African mountain gorillas are picky eaters.They strip off the most delicious bits of plants and spit out the rest, leaving a trail of partially chewed leaves drenched in saliva.
Entertainment news
Top Stories: iPhone 15 Pro Design Leak, iOS 16.4 Coming Soon, and More – MacRumors
We’re still almost six months away from the official unveiling of the iPhone 15 lineup, but it seems like every day we’re learning more about what to expect from the next-generation models.Notably, this week gave us our clearest look yet at what appear to be some changes for the volume and mute control hardware.
iOS 16.4 and associated releases are also right around the corner with some new features and hints of updated earphones coming from Apple and Beats.Meanwhile, we’re continuing to hear about Apple’s plans to expand its home audio product portfolio, so be sure to read on for all the details on these stories and more!
iPhone 15 Pro Leak Reveals Single Volume Button and Mute Button
We’ve been hearing for a while now that the
iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max will be equipped with solid-state buttons that do not physically move.Instead, the buttons will provide haptic feedback from Taptic Engines when pressed, similar to the Home button introduced with the iPhone 7 and the Force Touch trackpad on modern MacBooks.
Now, a leaked CAD image has revealed that
iPhone 15 Pro models will apparently have a single, elongated volume button for turning the volume up or down based on where it is pressed.The image also shows that a small button will replace the mute switch that has existed on every iPhone model sine 2007 for turning the ringer on and off.
AirPods Pro With USB-C Charging Case to Launch Later This Year
In the iOS 16.4 Release Candidate made available to developers and public beta testers this week, there are
hidden references to what appears to be next-generation AirPods and a new charging case.
According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, these are
likely to be AirPods Pro 2 with a USB-C charging case rather than the current Lightning port.Apple is reportedly also not planning to release USB-C versions of AirPods 2 or 3, suggesting their transition to USB-C will need to wait until a more substantial AirPods 4 upgrade is ready.
iOS 16.4 also includes
references to unreleased Beats Studio Buds+ earbuds, which could be a new and improved version of the regular Studio Buds.
iOS 16.4 Adds Voice Isolation for Cellular Phone Calls
Another new feature coming with iOS 16.4 is
voice isolation for cellular phone calls.Apple says this option blocks out ambient noise around you so that your voice sounds clearer on the call.
Voice isolation was already available for Wi-Fi calls in apps like FaceTime and WhatsApp on devices running iOS 15 or macOS Monterey or later, and now the feature is available for regular phone calls over a cellular network.
HomePod With a Screen Delayed Until Next Year at Earliest
Apple is rumored to be developing a new HomePod model with a built-in screen to compete with the likes of Google’s Nest Hub and Amazon’s Echo Show, but the company has
reportedly paused the project until next year at the earliest due to cost-cutting measures.
Apple
relaunched the full-sized HomePod earlier this year after discontinuing the smart speaker in 2021, and it continues to sell the HomePod mini as a smaller option.
iPhone 15 Pro Rumor Recap: 10 New Features and Changes
While the iPhone 15 series is still around six months away from launching, there have already been plenty of rumors about both the
regular and model lineups.
Many new features and changes have been rumored for the iPhone 15 Pro models in particular.
This week, we recapped
10 new features and changes rumored for the Pro models that are not expected to be available on the standard iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus models.
Each week, we publish an email newsletter like this highlighting the top Apple stories, making it a great way to get a bite-sized recap of the week hitting all of the major topics we’ve covered and tying together related stories for a big-picture view.
So if you want to have
top stories like the above recap delivered to your email inbox each week, subscribe to our newsletter!
Entertainment news
Assertive Zimbabwe secure series with easy win in the final ODI – ICC Cricket
In stark contrast to rest of the series, the final ODI between Zimbabwe and Netherlands turned out to be a one-sided affair.
Though both sides are out of contention from direct qualification for the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023, this series played an important role in giving them some game time in these conditions before the ICC Cricket World Cup Qualifier 2023.The Qualifier will be played from 18 June to 9 July in Zimbabwe.
Netherlands and Zimbabwe will be among the 10 teams battling for two World Cup spots at the Qualifier.
Netherlands won the toss and chose to bat first at Harare.Despite steady contributions from their top-order batters, the Dutch innings was stifled by regular fall of wickets.Zimbabwe’s part-time spinners, Sean Williams (3/41) and Sikandar Raza (2/55), did the maximum damage as Netherlands could only reach 231/9 at the end of their allotted overs.
