Announcing $Afrofuture

A tokenized community exploring Africa’s past and co-creating its future

Since the 1996 death of African photojournalist Mohamed Amin, an inconspicuous back room in Nairobi, Kenya has been locked off from the public, maintained only by two solitary sentries stationed between file cabinets in a windowless, climate controlled vault. Now, after years of frame-by-frame cataloging and the digitization of thousands of hours of raw video footage, the Mohamed Amin Collection is opening its doors to the world for exploration. This archive represents one of the world’s greatest unexplored historical artifacts. This timeless work of art features culture, conflict, political upheaval, wildlife, entertainment, and an unparalleled visual chronicle of the daily life of millions of Africans.

Today Salim, Trupti, Andrew, and Osinachi are excited to announce the launch of $Afrofuture, a mission-driven social currency underpinned by a vault of highly valuable digital African assets. By bringing the Mohamed Amin Collection onto Ethereum through NFTs, we aim to unlock new funding and distribution opportunities for African artists, while catalyzing conversations about Africa’s rich and cultured history. Africa has many talented creatives, yet historically has lacked the infrastructure, capacity, and support network to commercialize its talent and provide them access to global markets. With the foundational digital infrastructure to support the creative industries increasingly being put in place, the time is now to organize efforts in order to put Africa’s creator economy at the forefront of Web3 innovation.

How It Works

Each quarter we will drop 5 images from the Mohamed Amin Collection into the $Afrofuture Vault, providing an underpinning value to the $Afrofuture token. Immediately after each quarter’s drop, everything in the Vault will open for auction for a 48 hour time period. Whenever an image is purchased, 20% of the purchase price will be sent directly to the $Afrofuture treasury with the other 80% sent to the Mohamed Amin Foundation.

Concurrently, each quarter up to 5 African artists will be commissioned to produce NFT artwork within the theme of Afrofuturism. These will be unveiled, sent into the Vault, and auctioned off during the subsequent quarter’s drop. 40% of the purchase price for each art piece will be sent directly to the $Afrofuture treasury with the other 60% sent to the artist.

Through our NFTs and the $Afrofuture social token community, we aim to catalyze dialog about the stories and context behind these amazing historical African artifacts, while using our social token to organize creative efforts towards producing Afrofuturistic style art.

Co-create the Afrofuture with us

• Earn $Afrofuture — Over the next few weeks we’ll be announcing our first community events and the initial ways you can earn $Afrofuture. Over the next 12 months, we will move governance into a DAO structure with $Afrofuture holders taking the lead in proposing and making decisions for the DAO and deciding the treasury management strategy.
• Join the community on Discord — Our Discord server will feature a group chat full of Africa’s leading thinkers, creators, and crypto natives. Here is where we’ll be organizing history focused discussions, led by Salim Amin, discussions on cryptocurrency in Africa, led by key operators from the African tech industry, as well as a place for creatives to share their work, collaborate on projects, and help to co-create the Afrofuture!
• Check out our Metaverse spaces — Club $Afrofuture, located at -70,42 in Decentraland, will serve as both a gallery for NFT drops, as well as an event center with periodic community gatherings.
• Participate in our quarterly auction events — Follow us on Foundation and Twitter to be sure you don’t miss any of our NFT drops.

Optimizing for impact

4% of ETH inflow into the $Afrofuture treasury will be allocated towards achieving two important community-aligned missions.

1. African archivist training fund — 2%

Due to a lack of local talent and education infrastructure, African media companies are forced to fly in professional archivists from abroad in order to properly preserve, document, and extract valuable insights from their archives and historical artifacts. The first impact mission of the $Afrofuture treasury will be the establishment of a fund, managed by the Mohamed Amin Foundation, to train local African archivists with the skills and knowledge base for media companies on the continent to employ them as archivists.

2. African history preservation fund — 2%

Museums across the continent are struggling to properly store and maintain the quality of their historical artifacts. Because of this, many of Africa’s historical artifacts are deteriorating at a rapid pace. With this fund, we will periodically announce grants for museums across the continent to invest in infrastructure and training to better preserve their archives.

Token distribution

The purchasers of the initial 5 NFTs dropped will each receive the first distribution of the $Afrofuture token.

The total token distribution of $Afrofuture will be as follows:

40,000,000 — African creator commissioning program

15,000,000 — $Afrofuture Team

37,000,000 — Community

5,000,000 — Liquidity mining

3,000,000 — Seed Club

If you’re interested in working with the $Afrofuture team, offering feedback or just want to give us a shout, feel free to introduce yourself on Twitter at @afrofutureai, join us on Discord, or comment below!