Wayne Hennessy-Barrett cut an untypical figure at the recent Ethereum developers’ conference DevCon1, clad in his Barbour jacket, fielding interviews, and smoking his pipe. His micro investment company 4G Capital based in Kenya is also unusual. He provides practically instantaneous, completely unsecured micro-loans of between $50 (£33) and $500 to small African businesses, as well as providing business training to borrowers to help these companies grow. His typical customer is a middle-aged Kenyan woman with between three and five kids, selling tomatoes from a market stall or perhaps at the side of the road.
IBTimes asked Hennessy-Barrett where the Ethereum connection lies. He explained that the attraction of a public blockchain is transparency, with a view to garnering further investment in the core business. "On a blockchain the customer and the investor and the regulator and an auditor and indeed anyone who wants to look, can see with total assurance where every dollar goes within the business."
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4G Capital’s accounts currently reside on a cloud-based banking system. Hennessy-Barrett sees the public ledger of Ethereum as an opportunity to clearly demonstrate the transformative potential of his business to outside investors. It also means spreading the word of Ethereum and establishing nodes in the region.
"We are set to scale. We are still fundraising and have got some great traction but we want to take this across all of Africa. We have an incredibly compelling case for grant funding as well because of the transformative impact," said Hennessy-Barrett. What is a blockchain?
A blockchain is a shared ledger of transactions and data entries, a copy of which is held by everyone on a given network. As it is updated and verified by the network, data is time-stamped into blocks.
The data – be it bitcoin transactions in the case […]
