What is the Divest app about?
In the past few years, since crypto has begun to offer young Nigerians risk-inclined enough looking to invest their money or just move it around away from prying eyes or government overreach, crypto bros and their beneficiaries have demanded a platform where they can also liquidate their crypto into cash as quick as possible.
Several methods have risen in the past few years to solve this problem. There have been peer-to-peer marketplaces where people trade their crypto to others looking to buy crypto for cash. Away from the marketplace are friends and family who hold vigils on WhatsApp, bombarding their contact list with what they’ll say are the best BTC or USDT rates.
Then there are the fairly stable startups offering the business to customer services. All of this is to meet the rising demands for faster off-ramping processes.
But the problem with these services is that, at times, they take too long and need to be built for this fast-paced era of TikTok and remote internships of this new decade.
Enter Divest, a new app that debuted on the app stores just under a week ago, looking to make off-ramping transactors as fast as possible.
The premise of Divest is straightforward. Users can send chunks of their assets from their crypto wallets directly to their bank accounts or anyone else with a bank account, and they receive the crypto already converted as cash in just ideally under 5 minutes.
Away from the type of all-in-one fintech apps that have populated the app stores and become the backbone of “the Nigerian tech ecosystem” – the savings platform is also selling recharge cards, the mobile bank offers options for customers to buy shares from global companies the – functions of the Divest app is singular. Divest’s sole function is instantly converting crypto to cash from any holdings platform for crypto users. It doesn’t even hold the money, at least not yet.
Many crypto holdings companies, Binance, Trust Wallet etc., don’t support off-ramping directly to Nigeria. This is one of the reasons why Divest’s primary function remains timely.
On the Divest app, current rates of USDT and BTC are displayed. For users to liquidate their crypto through the app, they have to add a bank account and then select that bank account—a wallet address. Then Divest offers a unique wallet address tied to the selected naira account. When users send crypto from their holdings platform of choice through that wallet address, it hits the account attached as cash.
In the more traditional settings of crypto liquidations, users looking to convert their crypto to cash notifies any of the platforms available to them that they have crypto. The platform then serves as a middleman and connects people who want to buy crypto to the users. They send the seller their wallet address, who sends themes the crypto, and then they send cash to the user. For this to happen, someone has to be on the bank end, facilitating communication and processing the transaction manually.
Unlike this traditional method of crypto liquidation, where a middleman has to process the transactions manually, the Divest app automatically processes the transactions making it possible for thousands of transactions to occur concurrently. That is why Divest can boast more reliable and faster products to customers.
The Divest unique wallets
At the core of Divest offerings are the unique wallets.
This product also immediately offers another solution to a rising problem that has ravaged people looking to make cross-border transactions in the developing worlds that traditional international regulatory bodies have sidelined.
Because the wallet addresses are tied to local currency accounts, but the crypto is coming from a global network, it makes it possible for users to receive direct payment into their local currency account through crypto from any part of the world and what they will get is cash in their local currency.
“For freelancers in Africa, this is their best option,” Kelechi Idoko, the company’s founder said. “Instead of using other virtual account providers that exchange your digital assets with about 30 naira less than the market value, using Divest has very competitive rates that you’re never charged more than 5 naira below the market rate,” he said.
Divest wallets are not only tied to Nigerian Naira accounts. It is already available in Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, and South Africa, giving even more Africans a pathway to engage in the global financial markets.
With the arrival of the Divest app on the app stores, a new age for crypto liquidation and cross-border payment has dawned.