Zimbabwe just reverted their Monetary policy. How can we help?

I had the pleasure of sitting next to a man on the airplane a few days ago. He is from Zimbabwe originally currently living in the UK. He called me up and asked how Ethereum could help with Zimbabwe’s current financial situation. They just reverted their monetary policy back to a part of what drove the earlier inflation spiral. People are only allowed to withdraw 30.00 dollars a day from their bank accounts. They have tried to adopt cash, but it is difficult to get enough cash in the system to support it.

There has to be something Ethereum can do. Anyone know of projects addressing adoption in countries like this? Layer two solutions? Can dai be used?

What are some obstacles and ways we can overcome them when looking at a situation like this?

This is a critical time for them and they are at the point of necessity to adopt something. Lets be there for them.

I am going to lunch with him tomorrow to discuss. Anyone in Berlin is welcome to join as well.

Cheers,
James

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Maybe @localethereumMichael can be involved? Bootstrapping with Status, TrustWallet, WallETH etc to have Ethereum based savings?

Feels like grass roots and education, not sure what else can be done. Thanks for sharing this!

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Thank you Boris!

I’ll look into those. I will get a better idea of what they have to work with on location after today’s meeting. I’ll share these projects with my friend as well.

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A small relations team at Stripe has been keeping an eye on the situation as well; it’s terrible, and a prime opportunity for a community to do good. Please let us know what you find out, thanks for posting.

What’s the smart phone penetration rate in Zimbabwe?

Maybe paper wallets with small amounts of DAI could be printed (1, 2, 5, 10 denominations) and someone could set up some meta transaction nodes with a bit of ether that could do simple transfer transactions from the accounts.

People could trade the paper freely for goods and cash, and redeem the DAI if they need it using the nodes. I mean, how different is a digital dollar backed piece of paper from a real dollar? It might get confiscated, but it would help out in the short term if they’re restricting the dollar.

Or just print directly on the dollar

https://www.ccn.com/a-bitcoiner-turned-100-bills-into-bitcoin-paper-wallets/

Backed by Bitcoin :sunglasses: (or Ether or whatever)

Take those defunct, worthless pieces of Zimbabwean currency and use them as paper wallets lol

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Who is this guy, @MadeofTin? Does he have some juice? Is he politically connected? Grassroots connected? Hacker connected?

Seems like he needs to connect with some Zim Hackers and suggest they come here and/or develop a working group. Or we can find some zim hackers and invite them to do some ideation on the problem.

P.S. Just found this site by the way. Fullstack JS dev just starting out with Solidity but have been following several EIPs threads closely.

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