Vinny Lingham to keynote Bitcoin Africa Conference

Serial entrepreneur and investor Vinny Lingham will be the keynote speaker at Bitcoin Africa Conference which will be taking place in Cape Town, South Africa from 16 to 17 April 2015.

A first of its kind for the country, the conference will focus on educating both individuals and business on what Bitcoin is as well as its different applications and associated trends. Thus, some of the speakers will include Brock Pierce: co-founder of Tether and board member of the Bitcoin Foundation, CEO and co-founder of BitPesa Elizabeth Rossiello, and many more.

Read more: How bitcoin is fixing some of the web’s biggest problems

Lingham is well known for having exited the digital gift carding service called, Gyft, to global payments company First Data back in mid-2014. Gyft was also one of the first well-known ecommerce companies to accept Bitcoin as a payment option after it partnered with the payment gateway, BitPay.

The Gyft co-founder is also known for being one of the judges on Dragon’s Den South Africa as well as having co-founded Clicks2Customers and Yola. He’s also one of the brains behind the Silicon Cape Initiative, which aims to build a high-tech cluster in South Africa.

The event is taking place at a really interesting time for the cryptocurrency. After Bitcoin dropped to record lows at the beginning of this year while exchanges’ vulnerability again deterred investors, many startups managed to enjoy a lot of interest from investors. From East Africa to the US, the likes of BitPesa in Kenya received over US$1-million last month. CoinBase, a global currency-exchange-turning-bank from the States, furthermore raised a massive US$75-million.

Read more: First Data buys out Vinny Lingham’s Gyft in $50m+ deal

Delegates are attending from as far afield as the USA and UK. Several African countries are also represented, such as Botswana, Kenya, Ghana and Zimbabwe. A great deal of interest has been shown by the banking, financial services industry and the retail sector.

With just over a month to go, tickets are selling fast, with limited seats available. For more information on getting tickers, click here.