Background: Decentralized Academy is a non-profit entity founded by Hurupay Incorporation in June 2022 (www.hurupay.com). Hurupay is a web 3 startup that has built a self-custodial wallet on the Celo blockchain that allows SMEs to accept stablecoin payments for goods and services from consumers. In addition the wallet offers additional use cases such as bank and mobile money integration, book-keeping, fixed saving and inventory financing.

Hurupay is on a mission to support African SMEs to become sustainable and scalable. We aim to achieve this by solving the major problem that kills most SMEs, which is inability to easily access financial support to grow and stay afloat. As most African economies grapple with the problem of currency devaluation as a result of macroeconomic factors such as inflation that increases costs of goods and high interest rates that increase cost of borrowing, most SMEs end up losing significant money and wealth over time and becoming stretched thus going out of business.

In the process of building Hurupay, we had to go out to users and test the product with them to see if it was desirable and feasible. From various users onboarded we managed to get a lot of feedback around our product and most importantly we got to see why they struggled with understanding the web 3 element of our innovation.

The following are some key learnings and insights we captured:

1. Most users who were ordinary consumers of products and SME owners did not really understand the concept of the underlying blockchain technology and most importantly, they did not care one bit about it! What they cared about was what was the unique value add that our startup could bring to their business.

2. Most users could not tell the difference between various cryptocurrencies and most importantly the difference between stablecoins and normal unpegged cryptocurrencies.

3. Users preferred pre-existing wallets like M-pesa and Momo because they were reliable and they could easily access their money from any agent outlet who were always accessible and within 50m wherever the user is. This was not the case with our model because despite having lower transaction costs, they had doubts about on and off-ramping their stablecoins to and from our wallets and security of funds in their wallets.

4. Most young adopters, especially university students, were keen to join a community and learn about web 3 and how blockchain works. The major problem was that while there was information overload on blockchain online, most resources were still hard to understand.

5. Not all SME owners and consumers used smartphones. Some still used feature phones(with keypads) and needed mobile money agents to on and off-ramp money to and from their wallets. These agents also acted as customer care agents in case they had any challenges and needed to solve any issues with their wallets. The users claimed that they were yet to see this service offered by crypto wallets.

These hurdles in onboarding users to the web 3 ecosystem prompted us to launch Hurupay Academy, later renamed to Decentralized Academy. The main goal of launching Decentralized Academy was and remains to facilitate web 3 education for various users to help bring in more people to the ecosystem. We see this as the biggest opportunity to catalyze the mass adoption of web 3 inventions and crypto usage.

Having gathered the insights and pain points from users, decentralized academy set out to test the following hypotheses:

1. How can blockchain technology help remove inefficiencies in the informal sectors that hamper access to financing and growth opportunities for SMEs?

2. Can the use of stablecoins help to promote stability and self-sustainability of SMEs in the wake of worsening economic factors in developing countries such as inflation, high interest rates that lead to high mortality rates of SMEs?

3. How can various ecosystem stakeholders (government, entrepreneurs, SME owners and crypto users) collaborate to harness the potential of web 3 technologies and foster partnerships that will lead to increased adoption levels of web 3 solutions? What opportunities exist or can come out of such collaborations? What role will Hurupay play in enabling these collaborations?

4. How can Hurupay help bridge the gap in information asymmetry (lack of knowledge sharing) in web 3 and decentralized finance for SMEs ?

5. How can we leverage the network effect to build a community of web 3 ambassadors to help onboard more users to the ecosystem?

Our Methodology:

1. Community Building a. We have built a decentralized Academy community. At the moment, we have onboarded over 300 community members to Hurupay. We carry out monthly meetups at Ashesi University where we get to conduct peer to peer conversations and discuss various emerging topics within the Web 3 space.

b. During these events, we get to invite top web 3 experts to deliver talks and answer questions from community members.

c. Our hope is that as we educate more community members, we can create a network effect where existing users can educate even more people within their networks to help bring more users to the web 3 ecosystem.

d. We are also building an online community platform that will have a social feed to connect community members and share web 3 news, have an events calendar as well as a resource library that members can use to learn or build web 3 products and solutions.

2. Web 3 Educational Training Programs, workshops and events. a. We collaborate with various blockchain protocols and startups to design training programs and workshops for SMEs, blockchain developers and students to help.

b. We are also creating an agent training program whereby we intend to train agents and p2p merchants that will help users on and off-ramp their crypto assets from various wallets and exchanges easily.

c. In addition, we help startups to leverage our community to conduct product testing and feedback sessions to help improve their products via a user-centered approach.

3. Partnership building a. We are looking to work with various stakeholders including government, corporate partners and foundations to co-design and implement programs that will help drive more innovation and collaboration to help promote web 3 adoption in Africa. These partnerships are aimed at policy making, discussing regulations and exploring areas of collaborations among the various players.

4. Educational Grants a. We look to start grant financing programs aimed at helping community members access funding to access training programs as well as carry out smaller training workshops within their home communities. This will help with last mile education and help us take education to the remotest of areas and communities.

b. We are also looking to collaborate with various blockchain foundations to do a grants award program that will help agents and p2p merchants access crypto liquidity to facilitate on and off-ramping for users of their assets.

5. Talent building a. We will also conduct innovation bootcamps and hackathons to bring in experts and mentors to support community members to build solutions aimed at heping boost mass adoption of web 3 in Africa.

Participants will get an opportunity to either: a. Build solutions and pitch them in front of investors and foundations for pitching.

b. Get scouted by corporate partners sourcing for talents to join their companies

c. Win prizes to help advance their prizes Win scholarships from partner institutions to help further their education in their areas of talent.

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