Eventually, he ended his MMA career and came back to New York and began launching new companies. He figured he had the Midas touch and would be successful again, but instead he experienced 11 company failures in a row.

Youssef is the first and only person I know in Bitcoin who uses the term “financial apartheid” regularly to describe the extreme unfairness of the financial system in Africa and in other nations throughout the emerging world. Our job is to educate these young entrepreneurs to a new way to think about money, as Youssef inspires.

Africa has over 2,000 payments systems and only 3% are able to talk to each other.

Paxful has established 300 trade routes to date and feels it could have another 3,000 in short order.

Calling them “walled gardens” of money is far too kind. Walled prisons of money is a better description for how the 1% maintain full control of the masses and repress the bulk of humanity.

I’m happy to report that bitcoin and Youssef will be a wrecking ball to financial apartheid in Africa.

A circular economy that allocates capital more effectively? What a concept. Youssef sees Africans and other emerging markets as unstoppable with Bitcoin, the fairest monetary system ever invented, created or discovered.

He is looking for trade routes and trade corridors and native born “co-founders” who can develop them. When asked about how he developed this novel approach, he said he got the idea from studying the history of money going back to the Roman Empire, which didn’t allow for agency. It relied on trusted networks. And the most lucrative trade routes hundreds of years ago were dangerous.

Today they’re “dangerous” in the sense that these opportunities are more often found in gray markets or gray areas of the law.

Paxful calls itself a “people-powered marketplace for money transfers with anyone, anywhere, at any time.” Its mission is to empower the forgotten and underbanked around the world to have control of their money using peer-to-peer transactions.

During these campus tours he often encounters enormous skepticism towards Bitcoin.

To overcome this, he conducts what he calls “entrepreneurial crash courses” at each stop. He will tell young aspiring entrepreneurs that in order to start a business, you must solve a problem.

Remove the friction or find a work around and you‘ve got yourself a business. He tells them “when your country keeps money trapped, that’s what keeps you poor.” All we have to do is remove the barriers and blockages.