Founder of popular microblogging platform, Twitter, Jack Dorsey, has appointed three Nigerians and one South African to act as the board of his Bitcoin Trust (BTrust) fund which will be expended for development in Africa and India.
In February, Dorsey, who resigned as Twitter CEO in late November, had announced a B Trust [with the ‘B’ carrying bitcoin symbol] in collaboration with American rapper, Shawn “Jay Z” Carter.
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JAY-Z/@S_C_ and I are giving 500 BTC to a new endowment named ₿trust to fund #Bitcoin development, initially focused on teams in Africa & India. It‘ll be set up as a blind irrevocable trust, taking zero direction from us. We need 3 board members to start: https://t.co/L4mRBryMJe
— jack⚡️ (@jack) February 12, 2021
BTrust is a fund with a 500 BTC capital base worth N10,014,265,775.40 ($24,426,230), when pegged to late Monday’s market price $48,815.35, and will be overseen by four Africans, without supervision from Dorsey or Jay Z.
Jack Dorsey disclosed the identities of the BTrust board, three of whom are Nigerians; Abubakar Nur Khalil, Obi Nwosu, Ojoma Ochai, and South African, Carla Kirk-Cohen in a late statement released on his Twitter page on Wednesday.
Announcing the ₿trust board: @actuallyCarlaKC, @ihate1999, @obi, & @ojomaochai! I’m so grateful for you all and so inspired. 🧡⚡️🌍
They’ll now work towards defining the operating principles as they think about how to best distribute the 500 bitcoin towards development efforts. https://t.co/jwbr4qQUZ2 pic.twitter.com/1MszEPdGKL
— jack⚡️ (@jack) December 15, 2021
The individuals were selected from a pool of 7,000 applicants who applied to be on the board, which was initially meant to be occupied by three directors.
Obi Nwosu is the Co-founder of Coinfloor, a seed-level cryptocurrency startup, which has raised $300,000 in a funding round.
Ojoma Ochai is the Managing Partner at CcHUBCreative (Co-Creation Hub), a technology innovation workspace, accelerating startup growth in Nigeria and selected part in Africa – CcHUB has raised $5.5 million to aid its operation.
Abubakar Nur Khalil is a 22-year-old bitcoin core contributor, and had received $50,000 in BTC for his work on Bitcoin wallet software from Human Rights Foundation (HRF) in May 2021.
Khalil is also the CTO of Recursive Capital, an early-on-stage crypto VC fund, supporting founders building critical web 3.0 infrastructure.
Carla Kirk-Cohen is a software engineer at Lightning Labs. She previously worked for Luno, a South African cryptocurrency Exchange and Wallet firm, working on the crypto-ops team.
