Introduction

This year I had the privilege of working and studying across India, China and the UK. Apart from the vast learning and experiences I had, one personal gripe stuck with me and affected me throughout my stay. Why is it so costly and tedious to move and spend money across from South Africa to foreign countries.

Daily living expenses which seemed to be reasonably priced had to have additional factors such as currency spread, transaction fees and various service charges added on from my perspective before I could even understand how much I was paying for everything.

Now you may ask, what did I do to resolve this problem. This is where I can sadly say that I did absolutely nothing and continued to pay all the charges for the full 7 months I was out of the country.

Whilst in Thailand during my travels I attended a digital nomad meetup where I met a host of different people, most notable a significant number of 'crypto bros'. The common conversation thread between each crypto bro was the talk of stable coins and their various uses. Being an accountant and very much trained in traditional finance, crypto was a curse word to me and was synonmous with words like scam and dodgy. I dismissed all most of what they told me, however subconsiouly the seed had been planted that there was a whole world of finance out there that I was just not exposed to.

After my trip to Thailand, I had met up with a few CA friends and other South Africans living in London. They had also talked about the pain points of moving money across from South Africa in order to cover rental deposits and things like that. It was here that I heard the mention of stable coins for a second time where I met another South African who was using stable coins to move money from South Africa to the UK in order to cover some of his initial moving costs. Alarm bells rang in my mind and I did not want to hear anymore about crypto and promptly changed the topic.

After returning to South Africa in August, I felt like someone had rewrote my news algorithm. Wherever I would look I would see articles about Stable Coins, being Donald Trump implementing them into the US reserve, Discovery partnering with Luno, Revolut in the UK opening up a Crypto platform and many others.

This was the last straw, I could not handle reading about this without having any experience or knowledge on the topic. How better to learn about something than to do a hands on project with the technology and put real money on the line