Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, has named 3 Nigerians and 1 South African to the board of his Bitcoin Trust (BTrust) fund, which will be used to support development in Africa and India.
Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, has named 3 Nigerians and 1 South African to the board of his Bitcoin Trust (BTrust) fund, which will be used to support development in Africa and India. In February Dorsey announced a BTrust (with the ‘B’ representing the bitcoin symbol) in conjunction with American musician Shawn “Jay Z” Carter. Dorsey resigned as Twitter CEO in late November.
BTrust is a fund with a 500 BTC capital base worth N10,014,265,775.40 ($24,426,230) when pegged to late Monday’s market price of $48,815.35. It will be administered by four Africans without Dorsey or Jay Z’s control.
On Wednesday, in a late statement released on his Twitter page, Dorsey revealed the identities of the 4 BTrust board comprising 3 Nigerians; Abubakar Nur Khalil, Obi Nwosu, Ojoma Ochai, and 1 South African, Carla Kirk-Cohen.
BTrust Board Members
The individuals were chosen from a pool of 7,000 applicants who applied for a spot on the board, which was supposed to have 3 directors at first.
Obi Nwosu is a co-founder of Coinfloor, a seed-stage cryptocurrency company that just raised $300,000 in funding.
Ojoma Ochai is the Managing Partner of CcHUBCreative (Co-Creation Hub), a technological innovation workspace that helps startups flourish in Nigeria and other parts of Africa. CcHUB has raised $5.5 million to help with its operations.
Abubakar Nur Khalil is a bitcoin core developer who got $50,000 in bitcoin from the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) in May 2021 for his work on Bitcoin wallet software.
Khalil is also the CTO of Recursive Capital, a crypto venture capital firm that helps companies create crucial web 3.0 infrastructure.
Carla Kirk-Cohen works for Lightning Labs as a software engineer. She formerly worked on the crypto-ops team at Luno, a South African cryptocurrency exchange, and wallet company.
CBN Rule on Crypto May Affect BTrust Nigerian Beneficiaries
While the BTrust monies will be distributed in India and Africa, it’s unclear how it will operate in Nigeria, where cryptocurrency activities are prohibited by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
Although a Nigerian court has found that the CBN circular forbidding cryptocurrencies isn’t legal or backed by the constitution, this threatens the advantage available to Nigerians.
The CBN, however, has not publicly accepted the verdict, and the financial regulator, led by Godwin Emefiele, has continued to crack down on bitcoin and prospective crypto bank accounts through Nigerian commercial banks.
Banks such as Guaranty Trust Bank, Zenith Bank, Kuda, and other industry players seek and cancel any account that gets a big amount of money and is owned by a minor.
Because the objective, sender, and recipient will almost certainly be specified on paperwork, this creates a bottleneck around the channel through which monies will be delivered to Nigerian beneficiaries.
