MELD — Tingo Partnership
MELD is setting its goals as a highly efficient DeFi lending and borrowing protocol. MELDs focus is on operating a non-custodial and capital-efficient protocol that offers highly sophisticated financial services for any size of a transaction. Our goal is to bring these services to the masses in Asia, Africa, and South America, not only Europe and the US. MELD sees Africa as a key market especially since we have partnerships like World Mobile and Cardano’s focus on Africa.
As such, we are thrilled to partner with Tingo International Holdings, the majority shareholder in Tingo Inc, who are 100% shareholders in Tingo Mobile PLC in Nigeria. Tingo mobile is a leading Africa-focused Agri-Fintech company with almost 10 million subscribers. We believe a high-efficiency DeFi protocol like MELD, can provide a great deal of value to Tingo Mobile users even if the transaction sizes are sub $100USD.
With Tingo in such a critical position in the Nigerian market, with almost 10 million active subscribers, MELD services can offer existing customers more economic/financial flexibility and attract new users to Tingo as well.
About Tingo
Tingo is an Agri-Fintech company offering a comprehensive platform service through the use of smartphones (using GSM technology) to empower a marketplace to enable subscribers/farmers within and outside of the agricultural sector to manage their commercial activities of growing and selling their products to market participants both domestically and internationally. The ecosystem provides a one-stop-shop solution to enable such subscribers to manage everything from airtime top-ups, bill pay services for utilities and other service providers, access to insurance services, and microfinance to support their value chain from seed to sale.
Tingo aims to be Africa’s leading Agri-Fintech player that transforms rural farming communities to connect through our proprietary platform to meet their complete needs from inputs, agronomy, off-take, and marketplace which delivers sustainable income in an impactful way.
Through its innovative platform Nwassa, Africa’s first digital agriculture ecosystem, Tingo empowers rural businesses to access markets. Farm produce can be shipped from farms across Africa to any part of the world, in both retail and wholesale quantities. Tingo operates Tingo Pay, a mobile payment gateway. It is the intention of Tingo to support a continent-wide SuperApp.
Chris Cleverly, President of Tingo, said this about the partnership:
“It is important as Africa’s largest Agri-fintech directed at providing services for the agricultural community and working to ensure food security across the continent, that we work with technologies such as MELD and CARDANO that are looking to shift the present paradigm in favour of banking for all and inclusive finance. DeFi, Stable Tokens, and NFTs will emancipate Africa as an economic powerhouse — we will work with regulators to ensure this is done safely but it is clear that change is inevitable and Nigeria is leading this change.”
Business background
Tingo International holdings is a majority shareholder in Tingo Inc, which owns 100% of Tingo Mobile PLC in Nigeria.
Tingo Inc, an OTC-listed public company that owns Tingo Mobile, has recently acquired the Coinfield crypto exchange. Tingo intends to launch a gold stable token, along with MELD and the Ubuntu Tribe, to reduce interest rates, volatility, and cross-border costs.
Bringing flexible and low-cost DeFi lending and borrowing will unlock a great deal of value to users including earning yield on latent capital, gaining access to fiat while maintaining a crypto position, and sending and receiving funds with very low transaction costs.
⭐️ Purpose
The purpose of this partnership is to build value-added financial services across Africa that are safe, easy, and transparent. The MELD application will be customized for Tingo customers and be focused on use cases for Africa. MELD will work with Tingo and their mobile OEM to preload a co-branded MELD app on Tingo mobile devices. The collaboration will build a servicing offering that will help Tingo customers gain economic freedom and flexibility in their day-to-day financial transactions.
🤝 Joint Collaboration
In this partnership MELD and Tingo will work together to mutually develop each other’s business and support each other’s ecosystems. Tingo and MELD may co/brand the service. This includes the following:
Tingo
- Provide know-how and assistance to effectively deliver MELD protocol services via the Tingo mobile devices
- Provide access, documentation, and technical guidance to efficiently integrate the MELD protocol into the Tingo mobile OEM infrastructure
MELD
- MELD will provide access, technical development, and support services for MELD products and services to Tingo’s customers
- MELD will provide a full suite of DeFi, non-custodial and decentralized projects and services to Tingo customers
📱 Integration of MELD Protocol into Tingo mobile device
In this partnership MELD and Tingo will work together to mutually integrate the MELD protocol into Tingo mobile devices built and delivered to Tingo customers. This includes the following:
Tingo
- Support the development of a MELD application specifically designed and delivered to Tingo devices
Providing access to OEM technical documentation and test devices - Tingo to ensure the MELD mobile app is preloaded on Tingo mobile devices
MELD
- MELD to develop, deliver, manage and support the MELDapp for Tingo devices
💱💵 Integration of Lending Products
Tingo
- Tingo to allow MELD to offer DeFi services that conform with the country that they are to be distributed in
With Nigeria being the first country of implementation - Tingo to allow MELD to execute KYC/AML verification on Tingo customers for DeFi lending services.
Certain functionalities within the MELD Protocol require KYC/AML verification when dealing with fiat currencies
MELD
MELD will provide unedited/unmodified MELD protocol lending and borrowing services to Tingo. This includes but is not limited to:
- MELD Genius loan (Self-paying loan)
- MELD -1% interest loan
- MELD credit line
- MELD warped assets
- Future MELD Lending & Borrowing products
Tingo users will be able to lend their value to earn an interest return per year (generated through lending fees APY) and borrow against their value for further utility if required.
👔 Roles and Responsibilities
MELD will be responsible for collaborating on the overall architecture, development of the Plutus solution, user experience, and user interface, and application delivery. MELD will contribute a part-time product owner, project manager, and DevOps engineer as well as several full-time mobile app engineers.
MELD will be responsible for evaluating and running infrastructure and providing insight and feedback to the Tingo team. MELD will work at all times transparently and in good faith with Tingo and this will include where the technical teams interface and work together.
Reporting
The “MELDapp by Tingo” project will be run via technical project managers from MELD and Tingo where bi-monthly standups will be held by project managers and a shared kanban style task model will be employed. Status reports will be distributed to all partners on a monthly basis.
It’s super exciting partnering with an African-based telecommunications company that shares so many of our core views and values. It’s only a matter of time until Nigerian-based farmers, and other Tingo Mobile users, are utilizing MELD services to manage their value in a more efficient, non-custodial way. It’s time to bring the value back to the consumer… And yes, that means those with less than $100 USD!
Looking forward to a bright future! ☀️ 🚀
MELD — Enjoy today, Secure tomorrow
We think it’s essential for everyone to gain control of their financial lives and have equal access to financial instruments used by professionals, not just centralized institutions, governments, or the 1%. We want to provide financial freedom and control to the masses, including the unbanked.
We have a long-term goal to enable the $15 trillion that is currently locked out of the global economy, including 2 billion individuals worldwide that are either underbanked or have no access to banking services whatsoever, to access these tools. These are the people that are paying the highest fees, getting the worst customer service, and they are the ones that are having the most problems.
Our vision is to create an ecosystem that empowers individuals to regain financial control by providing them with the tools and services they need to manage their money on their terms. Whether that be creating a collateralized debt position (CDP) with cryptocurrency, earning an interest return for lending fiat to borrowers, or even participating in reward incentive programs, we strive to provide our users with the functions they need to manage their own financial lives.
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