Recently, there has been a surge of interest in cold plunges. Here are the benefits and latest research on their effectiveness.



By Peter Engelbrecht



You begin the descent.



As your feet and legs go into a rapid shiver, all you can think about is the wave of freezing cold climbing up your stomach.



Finally you are up to your neck in ice. We are of course talking about cold plunges or Ice Baths.



Ice baths have been used for decades by athletes, particularly those involved in endurance sports, as a way to promote recovery and reduce muscle soreness after intense exercise. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in ice baths, not just among elite athletes, but among fitness enthusiasts and the general population as well. Let’s explore the benefits of ice baths and look at the latest research on their effectiveness.



What are Ice baths?



Ice baths, also known as cold water immersion, involve submerging the body in cold water for a set amount of time. The water temperature is typically around 50°F (10°C) or lower, and the duration of the bath can range from a few minutes to 20 minutes or more. Some people also add ice to the water to make it even colder.



Reduces Inflammation



One of the main benefits of ice baths is their ability to reduce inflammation. During intense exercise, the body produces a lot of waste products, including lactic acid, which can build up in the muscles and cause soreness. Cold water immersion helps to constrict blood vessels and reduce blood flow to the affected area, which can help to reduce inflammation and promote healing.



Speeds Up Recovery



Ice baths can also help to speed up recovery after exercise. When you immerse your body in cold water, your blood vessels constrict, which helps to flush out metabolic waste products and reduce inflammation. This, in turn, helps to promote healing and reduce muscle soreness, allowing you to recover more quickly from your workouts.



Enhances Immune Function



Research has also shown that cold water immersion can enhance the immune function. Exposure to cold water can stimulate the production of white blood cells, which are responsible for fighting off infections and diseases. This means that regular ice baths could help to boost your immune system and make you less susceptible to illness.



Improves Mood



In addition to its physical benefits, cold water immersion can also have a positive effect on your mood. When you immerse your body in cold water, your body releases endorphins, which are natural mood enhancers. This can help to reduce stress and improve your overall sense of wellbeing.



Latest Research



While the benefits of ice baths have been known for some time, there is still ongoing research into their effectiveness. Some of the latest research has been done by Andrew D. Huberman, an American neuroscientist and tenured associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, who has made contributions to the fields of brain development, brain plasticity, neural regeneration and repair.



During an interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan, Huberman recalls a study done by the European Journal of Physiology which was the first study of its kind that probed the effects of cold plunges and the neurochemical impacts on the brain. Huberman states: “When you go into the cold for one to two minutes and it is shockingly cold where you have to catch your breath and stabilize your mind, that invokes a dopamine, epinephrine and nor-epinephrine release.”



These three neurotransmitters collectively are referred to as catecholamines. There is a huge spike and dopamine levels that are present in the brain after cold exposure remain for up to four hours later.



Ice Baths vs. Active Recovery



A recent study compared the effects of ice baths to those of active recovery (light exercise) on muscle soreness and recovery in elite athletes. The study found that while both ice baths and active recovery were effective at reducing muscle soreness, active recovery was more effective at promoting recovery and reducing inflammation.



Frequency of Ice Baths



Another study looked at the frequency of ice baths and its effect on recovery in athletes. The study found that while daily ice baths did help to reduce muscle soreness and improve recovery, there was no significant difference between daily ice baths and ice baths taken every other day.



Timing of Ice Baths



Timing may also be an important factor when it comes to the effectiveness of ice baths. A study published in the Journal of Physiology found that taking an ice bath immediately after exercise was less effective at reducing inflammation and promoting recovery than waiting a few hours to take an ice bath.



Duration of Ice Baths



Finally, the duration of the ice bath may also play a role in its effectiveness. A study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine &amp; Science in Sports found that longer and warmer ice baths (20 minutes) were more effective at reducing muscle soreness and promoting recovery than shorter and colder ice baths (two minutes).

Woman enjoying cold baths in a ice hole, Lapland

Cool Fad: Why Ice Baths Are Getting Popular

<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-topline">TOPLINE</h2>



Google&nbsp;<a href="https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-search/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">announced</a>&nbsp;Wednesday that it’s giving its signature product, the search engine, an AI makeover—potentially transforming the way users view search results after Microsoft announced a similar plan.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-facts">KEY FACTS</h2>



Google results with AI will be available to select people in the U.S. who apply for a waitlist to be part of Search Lab, where they’ll be able to test out how the product is working and give Google feedback, the company announced Wednesday at its annual developer conference, Google I/O.



