Stratis to Fund Blockchain Innovation Centre in Uganda

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Stratis has entered a long-term partnership with the charitable Foundation of King Oyo, the current monarch of the Tooro Kingdom located in the South West of Uganda, with a population of approximately one million. King Oyo (Rukirabasaija Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV) is the world’s youngest reigning monarch, crowned at 3 and a half. He is known for his keen interest in technology. A recent partnership with the Uganda Industrial Research Institute saw the creation of the King Oyo Science, Technology, Innovation and Industrialization park.

The Investment Marks the Beginning of Stratis Africa

The partnership sees Stratis fund a new blockchain innovation centre in the kingdom designed to build knowledge and blockchain development skills within the kingdom. Knowledge will be shared by developing a syllabus designed to provide relevant use case examples to spark creativity and innovative thought process around blockchain applicability.

Stratis is a Microsoft-focused blockchain platform built from the ground up utilizing Microsoft programming languages (C#). The syllabus will leverage renowned development tools, such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio. Participants will also be able to lean on a wealth of online knowledge thanks to Stratis’ choice of utilizing one of the world’s most popular programming languages. As part of the partnership, Stratis plans to locate a senior team of business and technical roles at the new innovation centre with the vision to further grow its ecosystem across Africa.

Chris Trew, Founder and CEO, Stratis commented:

“We’re looking forward to developing a syllabus that will be taught at the new innovation center, focused on the use of Stratis blockchain technologies. We view this investment as the beginning of Stratis Africa and plan to deploy a senior team to Uganda. King Oyo is taking a forward-thinking stance on innovation that will bring new economic opportunities to the Tooro Kingdom.”

The partners will also collaborate on new blockchain use cases that can contribute to the more efficient administration of the Tooro Kingdom for the benefit of its population. A particular area of interest lies within agriculture. The Tooro Kingdom is renowned for its rich soils, sunshine and abundant rainfall. Stratis’ management team already envisions the employment of solutions in agriculture and track-and-trace by introducing blockchain technologies to enable new intelligent resource management facilities. This will be achieved through IoT devices interacting with Stratis Blockchain technologies to create an immutable data store, containing data relating to plot usage, weather conditions, product traceability and financial detail.

King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV said of the partnership:

“Blockchain technologies offer new approaches to organizing societies and increasing efficiencies. In the Tooro Kingdom, we see that the immutability of blockchain has significant potential, for example, for use cases within agriculture, logistics, banking and many more. I’m excited to be working with Stratis to further knowledge and understanding across the kingdom.”

Stratis has seen significant growth in new applications built using its foundational Layer 1 blockchain technologies over recent years as developers embrace the simplicity of developing in the world’s most widely known programming language, C#. Innovation on Stratis is flourishing in areas like blockchain gaming (20 new games in development), DeFi (Opdex decentralized exchange recently launched) and NFTs (Stratisphere feeless NFT platform is now live).

At Stratis our mission is to simplify the adoption of blockchain technology within existing computing environments.

To deliver on this mission we have built a Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform written entirely in C# and based on the Microsoft .NET Core framework. This means more than 10m developers across the world with C# skills can easily apply blockchain within their existing tech stack.

Decentralized and highly secure, the Stratis blockchain offers an ideal platform for deploying decentralized applications incorporating smart contracts. Over $2 Billion in value has been successfully secured on the Stratis public blockchain.

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