Taxir Is the MENA Initiative Accelerating Blockchain Adoption in the Region
This web3 initiative is hoping to educate people in the MENA region about how blockchain can solve pressing issues.
Farah Ibrahim, social media manager and content editor
Ammar Hassan, a 30-year-old Syrian living in Beirut, has never had a bank account in his life. This is a common story across the region. MENA is not only underbanked, but also lacks online payment infrastructure, with e-payment solutions like PayPal and Stripe inaccessible across many Arab countries. About 85% of financial transactions in the region are carried out in cash, and young professionals like Hassan are left without viable solutions.
As digitalization spreads across the region, blockchain presents a unique opportunity to tackle the lack of financial solutions head-on in countries like Lebanon. “Blockchain technology provides the infrastructure and tools to build alternative and parallel economies. This could enable grassroots movements in the MENA region to effectively organize themselves around for-profit and non-profit initiatives and projects, where they can fill in the gaps caused by poor governance, or even be used as a form of nonviolent protest,” Hassan told SGC. Out of this need, Taxir, a Lebanon-based web3 initiative was born.
Hassan, along with Beirut-born Ali Karake and Nour Ezzeldine, launched a three-armed project with the goal of ensuring MENA residents don't miss out on the potential of blockchain technology. They bridge the language barrier, tackle data poverty, and navigate the lack of regulation to pave the way for wider blockchain adoption in the region.
Their origin story is one of work culture in the past few years. The Great Resignation had a crucial role to play in the inception of Taxir, as three of their earliest members left their decade-long careers in banking, media and culture in search of a more exciting field, but also a fairer one. This is why they decided to structure Taxir as a Worker Cooperative first, and a DAO second. This unique model attracted a like-minded group of professionals, and during 2022 alone they grew from three to eight members.
Taxir’s mission
They divided their mission into three projects: Taxir, Tajseer, and Tafkir. Taxir, a for-profit communication agency, offers media consultancy and services to blockchain projects operating in or expanding to the MENA region. Taxir hopes to hammer on the importance of Cross-Cultural Scaling, which involves adapting products not only to different sizes of operation but also to different market cultures. Taxir also provides their non-profit projects with an inhouse source of income to give them financial stability and flexibility.
Tajseer, is a professional directory of Arab service providers interested in working with or for the blockchain industry. It indexes individuals, businesses and institutions, provides them with blockchain training tailored to their needs, and delegates them over to their team at Tafkir and Taxir.
The last branch is Tafkir, a non-profit research and public goods center. Tafkir aims to research the 'high potential/low adoption' paradox of blockchain technology in MENA and identify the adoption barriers. After research, it develops projects to mitigate these barriers, such as AbjaDAO, which was launched to address one of the identified issues.
Breaking down the language barrier
AbjaDAO is an alliance working on mitigating one of the biggest obstacles to blockchain adoption in the region: the language barrier. They are made up of four blockchain and linguistics focused organizations that have joined forces to develop an Arabic glossary for blockchain terminology.
While Arabic is a language spoken by 400 million people around the world, it’s plagued with a number of issues, such as poor institutional support, lack of a historical dictionary for Arabic, and dialect dispersion. Dialects in the Arab world are largely different. Moroccan and Saudi Arabic have fewer words in common than Italian and Portuguese, and yet they are treated as different dialects and not separate languages.
To tackle this mission, Taxir joined an alliance capable of undertaking this task. Their second member is ZeFi, a 40-people strong blockchain-focused Arab organization based in Berlin that was already in the process of developing their own glossary, but merged their project together with the other three members. The third member is Arabs in Blockchain, which was founded by Egypt-based Eman Hewary, an Ethereum fellow and lead translator of Ethereum’s Arabic website, who accumulated immense experience working on some of the most fundamental blockchain projects in MENA. Lastly, they have DocStream, a collective of linguists, translators and editors who played a crucial role in developing translation methodology and moderating translation workshops.
AbjaDAO is now weeks away from releasing their first edition, which will be followed by a propagation campaign that will try and encourage wide adoption of the glossary in an effort to reduce translation dispersion, or many translations of the same term.
The language barrier is not the only obstacle to blockchain adoption in the MENA region. Taxir believes that the lack of digitalization is also a major issue. “Most MENA residents still haven’t made the transition from cash to digital money. Cryptocurrencies are an advanced form of digital money, and it makes sense that people are hesitant to make this adventurous leap from cash to crypto,” Hassan told us.
Stigma in the MENA region
Part of the reason for this is that cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology in MENA has been plagued by ill-informed trading and NFT flipping, which stigmatized blockchain in the region and perpetuated a ‘get rich quick scheme’ reputation.
“We strongly believe in the importance of education and literacy building. We need to associate blockchain and crypto with their intended use cases, and make sure people have a clear idea on the technology they are forming their opinions about. For example, whenever we mention crypto payment to someone in MENA, we have to explain stablecoins as well, and how getting paid in crypto is not necessarily an investment; a simple fact that most of the people we interact with are not aware of,” Hassan added.
Internet culture
Their work thus far has also largely revolved around optimizing internet culture in the region to help pave the way for greater understanding of blockchain. They have collaborated with organizations such as MozillaFest and Decentraland to produce virtual exhibitions and educational content. In October 2022, Decentraland launched a community outreach program in the MENA region with Taxir, which included publishing media and educational content in Arabic and launching an Arabic channel on their Discord.
In October they held a collaboration between music NFT platforms Catalog, and Simsara Music, to release the first batch of NFTs produced by four Arab musicians who took their first step into web3.
“Today, the internet is largely user-generated. Yet, those users are being exploited, not compensated, for their content, data and labor. Blockchain as a movement is a call to build an internet economy that is similar to the internet itself, in being collective, collaborative and decentralized.”
The future of their work
As for what plans lie ahead, Taxir is in the process of catalyzing two projects in Tafkir. The first is a multi-year legal research workshop that will produce research papers on topics such as consumer and investor protection, taxation, DAO incorporation, VASPs and reporting duties, and litigation. Once those papers are published, they will present their findings to MENA governments, policy makers, and law students.
The second project is a data aggregation and journalism center that will compile blockchain and cryptocurrency data in MENA, produce reports and studies, and offer subscription-based access to the database for researchers and industry actors.
These projects aim to establish Tafkir as a grassroots-orientated think tank that promotes education and literacy building, and associates blockchain and crypto with their intended use cases in the MENA region.