Search with AI will be labeled as an experiment for users—though it won’t be available for at least a few weeks—and Google said the AI-generated information will be more factual than conversational, unlike other AI tools like ChatGPT, AP&nbsp;<a href="https://apnews.com/article/google-artificial-intelligence-search-engine-chatgpt-microsoft-fd0538018df958388991772ced6e693d?utm_source=homepage&amp;utm_medium=TopNews&amp;utm_campaign=position_06" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>; however, Google also announced Wednesday that&nbsp;<a href="https://bard.google.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bard</a>, its chatbot-like experiment, is now widely available for people to try.



PROMOTED



Combining AI with Google Search will let users type a question into the search bar and receive one main result that synthesizes the information gathered—but there will still be normal search links provided below the generated answer.



The company did not provide a timeline for when AI-based results will roll out to the general public.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-contra">CONTRA</h2>



The service will not be able to respond to certain questions about health and finance matters. People searching for those will continue to be directed to normal search results for their answers.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-background">KEY BACKGROUND</h2>



The AI-based updates and changes to Google products come as Microsoft, one of its main competitors, is also working to incorporate AI into its search engine, Bing, and as ChatGPT continues to grow in popularity. Google has maintained its status as the go-to search engine for most of the world for at least two decades, but the stock of Google’s parent company, Alphabet,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/tech/google-ai-search-engine-stock-drop/index.html#:~:text=Shares%20of%20Google%2Dparent%20Alphabet,powered%20rivals%2C%20including%20Microsoft's%20Bing." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">dropped</a>&nbsp;significantly when Bing incorporated AI. The share price has since recovered—even as rumors swirl of Samsung dropping Google, according to the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/technology/google-search-engine-ai.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">New York Times</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/tech/google-ai-search-engine-stock-drop/index.html#:~:text=Shares%20of%20Google%2Dparent%20Alphabet,powered%20rivals%2C%20including%20Microsoft's%20Bing." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">CNN</a>. Microsoft also has an early advantage in the AI chatbot race, investing billions of dollars into ChatGPT creator OpenAI and unveiling plans to integrate ChatGPT technology into its suite of products.



Forbes Daily: Get our best stories, exclusive reporting and essential analysis of the day’s news in your inbox every weekday.Sign Up



You may opt out any time. By signing up for this newsletter, you agree to the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-crucial-quote">CRUCIAL QUOTE</h2>



“We are at an exciting inflection point,” said Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. at the conference. “We are reimagining all our products, including search.”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-tangent">TANGENT</h2>



AI search tools weren’t the only update from Google on Wednesday, as the company announced plans to infuse more AI technology into its products. Soon, Gmail will have a “Help Me Write” option that people can use to write long responses to emails in seconds, and the company announced “Magic Editor,” a tool for Google Photos that will automatically edit pictures.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-big-number">BIG NUMBER</h2>



5%. That’s how much Alphabet’s shares increased after the series of Google and AI announcements, rising to $112.65. The increase brough Alphabet to its highest level since Bing remodeled its search engine using AI in February, AP&nbsp;<a href="https://apnews.com/article/google-artificial-intelligence-search-engine-chatgpt-microsoft-fd0538018df958388991772ced6e693d?utm_source=homepage&amp;utm_medium=TopNews&amp;utm_campaign=position_06" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-further-reading">FURTHER READING</h2>



<a href="https://apnews.com/article/google-artificial-intelligence-search-engine-chatgpt-microsoft-fd0538018df958388991772ced6e693d?utm_source=homepage&amp;utm_medium=TopNews&amp;utm_campaign=position_06" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Google is giving its dominant search engine an artificial-intelligence makeover</a>&nbsp;(AP)



<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/10/google-search-ai-io-2023/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">AI is changing Google search: What the IO announcement means for you</a>&nbsp;(Washington Post)



<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/10/tech/ai-search-google-io/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The most popular search engine in the world is about to look different</a> (CNN)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/"></a>By Molly Bohannon, Forbes Staff

In this photo illustration, a woman holds a smartphone with

Google Adding AI To Search Engine For Some Users—Closing In On Microsoft’s AI Push

Despite the public roasting Levi’s took for flirting with AI, smaller clothing sellers who model their own products online maintain a growing interest in replacing themselves with the computer-generated kind.



