Hurupay is a cryptocurrency payment system that seeks to encourage the adoption of stablecoins in the transactions of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across Africa. Their mission is to empower African communities and drive economic growth through blockchain technology. They plan to do this with the vision to make Hurupay a dominant app for users to control their finances, protect their revenue against inflation and currency volatility and make secure monetary transactions locally and globally. In addition to this, they seek to empower African women entrepreneurs with an innovative stablecoin payment platform for financial stability, financial and entrepreneurial success.
This project is cofounded by Philip Mburu Wanyoike ’25, a computer science student in Ashesi, who came into Ghana as a Kenyan student with the hopes of opening a bank account easily in order to manage his finances. In doing this, he had to wait 6 hours, endure the back and forth situation of paperwork, only for the money he kept in his bank account to depreciate by 20% a year later. These cumbersome bank processes and transactions are what led to his project, Hurupay.
Philip Mburu ‘25 presenting the project to an audience
The solution, Hurupay, formerly Eazycrypto, is in the form of a website and a business app. These products make life easier for the users by unlocking financial freedom and allowing them to access credit services easily by visiting their website https://www.hurupay.com, or downloading the Hurupay Business app and scanning a QR code. This solution eliminates paperwork, reduces the bank of charges of 2-7% to a crypto charge of 0.5%, hedges the possibility of inflation and seamlessly enables the 60% unbanked Africans to be banked with just a phone number, internet connection and an email address. Last year, to actualize their plans and dreams, Hurupay received $2,000 from the Ashesi D:Lab to build his app.
Hurupay website
Philip Mburu alongside his other cofounders, James Mugambi and Allan Okoth strive to progress with their project by inculcating the values of transparency and honesty, teamwork, being customer centric, innovative and creative. In the beginning phases of this project, they struggled with getting in and out of crypto, but have now mastered it. With the support and mentorship of the Ashesi D:Lab, they conducted ethnographic research by visiting communities with SMEs and interviewing stakeholders.They went ahead to develop a back-end system for the website and mobile app with the help of mentor, Philip Coleman and after many months of continuous iterations, Hurupay has been awarded a grant of $21k by Prezenti, a grant awarding organization, to further develop Hurupay.