Jack Dorsey, founder of popular Microblogging platform, Twitter has announced the appointment of 3 Nigerians to his Bitcoin Trust.
He tweeted the appointment in a statement on his page on Wednesday. He appointed 3 Nigerians and 1 South African to act as the board of the BTrust fund.
The fund will be expended for development in Africa and India.
According to jack@jack·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.
BTrust is a fund with 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 4 Africans, without supervision from Dorsey or Jay Z.
Jack Dorsey added that “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.“
Jack Dorsey disclosed the identities of the BTrust board, 3 of whom are Nigerians. They include: Abubakar Nur Khalil, Ojoma Ochai, Obi Nwosu and South African, Carla Kirk-Cohen.
Who are BTrust board members?
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 3 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 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.
While the BTrust funds will be disbursed in India and Africa, it’s unsure how it will work in Nigeria considering the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has banned cryptocurrency activities in Nigeria.