On Tracy Porter’s&nbsp;clothing site, it’s all Tracy Porter.



Thin, blonde and 5-foot-10, the 55-year-old entrepreneur poses in each and every one of her designs. Her husband uses his iPhone to snap pictures, which they often take on the wildflower-strewn bluffs overlooking the beach 15 minutes from their home in California’s Santa Ynez Valley, before uploading them to their e-commerce site, The Porter Collective. There, you can see Porter in her striped midi dress, in her multicolor crocheted cardigan and in her black-and-white rattan visor.



Porter said she’s been searching for ways to replace herself as a model, not only to lighten the load but to bring some diversity to the site. Humans, however, are prohibitively expensive. So she’s been testing a new artificial-intelligence service from Israeli startup&nbsp;<a href="https://botika.io/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Botika</a>. She said the images look so realistic that when she showed her sons, they told her she was out of a job.



“I’m actually excited about that. I don’t want to be our model anymore,” Porter said with a laugh.



After Levi’s endured a scorching backlash in March for&nbsp;<a href="https://www.levistrauss.com/2023/03/22/lsco-partners-with-lalaland-ai/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">its plan</a>&nbsp;to bring more diversity to the site with AI-generated models – critics flayed the company, which had 2022 sales of $6.2 billion, for not simply hiring more humans – it would be no surprise if big clothing retailers have gotten skittish about using, or admitting they use, nonhuman models. That same public disapproval hasn’t yet extended to the many mom-and-pop clothing shops, whose budgets, like Tracy Porter’s, would collapse under the costs of professional hair, makeup and photography – even without inflation, rising borrowing costs and a recession that feels as if it’s been looming forever.



Services like Botika let brands easily display their clothing on various (computer-generated) fashion models. However, they are still working to add more ages, body shapes and ethnicities.BOTIKA



“In the current economy, customers are mostly looking to optimize costs,” said Eran Dagan, cofounder and CEO of Botika, which caters to small businesses and plans to start subscriptions for its AI model service at just $15 a month. It’s preparing to launch on Shopify and has a waiting list of over 1,000 customers. Dagan said Botika has gotten interest from sellers on resale platforms like Poshmark and Depop, where entrepreneurs typically photograph clothing on themselves and crop out their heads.



Another company in the space,&nbsp;<a href="https://lalaland.ai/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lalaland</a>&nbsp;— which is still set to power Levi’s attempt to go AI — said its recent growth has been driven mainly by small and medium-sized businesses. While the company declined to disclose revenue figures, cofounder and CEO Michael Musandu said business has picked up significantly over the last eight months and sales have grown by eight- or nine-fold.



“We’re helping emerging brands that are just starting out and have zero budgets, or low budgets, to actually plan photoshoots,” said Musandu. “We really help level the playing field by representing the underdog.”



The fact remains that for everyone, photoshoots are pricey, and while shoppers are increasingly demanding that clothes be shown on a variety of models, no brand has an unlimited budget to do that. Tracy Porter used to hire outside photographers, models and hair and makeup stylists to shoot her products, but it would cost $5,500 every time she brought them out. If she outsourced photography for her multimillion-dollar business today, she estimates it would set her back $500,000 a year. “It’s just too much money,” she said.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
“What I’d like to do is take an image and see it on different sizes. Small, medium and large. But I don’t want to have to hire all the people to do that.”Tracy Porter, small business owner
</blockquote>



Which is how Porter landed on modeling the clothes herself. However, that makes it difficult for shoppers with a different body shape or ethnicity to get a sense for how her products would look on them. “What I’d like to do is take an image and see it on different sizes. Small, medium and large. But I don’t want to have to hire all the people to do that,” said Porter. “Because there will be no profit left in our company and we’ll have to close.”



Another small business owner, Jacob Flores, is looking forward to more easily finding models that reflect his customer base. The 50-year-old former web designer from San Antonio, whose online store Blissfully Brand sells skintight dresses, skater skirts and bell bottoms in colorful prints inspired by fashion from the 1960s and 1970s, has a lot of customers in their 40s and 50s. But many models for hire tend to be much younger.



Flores recently started using Lalaland, where he can hand-select digital models from a library, dress them in his products and upload the images to his site without leaving the house. For $300 a month, he gets 50 images, enabling him to display more of his clothing on models much faster. He was previously limited to doing photoshoots four times a year, where he would pay $900 to get as many shots of a few models in 20 outfits as he could in two hours.



