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Ray Youssef, CEO of crypto P2P platform NoOnes, argues the current balancing act between crypto and currency control will have a significant impact on the future of the Global South
Central banks are performing a balancing act trying to leverage crypto’s utility while maintaining control of their currencies. Although most in traditional finance would have once preferred crypto to quietly disappear, the battle over crypto’s existence has been fought and won. The “cryptoization” of the money system is underway, but how far central banks allow crypto to remain true to the original mission remains to be seen. Nowhere is the outcome more important than in the Global South, where crypto has done more to change lives than any financial innovation in history. It is therefore crucial that the balancing act being performed by the central banks falls in our favor.
Governments say they regulate crypto to help them catch people who use it for criminal activities. Central bankers want to maintain control over monetary policy. In both cases, they see crypto as a threat. Governments see crypto’s anonymity as the problem, but it’s no more anonymous than cash – it just travels faster. Central banks fear that widespread crypto adoption will make it a serious alternative to national currencies. (I have seen what happens when governments implement exchange controls on foreign currency to prop-up their national currency – crypto volume explodes.) The reasons governments and central bankers fear crypto are perfectly understandable, but the line between regulation and financial freedom has to be drawn with care.
The Global South is the epicenter of crypto – the West just doesn’t know it yet.
The central banks and governments have made their case, but those of us who see crypto as the future of money have to be loud when we put our case for deregulation forward. Cryptoization is happening, but we can’t let crypto morph into another version of fiat or a random selection of trading stocks. That’s already happening in some cases, with institutional support for the ETH EFT growing strongly. Some people holding crypto hope it will go to the moon, but they don’t drive the crypto mission. They are investors, and crypto has never been about making money from money. The crypto mission is about changing the financial system to make it fairer, and that won’t happen in the West because they already hold all the cards that give them an advantage over the rest of the world. The Global South is the epicenter of crypto – the West just doesn’t know it yet.
When governments over-regulate crypto, they stifle innovation and restrict economic growth. The average person in the West might not see the effects, but the effects are stark in the Global South because crypto regulation almost never represents the needs and perspectives of the Global South. When cross-border remittance trade routes are closed down, for example, Africans are severely affected. People in India are affected. People all over the Global South are affected. Relatively few people in the West face financial hardship because not many of them have to send money home to provide for their families. Not many people in the West are unbanked. Lots of people in the Global South don’t have a bank account, and even those who have bank accounts face restrictions and limitations on transactions that people in the West wouldn’t accept. That’s the reason crypto lights up faces in the Global South – people realize how it can change their lives, and they are the driving force behind cryptoization.
Solutions to problems
Cryptocurrencies make compelling solutions to some of the greatest financial challenges faced by people in the Global South. Innovation is being driven by their need to solve problems and the ability of crypto to work as a tool to help them. Crypto allows them to transact, it moves quickly over any distance, it’s cheap, and it requires nothing more than an Internet connection. The irony is that those benefits are the things that governments and central banks fear the most – but they can’t stop it. Cryptoization is real because crypto works better and more efficiently than any other alternative available to people in the Global South.
We have spent a lot of time arguing about whether crypto is a fad or some geek scam. All that wasted energy might have been worthwhile to some people, but the time has now come for us to embrace the benefits of crypto and to agree that it makes the world better. It does that because it democratizes money. It means people in Africa, Asia, or Latin America have the same access to the financial system as a person living anywhere else.
Right now, we are navigating a path that will determine the future of a big part of the world. In 1900, Europe had three times as many people as Africa. By 1993, their populations were the same, and by 2037, Africa will hold three times as many people as Europe. All those people need financial freedom, and crypto is giving it to them. They are the drivers of cryptoization.
Ray Youssef – X (Twitter): ray_noones
Ray Youssef is a prominent entrepreneur and humanitarian in the global crypto industry. He is the founder of NoOnes, a peer-to-peer (P2P) platform designed to expand financial freedom across emerging markets, and a former CEO of Paxful, one of the world’s largest P2P Bitcoin marketplaces.
Youssef has focused his career on building tools that empower underserved communities, particularly in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. His work combines advocacy for crypto adoption with a strong stance against financial censorship, making him a leading voice on how digital assets can transform access to money in the Global South.
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