In response, the Chevrons got off to a positive start.
The opening pair of skipper Craig Ervine (44) and Wessly Madhevere (50) were proactive, adding 96 for the first wicket.
After losing both of them to Shariz Ahmad, Zimbabwe banked on the experience of Sean Williams (43) and Gary Ballance (64*) to move ahead in the game.Their patient stand of 96 runs helped the hosts close in on an easy win.They won by seven wickets with 50 balls to spare.
This 2-1 series win helped Zimbabwe finish the Super League at 12th place, with 65 points in their kitty.
In stark contrast to the third ODI, the first two games of the three match ODI series were closely contested thrillers.Whenever a side went slightly ahead in the game, the opponents fought back to bring it to parity.
The first ODI had Netherlands bowlers all over the Zimbabwe batting, reducing them to 98/7, before Clive Madande (74) pulled off a rescue act with help from lower-order batters.
The late surge helped Chevrons set a target of 250.
Netherlands too struggled with the bat, and were 64/5 at one stage.However, the 28-year-old Teja Nidamanuru (110*) guided the Dutch fightback with a scintillating century, which came off merely 88 balls.He got great support from Paul van Meekeren, who supplemented his bowling figures of 2/50 with a fiery 21* from nine balls with the bat, as the tourists crossed the line with one ball to spare.
The shock of this defeat inspired Zimbabwe to put up a better show in the second game.
Batting first yet again, Zimbabwe’s top-order gave them a decent start before leg-spinner Shariz Ahmad struck thrice to leave them at 120/5.Hereafter, Williams (77) and Madande (52) put up a 104-run stand to guide the hosts towards 271.
The Dutch top-order put up a solid show adding 166 runs for the first two wickets.
The match was within their grasp, with only 76 runs needed off the last 60 balls.However, a hat-trick from off-spinning all-rounder Madhevere in the 44th over, turned the game in Zimbabwe’s favour.
But the Netherlands lower-order wasn’t done and kept chipping away at the target.Eventually, they needed 19 off the last over.Ryan Klein and Fred Klaassen nearly got them through, bringing the equation down to four off one, but Klein was run out while going for the third run.
Zimbabwe won by one run.
Entertainment news
Why gorillas’ viruses are of interest to human scientists – The Washington Post
It turns out these slimy specimens can tell scientists a lot about not only the health of gorillas but also diseases that may afflict humans as well — and the interaction between the two.
“Humans and gorillas share more than 98 percent of their DNA, meaning that much of our physiology and the way that we respond to pathogens are similar,” says
Tierra Smiley Evans, research faculty member at the One Health Institute of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
“If we can collect information about viruses that infect gorillas, we can learn about similar viruses that infect humans.”
More than 1,000 wild endangered gorillas live in protected areas of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
They are a big tourist draw.That has made them susceptible to diseases these visitors may carry, says Evans, chief veterinary and scientific officer for
Gorilla Doctors, a nonprofit group that helps care for the primates.
Because mountain gorillas are so genetically similar to humans, they can easily exchange infections with them, including respiratory ailments that can be mild in people but potentially more serious in gorillas, Evans says.For this reason, tourists and personnel who visit the parks must wear masks when they are near gorillas and must keep a distance of nearly 33 feet from the animals.
These precautions already have made a difference.
In Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, for example,
respiratory infections fell from an annual average of 5.4 outbreaks in gorilla family groups in the five years before the pandemic to 1.6 outbreaks after a pandemic was declared, experts say.“The decline documented during this time period correlated with fewer people coming into close proximity with the gorillas since the start of the pandemic, and with the use of face masks and safe distancing,” Evans says.
“The increase and interest in eco-tourism brings people from all over the world close to regular contact with the gorillas,” says Benard Ssebide, head veterinarian in Uganda for Gorilla Doctors.“Mountain gorillas are actually vulnerable to many human diseases such as influenza, covid, Ebola, tuberculosis, measles, polio, among others.The main threat we see now are infectious diseases ranging from respiratory illnesses to intestinal parasitic infections.”
Evans says that collecting food scraps soaked in saliva from an endangered species offers a noninvasive way of monitoring the gorillas for infectious diseases.
It “can be an important way to understand what may be happening in a population that you would not typically have access to through more traditional, labor intensive sample collection methods requiring darting, trapping, and anesthetizing individuals,” she says.
