentioned that the eventual board members were selected from a pool of about 7,000 applicants. Of the four chosen, three were Nigerian and the other was from South Africa.
The three Nigerians are: Abubakar Nur Khalil, a core bitcoin contributor who has received $50k in bitcoin from the Human Rights Foundation over his work on Bitcoin wallet software; Obi Nwosu, co-founder of Coinfloor, a seed-level cryptocurrency startup; and Ojoma Ochai, Managing Partner at CcHUBCreative (Co-Creation Hub), a tech innovation workspace.
The South African is Carla Kirk-Cohen, a software engineer at Lightning Labs and a former employee of Luno, South African crypto exchange and wallet firm.
The announcement of the three Nigerians on the board comes as no surprise, because back in June 2021, Dorsey touted the Nigerian people as future leaders of Bitcoin in spite of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s ban on cryptocurrency trading. The ban affected both fintech companies and traditional banks.
Nigerians have found ways to go around this ban, continuing to trade cryptocurrencies. It is similar to how Nigerians found a way around the Twitter ban, using VPN to access the social network regardless of the Nigerian Government’s Twitter ban.