One of the most common questions we receive from the community is why Humaniq is only open in a few countries. The short answer is that we must comply to regulations in every place we operate. In this article, however, we will elaborate on what exactly this means: what are the regulations, and what’s the process like for opening new countries.

It’s not just the token

Perhaps surprisingly, the fact that we use a cryptocurrency token in our app is not the biggest issue from a regulatory perspective. Blockchain and crypto as a whole are in a legal void, where there simply aren’t any laws governing their use. In most countries of the world, cryptocurrency is neither legal nor illegal, although various regulatory bodies issued warnings about its use in some states.

A much more important concern is compliance to privacy and user data protection laws. Since we handle a lot of sensitive information such as phone numbers and biometric identities, we need to be very careful to respect all existing standards for data safety.

With that said, we are fully compliant with the recently enacted EU GDPR laws, which can be considered as the toughest user data protection legislation in the world.

How new countries are added

In order to whitelist a country for use of the wallet, we need to be absolutely certain that our activities will be considered fully legal by the government.

Initially we created a list of 10 countries, chosen according to criteria such as large population size, low incomes, and low banking services penetration. Then, we began searching for local law firms that specialized in the financial sector, requesting a legal opinion on whether our services will be allowed in their country. As mentioned before, the most important factors were the regulations on user data protection and the legal status of cryptocurrency, taking into consideration our emission system as well.

The procedure generally took a couple of months for each request, meaning that we were somewhat limited in how quickly we could open new countries, though eventually we expanded the list to a total of 40 countries of interest. Unfortunately, not all of these turned out to be good options: for some states, the legal opinion was ambiguous or an outright rejection, which meant that we could not take the risk of including them.

In all of these cases, however, we remain hopeful that through additional work we will be able to solve the problems, though it will take time and resources.

Non-legal aspects

From a technical point of view, whitelisting a country is very simple: once the decision has been made, it generally takes less than a day.

However, as anyone who has ever launched something to the public knows, you can’t expect people to use something just because it’s available. Any new release always requires a marketing campaign, and the Humaniq app is no exception. Through a combination of techniques involving both digital and physical marketing we target every country individually, and this means that even if we opened all of them at once, we wouldn’t get any additional users.

What the future holds

In the recent months we have picked up the pace of new country whitelisting, and we intend to continue this trend. This time, however, we will be looking across the two oceans that surround Africa, towards Asia and South America.

It’s important to remember that Africa is not the only continent with large amounts of unbanked people, and we are excited to be making the jump soon! In fact, the expansion into Asia and America will be somewhat faster, as it’s much easier to find the required information by ourselves, compared to most African countries.

We will of course keep developing our African presence through providing more use cases and more available countries as well: our eventual aim is to cover all of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Any questions or feedback? We’d love to hear your thoughts. You can let us know on Twitter, and join our Subreddit to discuss this and other news from the Humaniq project!