Gorilla Doctors also works with
the Karen C.Drayer Wildlife Health Center at Davis, Calif., to monitor the gorillas’ health and treat them if they become sick or injured, as well as with the National Institutes of Health’s Center for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) network, a group of international research centers in regions where emerging — and re-emerging — infectious-disease outbreaks will probably occur.One goal is to better understand what happens to emerging viruses as a result of climate change, especially the transition from forest to urban landscapes.
“We know that climate change will continue to impact the distribution and epidemic patterns of infectious diseases,” Evans says.“Primates are often the first to be impacted by infectious diseases moving into new locations and can be indicators of impending outbreaks of disease in humans.
A good example of this is yellow fever virus, where acute outbreaks and die-offs in primate populations in South America often are the first indicator of an impending human outbreak.”
As changing land-use patterns result in more human contact with wildlife, the opportunity for pathogens to spill over from animals to people increases, she says, citing as an example the often-fatal disease of
Ebola.
“As we’ve seen in western lowland gorillas in other parts of Africa, great apes are impacted by Ebola virus in very similar ways to humans,” Evans says.
“Understanding what is circulated in great apes that are overlapping with other wildlife reservoir populations, such as bats, can provide very important information for both great ape and human health.”
Both humans and gorillas can become infected with Ebola through contact with the same wildlife reservoir host and become sick and die, but this research is ongoing.
She stresses, however, that there has never been a case of Ebola among mountain gorillas — “an important point that must be made clear” — although outbreaks have occurred among western gorillas, a different species.But “
we have shown that human communities surrounding mountain gorilla habitat have antibodies against Ebola virus, showing that the virus is in the region and, therefore, we must remain vigilant,” Evans adds.
The researchers conceived the idea in 2012 of gathering saliva samples in the field to extract gorilla DNA and analyze it for viruses.The project involved scouting the animals with the help of trackers, watching and waiting for them to finish eating and leave, and retrieving the discarded wild celery stalks.The researcher would record each gorilla’s name, matching it to its leftovers.
Veterinarians know each gorilla by name and “nose print” — distinct wrinkles above their noses, which are similar to human fingerprints.
Initially the scientists wanted to determine whether any wild gorillas were infected with herpes simplex 1 virus, which causes cold sores in people.In adult gorillas, “it likely causes fever, malaise and oral lesions as we’ve seen in the few eastern gorillas that have been infected in captivity,” Evans says.
“What we don’t know is what the impact could be on [gorilla] infants or immune compromised individuals, and what impacts this could have at a population level.”
“Any new virus in a new species is cause for concern,” Ssebide says.“Once a latent virus — that is, a virus that infects its host for life but is then shed intermittently, such as a herpes virus — enters a population, there is very little you can do to control it.”
To their relief, they did not find herpes simplex 1.But their research, detailed in a recently
published study, did detect other types of herpes viruses, although ones specific to gorillas and not passed from humans.
These include a gorilla version of cytomegalovirus, which in humans can harm a developing fetus; lymphocryptovirus, similar to human Epstein-Barr virus, which causes mononucleosis; and a rhadinovirus — which Evans described as “a novel finding” — that is much like the virus associated with human kaposi sarcoma, a cancer of cells lining lymphatic or blood vessels.
Their effects in gorillas are unknown.It is also unknown — although probably unlikely — whether they could jump into humans.The scientists say they hope to conduct further studies on them, Evans says.
The finding that the animals did not have human herpes simplex 1 suggests that procedures in place to protect the animals from human exposure have been effective, although it would be risky to become complacent, as cross-species transmission is always possible, the scientists say.
“This [possibility] is very worrisome because more dangerous viruses can cross as well,” says Ssebide, referring to transmission between species.“Whenever a virus crosses the species barrier into a new species, you can never know what effect it would have.” He cited the coronavirus, which causes covid-19 and is widely thought to have originated in animals.
“You can see the effect [the coronavirus] caused once it crossed to humans,” he says.
“Because we don’t know the impact that a human herpes virus could have on the wild mountain gorilla population, we need to remain vigilant.”
Evans began working with Gorilla Doctors while in veterinary school, taking part in a summer research project in Rwanda.“It’s when I started thinking about saliva projects,” she recalls.“At that point, we weren’t looking for viruses and pathogens, just looking to see if we could detect salivary enzymes — trying to figure out if we could get enough saliva to detect something.It really piqued my interest to realize that we could.”
Gorilla personalities, as well as the years-long comedy and drama of their lives, has become a big part of the experience of studying them, the researchers say.They celebrate their joy — the birth of a new baby, for example — and also worry about their health and safety, particularly as it applies to the work they do.
