Adedapo Adesanya
By Adedapo Adesanya
Consumers can now pay for services at gas stations, salons, and food retailers with a popular cryptocurrency known as BitMinute (BMT) in Nigeria because some merchants have begun to accept it as a medium of payment.
This initiative is a brainchild of Atlanta-based BitMinutes Incorporated, a financial services technology company that leverages blockchain and pre-paid minutes tokenization to help its partners deliver secure, affordable financial services to their customers.
Among the business owners who accept BitMinutes are the AYKAY Fuel Station, Barber Q-Salon and QDS Resources (a food and gift item retailer), all of which are in Abuja, as well as Stellytee Ventures, (a makeup salon) in Nasarawa.
According to Tom Meredith, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, more merchants are being added every week as “a direct result of the company reaching a tipping point in Nigeria, where we have more than 6,000 citizens who have purchased BMTs and saving them in their mobile wallets for use as airtime minutes or to pay for other products and services.”
It was revealed that the growth in the adoption and acceptance was made possible through its Trusted Area Network (TAN) business model that involved the company recruiting existing small business owners in Nigeria, who help citizens exchange BitMinutes for cash and cash for BitMinutes, and as a result becoming TAN agents.
Also, the entrepreneurs are rewarded for their participation by earning BitMinutes for the services they provide. There are more than 1,000 Nigerians enrolled in the TAN program.
BitMinutes technology said it has been able to do this by harnessing the decentralized power of the blockchain by leveraging the digital ledger behind user data for making purchases, transferring money, generating loans and using airtime minutes.
The company also said selling and lending BitMinutes-based micro-loans will create a business opportunity for entrepreneurs globally. BitMinutes will turn the corner retailer into the corner banker, delivering banking services to the smallest of villages and towns worldwide while doing it profitably.
BitMinutes is an early stage fintech company, founded in the U.S. Its token, the BitMinute, is exchangeable into universal prepaid airtime minutes. Prepaid minutes are already traded informally globally by billions of mobile phone owners.
Its tokens also allow peer-to-peer value transfer to over 1.2 billion bank accounts in 70 countries and prepaid top-up to over 4 billion mobile accounts in over 200 countries. The company also facilitates the expansion of micro-credit lending in communities where lending is rare and too expensive for most individual borrowers.
BitMinutes’ projects that its ownership and transactional records will establish a new type of consumer credit score for emerging market consumers who currently struggle with limited access to capital and a lack of traditional banking services.
