The Reference
The Confidently Crypto Glossary.
Every term of art from the show — from Momo to market structure — defined in plain English. New terms are added after each episode, and terms Dr. Evans uses on this week's episode are highlighted on the home page.
This Week's Terms From "From Momo to Crypto — Live from DASA 2026" · September 22, 2026
- Momo New
- Shorthand for mobile money — phone-based payments run by telecom companies on closed-loop ledgers. Ghana's Momo economy processed GH¢4.54 trillion in 2025 across 80.5 million registered accounts.
- Participation Gap New
- The gap Dr. Evans flags between registered mobile money accounts and active ones: only about one in three Ghanaian accounts is used in a given month. Registration is not usage — and plans built on registration numbers are roughly three times too optimistic.
- PAPSS New
- The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System — a cross-border payment network connecting 28 countries and 190+ banks, so a payment from Lagos to Accra settles without routing through New York.
- Dollarization Dilemma New
- The tension when citizens rationally move savings into digital dollars to protect them — and central banks rationally defend monetary sovereignty, because every cedi that becomes a digital dollar weakens the local currency and the tax base. Both sides are rational; that's what makes it hard.
- Managed Digital Sovereignty New
- Dr. Evans's term for the third path between full adoption and resistance: engaging digital assets deliberately, on terms that serve your own economy, currency, and people — writing your rules before someone else's defaults write them for you.
- Act 1154 (Ghana's VASP Act) New
- Ghana's Virtual Asset Service Providers Act — the statute that brought virtual asset businesses into supervised licensing, with a 48-hour compliance directive, 17 firms in the regulatory sandbox, and a $15 million joint asset-recovery action with the UK's National Crime Agency.
- DASA New
- Digital Assets Summit Africa — the continental gathering of regulators, founders, and institutions; the 2026 edition in Accra ran under the theme "From Policy to Prosperity," where Dr. Evans delivered her keynote.
Mobile Money & Africa's Digital Economy The rails, the verdict, and the statutes behind Africa's money movement
- Mobile Money (MoMo)
- Phone-based money transfer and payments run by telecom companies on their own closed-loop ledgers — the dominant way millions in Ghana and across Africa already pay for things every day.
- E-Money
- Electronic money — value stored digitally and backed one-to-one by real bank holdings. Mobile money wallets and stablecoins are both forms of it; the difference is whose ledger the balance lives on.
- Cross-Border Corridor
- A payment route between two countries — like the U.S.–Ghana corridor — where money must move across different banking systems, currencies, and regulators to reach its destination.
- Correspondent Banking Friction
- The slow, expensive chain of intermediary banks that historically stood between a payer in one country and a supplier in another — the problem new payment rails are built to remove.
- AfCFTA
- The African Continental Free Trade Area — a single market of roughly 1.3 billion people, and the reason cross-border payment rails on the continent matter as much as they do.
- Regulatory Sandbox
- A supervised testing environment for licensed virtual asset businesses — Ghana's is already seating its first companies.
- WeWire
- Cross-border payments company co-founded by Eben Ghanney (Sep 8 episode), building the rails that let businesses move money between Africa and the rest of the world without the old correspondent-banking friction.
US Crypto Law & Market Structure Stablecoins, securities, and the rules being written in Washington
- Stablecoin
- Private money that promises to hold its dollar value: a company holds real dollars in reserve, and the token is your receipt you can trade back for those dollars anytime. Digital paper, not government money.
- CBDC
- Central Bank Digital Currency — actual government money in digital form, a direct liability of the central bank. The key distinction: a stablecoin is a private company's promise; a CBDC is the government's own obligation.
- GENIUS Act
- Signed law since July 2025: created the federal framework for payment stablecoins, requiring 1:1 reserve backing and federal oversight.
- CLARITY Act
- The market-structure bill deciding which regulator (SEC or CFTC) oversees which digital assets — the fix for overlapping law without clear lanes.
- Cloture
- The Senate procedure that overcomes a filibuster, requiring 60 votes. A cloture vote on the motion to proceed decides only whether the Senate debates a bill — it passes nothing.
- Bitcoin
- The original cryptocurrency: decentralized, fixed supply of 21 million, no founder in charge — which is why regulators have consistently treated it as a commodity.
- Altcoins
- The other legitimate crypto projects — real teams, real use cases, real governance, from Ethereum on down.
- Shitcoins
- Tokens with no utility and no honest team behind them, existing mostly to enrich their creators. The label isn't about age or size — it's about whether there's anything underneath the hype.