“It’s natural for us — as scientists and doctors — to be concerned about their exposure to some of the pathogens we study,” Evans says.
“We worry about the gorillas just as a physician would for their human patients.
“Over time, you get to know who they are, especially the really charismatic ones.It’s amazing how quickly you can recognize gorilla faces.Like human faces, their faces — and their movements — are different and easily recognizable.”
Ssebide says he loves seeing silverbacks — adult male gorillas — and adult females today who were infants 20 years ago when he first rescued them from wire snares set by hunters to trap other wildlife.
“Seeing a baby gorilla grow to becoming a silverback and starting its own gorilla group and remembering all the interventions that had to be done on such a particular animal, brings lots of memories,” he says.
Similarly, Evans says she remembers her encounters a decade ago with Kabukojo, a young, inquisitive male gorilla and her favorite who at the time was “a rowdy teenager, with high energy — a showoff.”
“He loved to surprise people,” she says.“You would go up to the group he was in, and you would see the other gorillas, but not him.He was waiting to surprise you, running down the mountain and beating his chest.He enjoyed intimidating people.”
Several years later, he was unrecognizable to her.
“That’s Kabukojo? You’re kidding me,” she says.“He was this full-grown chill silverback, lying on his back taking a nap, with babies crawling all over him.
A gentle dad.Those were all of his babies, and he was the head of his group.
We’d all gotten older.We’d all changed.As they get older, we get older too.”
Entertainment news
How this 26-year-old went from running bitcoin trading desks in Taco Bells to creating the largest crypto exchange in Africa – CNBC
– Yellow Card is the largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange in Africa.
– For its nearly 1.4 million users across the continent, Yellow Card – which offers an experience similar to Block’s Cash App – is a vital lifeline to money.
– Co-founders Chris Maurice and Justin Poiroux launched the exchange from their dorm room in Auburn, Alabama.
ACCRA, GHANA – On the afternoon of Dec.
26, 2022, Chris Maurice finally capitulated and went to the emergency room at Hospital Clinic de Barcelona, just west of the city’s gothic quarter.For roughly ten months, the 26-year-old CEO of the largest centralized crypto exchange in Africa had ignored many of the symptoms consistent with malaria as he bounced between 21 different countries on the continent, advising heads of state on bitcoin adoption and setting up institutional accounts for his business, Yellow Card.
By the time Maurice was admitted to the intensive care unit, plasmodium parasites had been wreaking havoc on his red blood cells for nearly a year, multiplying in his liver and threatening to shut down many of his major organs, including his kidneys.His face and eyes were yellow from jaundice.As his hemoglobin levels plummeted in response to the intravenous meds administered as treatment, four days of blood transfusions helped save his life.
But to Maurice, his brush with death was simply the price of doing business.
Since graduating from Auburn University in Alabama with a finance degree four years ago, he has traded security and stability for a career on the road, all with the goal of fundamentally disrupting Africa’s broken financial system.
“I’ve slept more nights than I can count in the Joburg airport,” Maurice told CNBC on the sidelines of the Africa Bitcoin Conference in Ghana.“I’ve mastered the art of where to go to find chairs with no armrests.I’m six-foot-five, so I need my space.”
For nearly 1.4 million users across the continent, Yellow Card – which offers an experience similar to
Block‘s Cash App – is a vital lifeline to money.
“We wanted to make it as easy as possible for anybody to be able to come on and buy crypto within three minutes,” explains Maurice in an Uber ride cutting due south through the Ghanaian capital of Accra.
From there, Yellow Card users can send or receive digital cash in eligible markets.But unlike a centralized exchange like
Coinbase, where many customers store their tokens for an extended period of time hoping that their digital assets will appreciate in value, the average customer on Maurice’s exchange keeps money on the platform for under five minutes.People take their local fiat currency, turn it into bitcoin or a U.S.
dollar-pegged stablecoin like tether to send it across a border, and the recipient instantly cashes it out.
“It’s literally like, I deposit a million Francs in Cameroon, I buy USDT or BTC, and then I send it off,” continued Maurice.
Yellow Card customers can receive cryptocurrency from anywhere in the world and pay only a network fee, which typically ranges from 5 cents to $1, according to Maurice.
That is especially helpful for people who would customarily turn to a money service provider like Western Union and MoneyGram, which sometimes charge heavy commissions on remittances.
