Universal Money Instrument Decentralised Finance VS Ethereum Decentralised Finance: The quest of Goliath and David to conquer Africa.

Abstract

Few years after the development of Bitcoin (BTC), there was need to develop another blockchain that could support many applications, and consequently, the Ethereum Blockchain (EB) was developed. One of the key initiatives that was enabled by the development of the EB is that of Decentralised Finance (DeFi). Understanding the massive potential of DeFi, particularly in developing markets, many other developers are embarking on projects to develop their DeFi supporting blockchains. The Universal Money Instrument (UMI) team is one of the groups that embarked on this journey. Approximately 1.5 years after the launch of the UMI Blockchain (UMI B) and the UMI coin, the team recently released their DeFi manifest. Considering that Africa stands to benefit more from DeFi, it is expected that these two blockchains will compete for dominance in Africa. Hence, the main objective of this study was to determine the most suitable blockchain for the African continent. To achieve the above objective, a non-empirical, exploratory research was conducted in the form of an online desktop review. It was found that the UMI DeFi is ideal for Africa because the UMI B; is highly scalable, supports nearinstant transactions, offers free transactions, uses a superior consensus algorithm, took longer to develop, and safe from attacks like the 51% attacks.