Block partners with African crypto exchange Yellow Card
Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Block, speaks at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami. Joe Raedle—Getty Images
Block, the publicly traded company behind popular payment apps Cash App and Square, on Wednesday announced a partnership with Yellow Card, one of the largest crypto exchanges in Africa, to facilitate cross-border payments between 16 countries in Africa, including Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa.
In March, Yellow Card and Blocks TBD, an offshoot of the payments giant that specializes in developing software for crypto and Web3 projects, tested their cross-border payment infrastructure to send money between the US, Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya. The system leverages stablecoins and Bitcoin to reduce the fees needed to send money across borders, TBD says.
Yellow Card provided the software to connect to each of the 16 countries’ financial networks, and TBD provided the “bridge” between each of the countries, said Emily Chiu, TBD’s co-founder and COO. Fortune. TBD specifically designed its technological “bridge” to be legally compliant and comply with international and national money transfer regulations, legal and technological expertise that Yellow Card does not have.
“Developers don’t want to worry about jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction compliance,” she said Fortune in an interview. “Developers just want to build and make sure it works.”
Block’s partnership with Yellow Card comes two years after co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, invested in the African exchange. Meanwhile, Block has pursued a broader strategy for cross-border payments, including money transfers. That includes leading a funding round for Gridless, a Bitcoin mining company in Kenya that hopes to use Bitcoin mining to encourage the development of renewable energy projects.
“The international payments space, especially in Africa, is in dire need of the innovative solutions we are building together,” said Chris Maurice, co-founder and CEO of Yellow Card in a statement. “And this is the culmination of the vision behind Block’s first investment in Yellow Card in 2021.”
TBD is just one of Block’s crypto businesses. While flagship products Cash App and Square generate the majority of revenue, the payments giants have doubled down on crypto in recent years.
Dorsey, a Bitcoin evangelist, announced in 2018 that Cash App users would be able to buy and sell the cryptocurrency. Formerly called Square, the company announced in 2021 that it would be renaming Block, emphasizing its new focus on Bitcoin and blockchain. And later that year, Dorsey announced the establishment of TBD.
The subsidiary’s cross-border payments infrastructure, which COO Chiu says will eventually be available for other developers to connect to beyond Yellow Card, isn’t the only focus. It is also developing a decentralized online platform, and soon after it was founded, TBD released a white paper detailing its plans for the construction of a decentralized Bitcoin exchange.
“It’s not just remittances,” Chiu, TBD’s COO, told me Fortune. “It’s just really bridging the world of old money and new money.”