The service is a game-changer for many Africans, who rely on money sent home from abroad, especially in countries where unemployment and inflation is rife.The latest data from the World Bank shows that in Sub-Saharan Africa –
where up to 65% of adults are unbanked – remittance flows reached $50 billion in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available.
The actual number is likely much higher when you factor in money transferred over informal channels.Meanwhile, World Bank data shows that it is more expensive to send remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa than to any other region in the world.On average, it costs $15.60 (7.8%) to send $200 to or from Africa.That percentage can be as high as $38, or 19%, in some countries.
Building the crypto payment rails necessary for Yellow Card requires jumping through a lot of legal and regulatory hoops, which is why Maurice spends about nine months a year in the countries where he operates or plans to launch crypto services.He has local lawyers in pretty much every country on the continent, and he meets with elected officials and regulators to further foam the runway for adoption.The level of hospitality varies widely across the continent.
Maurice stands out pretty much wherever he goes thanks to his height and plume of curly black hair.His speech is punctuated with laughs and smiles, and that friendly demeanor puts people at ease.But it’s underpinned by an intense work ethic — he’s got a black belt in TaeKwonDo, was an Eagle Scout in his youth and a finalist for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships in college.
He also cares deeply about revolutionizing a broken financial system.These traits help enlist supporters for his longshot ideas – like launching a centralized cryptocurrency exchange in Africa from his dorm room in Auburn, Alabama.
Yellow Card has facilitated $1.75 billion in transactions since launching in 2019 and has about 220 employees – mostly in Africa.The exchange lets users send money to 16 countries on the continent – and crucially, at the other end of that transaction, the platform has streamlined the process of converting crypto back to local currencies.
On a good day, the service will do $5 million in transactions.On a slow day, it is closer to $1 million, according to Maurice.
The company has also raised $57 million, including from Jack Dorsey’s Block and Valar Ventures, a venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel.
Maurice says his ultimate goal is to expand service to the rest of the continent and turn Yellow Card into a billion-dollar company, up from its current valuation of $200 million.In practice, that means capitalizing on the exchange’s first-mover advantage.
“I realized very early on that there’s so much opportunity in all these countries and that we needed to be the first one there,” said Maurice.
“I drove from South Africa to Botswana, Zimbabwe to Zambia, then flew up to Ethiopia, Ghana, and Uganda.In all of these places, I was doing the grunt work – things like company registration and opening bank accounts, so that we would be ready to go.”
Maurice doesn’t stay anywhere for long, but the transient lifestyle suits him.He’s currently in Barcelona, but it’s just an apartment in a timezone that lets him take his morning work calls from a desk, rather than the shower.
“I can brush my teeth in peace,” Maurice says with his trademark smile.
How money moves in Africa
Moving money in Africa is an expensive and complicated process.
Commercial bank branch access is limited, especially for people living in remote and rural areas.
Digital banking options are also limited.The latest stats from the World Bank show that just 29% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa uses the internet.Tack on rampant hyperinflation, widespread government corruption, and capital controls trapping domestic cash in banks, and money can stop making sense altogether.
“If someone wants to move money to the country next door, normally, you’d have to fill up a suitcase full of cash and move it over the border,” explains Ray Youssef, the CEO of Paxful, a peer-to-peer crypto marketplace where users can exchange tokens with one another.
Companies like Western Union and MoneyGram offer an expansive physical network of storefronts around the world designed to move money for those who are unbanked.That cash network was extraordinarily difficult and expensive to build, which is why there aren’t a lot of direct competitors.It is also why those cash transfers often incur substantial fees.
“The entire system of cross-border payments is all about rent-seeking.That’s what it’s designed to do,” argues Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer for the
Human Rights Foundation, an organization that works with human rights activists from authoritarian regimes around the world.
“It’s not designed to help you move money from A to B.It’s designed by someone who’s going to make money off you moving money from A to B,” continues Gladstein.
If someone wants to move money to the country next door, normally, you’d have to fill up a suitcase full of cash and move it over the border.Ray YoussefPaxful CEO
Part of the problem stems from the continent’s quasi-colonial payment framework, in which roughly 80% of cross-border payments originating from African banks are processed offshore, mostly in the U.S.or Europe.
That translates to higher costs and processing times that are sometimes measured in weeks.
“The mainstream way of approaching this is, ‘Oh, let’s just Africanize it.
Let’s replace the intermediaries over there with intermediaries here,’” explains Gladstein.“That’s probably even worse because they’re going to be corrupt and expensive.”
