Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey has appointed three Nigerians to the board of the Bitcoin (BTrust) trust fund.
Dorsey, who resigned as Twitter CEO in late November, formed the Bitcoin trust fund in partnership with American hip-hop star Jay Z.
Dorsey announced the appointment in a statement on his Twitter page on Wednesday.
“I’m so grateful for you all and so inspired,” he tweeted while announcing the leaders of the Bitcoin trust fund.
He 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.
The Nigerians appointed into the Bitcoin trust fund are Abubakar Nur Khalil, Obi Nwosu, Ojoma Ochai, and South African, Carla Kirk-Cohen.
All four have worked to promote bitcoin development efforts across Africa.
Dorsey said a team selected the four developers from a pool of 7,000 applicants.
“They’ll now work towards defining the operating principles as they think about how to best distribute the 500 bitcoin towards development efforts,” Dorsey tweeted.
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.
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.
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.
Khalil is also the CTO of Recursive Capital, an early-on-stage crypto VC fund, supporting founders building critical web 3.0 infrastructure.
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.
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 of $48,815.35, and will be overseen by the four Africans, without supervision from Dorsey or Jay Z.
Dorsey in June 2021 said “the people of Nigeria will lead bitcoin” despite the Nigerian authorities clamping down on the trading of cryptocurrencies with a ban in place by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
