Crypto A.M. shines its spotlight on The Aziza Project
The Aziza Project is not your average crypto venture. This is not a technology play aiming to raise funds to develop an idea, it’s a project laden with tangible business.
The Aziza Project comprises a team with blue-chip backgrounds, the navigation of securities legislation and a $500m asset backing their token, the Aziza Coin.
The Aziza Project tokenises high potential oil and gas businesses in Africa to raise funds to fulfil their considerable potential: for profit and social good. Both are important criteria for the Aziza Project.
The first business in the portfolio is Africa New Energies, a UK registered company with rights to a 22,000 square kilometre oil and gas concession (the size of Wales) in Namibia. With conventional fund-raising routes proving notoriously time consuming and expensive, with layers of intermediaries wanting to take their cut, part of the reason the Aziza Project exists is to give investors greater access to real returns. People who buy Aziza Coins will have an indirect fractional ownership of the assets that the Aziza Project holds. And with tokens listed on exchanges investors will have a degree of liquidity that private company shareholders do not.
Africa New Energies has spent five years exploring their Namibian concession using innovative techniques that have indicated a prospective hydrocarbon resource of 1.6 billion barrels of oil equivalent. Last year, the company received an unsolicited bid of $500m, which the founders rejected owing to social and environmental concerns. Being able to prove the resource on the back of successful drilling will create huge value for investors and have a transformational effect on Namibia.
“Africa New Energies has transferred 20% of its equity to The Aziza Project in exchange for the majority share of the proceeds of our token sale. This qualifies the Aziza Coin as a security token, and sets us apart from most digital tokens,” says Robert Pyke, Aziza Project CEO. Aziza Project’s ICO, technically an STO – a securitised token offering – seeks to raise $60 million to fund a ten well drilling programme to prove the resource. Being a security token brings a degree of scrutiny and regulation that utility tokens are not exposed to. “The legal setup and development of our smart contract have been the most complicated and time-consuming elements of our project. We built the functionality so our contract can cater for different jurisdictional requirements, including US investor lock-in periods.” Pyke added.
The Aziza Project has identified six junior oil and gas companies in Southern Africa on the back of positive news from the region – Tullow Oil, Chariot Oil and Gas and Exxon Mobil are all currently active. Southern Africa is largely under-developed, only dozens of wells have been drilled compared to many thousands in north and west Africa. The Aziza Project believes that Southern Africa is the next great African frontier.
Pyke concludes, “A successful drilling programme would be massive news – a win for token holders, for Africa New Energies and the people of Namibia.”