Across the continent, there are fintech companies built on top of the existing banking system.These platforms abstract away the complicated back-office processes, but the fundamental problem remains.
These businesses go through the same legacy payment networks, where they spend a lot of money settling payments — costs which they then pass on to customers.
The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, or PAPSS, launched in Jan.2022 with a goal of bringing existing payment systems together under one interoperable network.But it’s too early to tell through official metrics whether PAPSS has begun to deliver on its promise of saving African users more than $5 billion in annual transaction fees.
Then there’s mobile money, which has
been around since the early 2000s.Think of it like an electronic wallet tied to a phone number that does not require a smartphone or data to operate.
Users can pay bills and shop with their phone through SMS texting, instead of having to rely on traditional banking options.
Africa’s mobile money transactions
rose 39% to more than $700 billion in 2021, according to data from the GSM Association, a non-profit representing mobile network operators worldwide.World Bank data shows that account ownership at a financial institution — or via a mobile money service provider — has more than doubled in the last decade, rising to 55% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa.
But even as adoption proliferates, mobile money users don’t get the perks of legacy banking, including earning interest on banked savings and building up a credit score based on a history of spending.
Interoperability on the continent also remains a major issue with this alternative way of banking.
“The entire banking system in Africa is completely and utterly broken, even amongst the mobile money providers, the telcos,” said Youssef from Paxful.
“Two thousand payment networks and only 2% of them talk to each other.That number continues to grow.It’s not getting better, it’s actually getting worse,” continued Youssef.
Take M-Pesa, short for “mobile” and the Swahili word for money — “pesa.” It’s Kenya’s version of mobile money, and it’s incredibly popular there.M-Pesa operates in
seven different African countries, but you can’t send money from M-Pesa Kenya to M-Pesa Ghana.
“Even on the same network, owned by the same company, because of regulations, those two networks don’t talk to each other,” said Youssef.
One solution for moving money across borders is the centralized crypto exchange that Maurice built.The Yellow Card CEO says he would ultimately love to tie in with the Western Union network to help bring those costs for the customer to essentially zero through crypto, given that half of all the world’s remittance is still cash on both ends.
Another option for making international payments on the continent are peer-to-peer digital asset marketplaces, like the one that Youssef runs.
“People find each other, they do a trade, there’s an escrow which removes the trust from at least one side, and the deal is done,” Youssef told CNBC on the sidelines of the Africa Bitcoin Conference.
Paxful has facilitated $5 billion in transaction volume in Africa since it launched, though Youssef says it’s only a small fraction of the entire peer-to-peer market.
“Most of it happens on instant messenger, or on the street,” he said.“Africans have been doing peer-to-peer finance for a very long time; one might say over 1,400 years.
So this is nothing new to them.”
From Taco Bell to Nigeria
On a 15-minute drive from Accra’s embassy-heavy Labone District down to the Atlantic Coast, Maurice describes himself as being as Southern as it gets.Before touching down in Nigeria in 2019 to launch his company, the New Orleans native hadn’t traveled much beyond the Southeastern seaboard of the U.S.
“My entire worldview was essentially confined to two states – Louisiana and Alabama,” said Maurice.“I had only been on a plane four times before flying to Lagos on a six-day-old passport with no visa and no shots.”
Despite his limited travels to that point, Maurice was no stranger to the difficulties associated with moving money around the planet.
Starting in the fifth grade, he used his father’s eBay account to sell Pokemon cards and other collectibles online – a venture that would ultimately cover his college tuition at Auburn.But the business of sending and receiving cash internationally wasn’t always straightforward.Some of his customers in Pakistan, for example, weren’t able to use PayPal.Bank wires were also not an option.
To get paid, Maurice instead had to wait in line at a local Western Union branch.
It cost the buyer a hefty fee, and it cost Maurice time – and gas money.
At the age of 18, Maurice turned his attention to bitcoin and soon grew convinced that the world’s biggest cryptocurrency was the answer to his problems.It also presented a new business opportunity.
In 2015, Maurice and his freshman roommate’s best friend, Justin Poiroux, decided to get into bitcoin trading by running their own over-the-counter trading desk out of the Taco Bell on South Gay Street in Auburn.
“We started putting out ads on Craigslist that basically said, ‘We have bitcoin.Come give us cash,’” explained Maurice.
