"Emmy CBN has done it again, they have banned financial institutions from facilitating crypto transactions" - James (Co-founder, Data Analyst at Surtii Tech), that was the first comment I heard when I picked the call from my co-founder just at about noon of Friday, 5th of February this 2021. My eyes were still heavy and I was still trying to get my orientation as the team had worked till late the previous day and I was trying to catch some sleep. Considering Surtii was working on a Digital Escrow solution to curb widespread scams on the social-commerce space of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram you might start to wonder how this news had any relationship with us. Oh well, it just happened that one of our infrastructure providers (Rubies Bank) had been caught in the web of the CBN, and asides from having to not be able to consummate transactions for our users due to the deactivation of virtual accounts, the entire nation that had gotten so dependent on Binance for on/off ramp solutions had been plunged into darkness. Again, how was this any of our business? Oh well, a project in our roadmap (Scalex) by some stroke of luck had just been activated the CBN ban.
You see, with Binance being unable to serve tons of Nigerians through the Flutterwave infrastructure, people had to resort to Peer-to-peer solutions to get their wallets funded. This led to the resurrection of various P2P communities on Whatsapp, Telegram, and Facebook, but guess what? Some of these communities are the absolute ghetto; scams and frauds are rampant. You literally need to depend on a human escrow and unless you are dealing with someone of good integrity, it can go south quickly.
So a solution was needed as soon as possible to organize the scattered flock whose shepherd (Binance) had been struck. I must say Binance rose quickly to the challenge and in a couple of weeks their P2P platform was up and in addition, other players such as Paxful, Remitano, etc. waded in.
How did Scalex.Africa come into this? so, asides from being a techie, I have been in the blockchain and crypto space since 2014, I recall playing around with about some BTC (Yes! more than 1) and losing them in "Mypayingcryptoads" and other such mistakes because as much as I was fascinated with the tech, I just didn't have it in my young mind than to know to save them. So I lost a lot and also gained a few, in all I grasped a lot about the underlying technology. So when CBN struck, I figured there would be a need for a Digital Asset Escrow solution.
So we got to work and while playing around, Scalex V1 (A telegram-based Bot) was born. This was built in a bid to provide users on telegram a way to securely trade with one another and avoid scams
Now this V1 was loaded, we went all out, integrated the most popular networks at the time in a bid to give users maximum flexibility. The market's response was not exactly what we expected. Traction was low and we got to ask questions and then we got to understand that while security was a pain-point, it was not the main issue rather, needed a very liquid platform to buy and sell and that led to the birth of V2
Now they could place orders, buy/sell, have dedicated wallets, and also use the quick escrow feature. Now this upgrade came with its challenges as the increased load led to lags in the bot and we eventually had to pivot to a full dedicated Webapp
Now, why should anyone use scalex.africa ?
- Security - Scalex has 100% addressed the issue of transaction fraud (will be addressed in our next post)
- Automation - Transactions on Scalex are automated and you do not have to monitor your trades
- Ease of Use - This is by far one of the most important aspects of Scalex.africa; from navigation to order creation and accessing features, Scalex has the best user interface among existing P2P platforms and this is not bragging (More will be captured in future posts)
Finally, I must say Scalex was built by crypto veterans, for crypto noobs and OGs in Nigeria.
We drew inspiration from the pain points of the community, friends, and advisers to build to the solution.
Our public beta is sometime this week and we are calling on the Nigerian community to support us as we build alongside you.
Visit: https://www.scalex.africa/
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