Jack Dorsey’s TBD, which is part of Block, has expanded into Africa after a partnership with pan-African cross border payments firm Chipper Cash.
Chipper Cash has been integrated into the tbDEX protocol to power cross border payments and decentralized identity use cases for individuals and businesses on the African continent.
According to Mike Brock, CEO of TBD, “Across Africa, the challenges of currency liquidity and access to global financial systems are palpable. For these reasons, we are laser focused on building out the tbDEX ecosystem in Africa. Adding Chipper Cash to our growing network will help to accelerate our work on global cross border payments and decentralized identity.”
Chipper Cash becomes the second platform to be integrated into the tbDEX ecosystem after TBD announced a payments partnership with Yellow Card last year. Yellow Card is the largest and only licensed stablecoin on/off ramp on the African continent.
Chipper Cash already allows 5 million consumers to move money efficiently to over 21 African countries. And with over 1.2 million cards issued, Chipper’s integration represents the onboarding of one of the largest virtual card issuers in Africa. TBD, an initiative of Block, was co-founded by Jack Dorsey, the former CEO and co-founder of Twitter, now X. TBD aims to drive financial access to individuals, businesses and payment platforms globally and Africa is a key market to Jack Dorsey and the team.
“At Chipper Cash, we’re excited about the potential of tbDEX to revolutionize remittance flows into Africa,” said Maijid Moujaled, President and Co-Founder of Chipper Cash. “Remittances are a lifeline for many African families, but the costs of sending money to the continent remain among the highest globally. By plugging into an open protocol like tbDEX with numerous network participants, we believe we can, collectively as an industry, drive down these high costs and facilitate remittances in a more efficient, transparent, and compliant manner.”
The two firms will focus on enabling faster and less expensive consumer remittances and then explore ways to empower small businesses. Chipper’s offerings for businesses already enable local and cross-border digital payments for underbanked SMEs across 40 different African countries, powering disbursements and collections from bank accounts, mobile money wallets and Chipper wallets.
Chipper Cash will leverage tbDEX to accelerate the onboarding and identity verification of consumers and small businesses as well as unlock trusted, compliant transactions with verifiable credentials (VCs) and decentralized identifiers (DIDs).
Following the successful launch of tbDEX 1.0 at Web Summit Rio, TBD has also launched a series of hands-on tbDEX Developer Workshops in Africa in partnership with Circle and Yellow Card to teach developers how to use tbDEX, an open source liquidity and trust protocol, to unlock frictionless, compliant cross-border payments that are settled in seconds, not days.