Every Wednesday at 7pm, he and Poiroux, a tech-savvy coder, would grab a spot in the back and split a 12-pack of Doritos Locos Tacos while drop-ins would swap dollars for bitcoin.Customers would slap a couple hundred dollars down on the table (bitcoin was trading at around $250 at the time), scan a QR code, and that was it.On the backend, Maurice and Poiroux were using LocalBitcoins, a peer-to-peer exchange, to carry out the trades.
At the time, Maurice says, his OTC desk offered an easier onramp to crypto than
Coinbase, whose interface was tough to navigate.Profits came from the arbitrage play between payment methods, since bank transfers and cash had different fees.
As for the location? Maurice says he chose Taco Bell because it offered the “perfect amount of apathy.”
“This operation would have never flown at a Chick-fil-A,” he said.
After two weeks, business was booming, so they decided to expand the franchise.
“We started calling up friends from high school who were now at LSU, Yale, Georgia, Alabama, anywhere that we knew someone,” continued Maurice.
“A few weeks later, we had seven Taco Bells on the eastern United States, all within college campuses, where you could walk in and buy bitcoin.”
Four months later, the Taco Bell trading desks were moving thousands of dollars in bitcoin.They weren’t too rigorous on the accounting at the time, but Maurice estimates that roughly thirty thousand dollars was exchanged across the entire franchise.
“Then one day, Justin and I were talking and we said, ‘Man, we should really do something less sketchy with our lives’.”
Then Maurice had a chance meeting at a Wells Fargo near campus that changed his life.
“I meet this Nigerian guy who is sending $200 to his family, and the bank charged him $90,” Maurice recalled.
“I’m like, ‘Man, have you heard of bitcoin?’” continued Maurice.“I explained to him what bitcoin is and how he could try it out by downloading Coinbase.”
There was just one problem: He had no idea what would happen on the other end of the transfer.
“What on earth is this guy’s mom going to do with $200 worth of bitcoin?” he said.
“I started skipping class and researching what the banking system was like in Nigeria – and the currency,” said Maurice.“Could you buy bitcoin in Nigeria? Could you sell it?’”
Maurice and Poiroux decided that the core market for Yellow Card should be the people who stood to benefit the most from an alternative, international payment network that cut out extra transaction fees and wait times.
While Poiroux stayed behind in Alabama to continue building and maintaining the tech that fueled the entire operation, Maurice set off to Lagos to establish a physical presence, including laying all of the regulatory groundwork needed to get the business off the ground.
Centralizing crypto payments seemed like the obvious thing to do.Up until their launch, peer-to-peer crypto payments on Binance, Paxful, or other more regional exchanges had been the status quo for many wanting to trade and invest in digital tokens.
“Generally, the reason that people use centralized exchanges is for the experience, right? It’s significantly easier to use Coinbase than it is to use MetaMask, which involves trying to figure out how to get your own ethereum and store your own keys,” explains Maurice.
Having the edge on general licensing has also put Yellow Card ahead of the competition.
“The amount of local expertise that is required to get some of these payment service providers signed, as well as registering entities and setting up bank accounts — it is such a different way of doing business than in other parts of the world,” Poiroux tells CNBC.
Running Yellow Card
Poiroux doesn’t crave the limelight — he has always worked behind the scenes, unconcerned with notching public accolades.If Yellow Card were a band, he’d be the drummer or bass player, keeping everything solid in the background while Maurice took center stage as the lead singer.
Poiroux started coding when he was 10, because he wanted to make his own video games.
But after reading the bitcoin white paper, he became obsessed with the idea of decentralized, unstoppable software.
The Yellow Card co-founder and chief technology officer dropped out of college freshman year, and instead holed up in his off-campus apartment teaching himself how to be a full-stack developer through a combination of YouTube tutorials and engineering blogs.It took a year and a half of coding for 16 hours a day for him to build the beta of Yellow Card, and he mostly did it himself.
“If something needs to be built, I will learn, figure it out, and build it,” Poiroux says, with a hint of a Southern drawl.
“Fairly confident this comes from my background as a farmboy from Alabama.”
Poiroux, who had been on a presidential scholarship to Auburn before quitting school, said he kept his off-campus apartment all four years so that he could still get the college experience of going to bars and football games.His parents eventually got on board after he and Maurice landed their first $100,000 in venture funding.
Today, Poiroux runs his own fleet of 40 software engineers across 13 countries who are responsible for keeping the entire operation going.His team is in charge of everything from patching bugs in the code to creating technical workarounds for nationwide internet cuts.
“A lot of the infrastructure dependencies in Africa aren’t reliable and so you have to build a lot of logic surrounding it that you wouldn’t necessarily, originally think of,” explains Poiroux.
In Zambia, for example, it is not uncommon for the largest mobile phone network, MTN, to go down for two to three days.Extended network downtime means having to deal with pending transactions and bracing for more extreme edge cases.Third-party infrastructure dependency is another big sticking point, particularly when it comes to the availability of the network and the payment service providers.
Poiroux first went to Lagos in 2020, and he now makes it back to Africa every three to four months, rotating between Yellow Card engineering hubs in Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria.
Part of what makes Yellow Card so convenient for users is its interoperability with existing banking options, as well as alternative payment service providers, including mobile money.While the platform will custody crypto assets if users want to keep their tokens on the exchange, very few choose to do so.Poiroux emphasizes the fact that they are really more the gateway to crypto.
As the counter-party for all trades, Yellow Card also market makes on the exchange against African currencies, a feature which proves crucial when it comes to reducing price volatility and fairly pricing assets.
“We’ll buy several million dollars a day worth of naira,” Maurice says, referring to the Nigerian local currency.
“We’re one of the few companies that will actually take on local African fiats.”
35-year-old Franklin Okoye, who works in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, earns a living by helping businesses to import goods like clothes and chemicals from China.Okoye says that he and other merchants use Yellow Card specifically because it offers “very competitive” market rates when he has to convert between tether and the Nigerian naira.
“We have difficulty in Nigeria here accessing dollars to make payments abroad.So everyone is looking for alternative ways of making payments,” said Okoye, adding that he swaps more than $1 million worth of naira for tether (and vice versa) on Yellow Card each month.“Everyone is going to crypto.”
Beyond the remittance use case, many customers use the platform to hedge against inflation and currency devaluation by holding some of their local currency in a U.S.dollar-pegged stablecoin like tether, according to Yellow Card’s director of special projects, Oparinde Babatunde.
He thinks that’s a big reason why crypto’s latest bear market didn’t hurt their business — the need to protect against inflation has only gone up as governments around the world began printing cash during the pandemic.
Maurice tells CNBC that Yellow Card’s business customers are also using the platform to pay for expenses like their Amazon Web Services bill, and Poiroux added that they have seen some of their retail customers earn money by informally day trading and trying to find arbitrage opportunities between coins.
“We have tons of people who use Yellow Card essentially as a full-time job,” Poiroux said.
Spreading the bitcoin gospel
Nowadays, Poiroux spends less time in the weeds of coding.Instead, he devotes most of his waking hours to thinking about what comes next and how to scale the business specifically to meet the needs of the people for whom he built the platform.
“Our approach is — and this has been my approach on the technical side — to build one solution, one platform — where we can quickly plug-and-play other functionalities,” Poiroux tells CNBC from Atlanta, where he’s working between visits to his production hubs in Africa.
“Think things like new payment service providers, so that we can scale quickly and make crypto as accessible as possible,” he said, noting that other crypto payment platforms have taken the opposite approach, hyper-focusing on big markets like Nigeria instead of the entirety of the continent.
Poiroux says that in addition to the retail-facing part of the business, the enterprise side of the operation is also a major priority.Yellow Card offers a
Payments API that enables companies around the world to collect and disburse funds in Africa without currency devaluation risk.
“The super-cool part is that it uses the same infrastructure as our retail platform,” Poiroux explains of yet another project he architected and helped to code.“So if we expand our retail business, we can instantly make that available to the companies that have integrated this service already.”
In the meantime, both Maurice and Poiroux are spreading the gospel of bitcoin pretty much everywhere they go.Last summer, for instance, Maurice advised
Central African Republic on adopting bitcoin as legal tender.
Maurice and his Cameroonian lawyer were brought to Bangui to meet with the minister of public works, who is in charge of the country’s crypto strategy.About halfway through the meeting, the electricity cut out, which meant no AC and no light for the remainder of the conversation.
“We were in a dark room with no windows talking about how the country would be tokenizing everything from their natural resources, to
Makumba gorillas,” Maurice recalls.
The conversation didn’t miss a beat, because everyone at the table was engrossed in the conversation at hand — how other countries had been taking advantage of Central African Republic through currency controls for its entire history and how bitcoin presented the country with its first real opportunity to determine its own finances.
“Bitcoin gives them a chance to control their own destiny — to keep their money outside of foreign banks, in their own country, to use how they see fit,” Maurice said.“It really is financial freedom.”
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