Now he plans to do photoshoots just once or twice a year on location so he can show his clothing at the beach or on a city street. He also sees AI being helpful with social media ads, allowing him to target certain audiences with tailored images.



Richard Evans, founder of wellness startup Juro Miru, also opted to include some shots on AI models to launch his new e-commerce site, in addition to images of clothing laid on a flat surface.



Startup Juro Miru displays some of its products on AI models.SCREENSHOT OF JURO MIRU WEBSITE



As for shoppers, it can be impossible for them to tell whether they’re looking at a real or fake model. There are no clear rules for disclosure, although companies are beginning to think about it. TikTok is reportedly working on a tool that will give creators a way to say whether they’ve used generative AI.



“When you’re presenting an image that could easily be mistaken for an actual person, I think you should disclose that it’s a computer-generated image,” said David Danks, a professor at the University of California, San Diego whose research explores the ethical issues around artificial intelligence.



Porter is wrestling with this question, among others. “How would you even know? Do we have to say? Are we supposed to say? There are a lot of questions,” she said. Her friends seem afraid of AI and have told her they think it will put models out of work. “It’s a constant dinner table conversation for us.”



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/"></a>By Lauren Debter, Forbes Staff

Pacific Islander woman wearing artificial technology mask

Clothing Entrepreneurs Can’t Wait To Fire Themselves As Models And Hire The AI Kind Instead

Very rarely do we receive 30 Under 30 nominations from Lesotho, and even more rarely, finalists from the small landlocked southern African country.



Monaheng is passionate about the energy space and doles out numbers easily.



According to an African Development Bank report, “over 640 million Africans have no access to energy, corresponding to an electricity access rate for African countries at just over 40%, the lowest in the world”.



In West Africa and Central Africa, the situation is dire as only three countries are on track to give every one of their people access to electricity by 2030, reports the World Bank.



“At this slow pace, 263 million people in the region will be left without electricity in ten years,” the report highlights.



Monaheng is trying to ensure that people know about these staggering numbers through Khantša Energy, which tackles the issues of energy access in Lesotho.



He also wants to do so for Africa.



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<iframe loading="lazy" title="#FORBESAFRICA30Under30 Class of 2023: Meet COVER STAR Koaile Monaheng" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bh0LdCSH464?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div></figure>



“I found it very interesting to say ‘how can we use adaptation from a subordinate level to combat some of these issues’ and these are also colonial powers. Because fundamentally what we are speaking about is how do we view Africa and as Africans how can we make a difference in this sector.”



The Lesotho-based Khantša Energy provides mobile solar power to rural communities in Lesotho and has been operating in the districts of Roma, Thaba-Tseka, Qacha and Mokhotlong since 2018.



“Our work was born out of connecting with the villagers and hearing about their everyday stories regarding their dire need for electrification,” Monaheng says.



Khantša spent its initial investment of about $8,000 on two years of research and development, learning about the communities in his country whilst also traveling the world to find appropriate solutions that were affordable and accessible in the “pursuit of equality, dignity, and equal opportunity to achieve a better life for all Basotho”.



“We imagined what the realties on the ground look like, having to structure entire days and orientate activities on the availability of light&#8230; Khantša which means ‘light up’ was a very symbolic name, as we looked to tackle the issue of energy access in Lesotho.”

instagram daily (21)

#FORBESAFRICA30Under30: Meet COVER STAR Koaile Monaheng: ‘How Do We View Africa and as Africans How Can We Make a Difference in This Sector’

The world’s most valuable startup does more than any other investment to put VCs on the Forbes Midas List, including its No. 1. But tens of billions in paper profits remain blocked by regulatory standoff without resolution in sight.



It’s the biggest venture capital profit haul that no one wants to talk about.



ByteDance – the Chinese parent company of social media app TikTok – is the world’s most valuable startup. Even at a valuation of $220 billion, down from a peak of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-02/china-specter-jolts-bytedance-s-backers-to-try-trimming-stakes?leadSource=uverify%20wall" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">$500 billion</a>&nbsp;in the secondary market in 2021, it’s not even close. (SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, slots in second at $140 billion.)



For its investors, some of whom backed the company when it was still valued in the millions, an eventual ByteDance public offering would mean billions, and even tens of billions of dollars, in profits, instantly vaulting their investments into the ranks of the top VC bets of all time. The company already does more to put investors on the Midas List of top venture capitalists than any other, even though the list prioritizes exits over unrealized returns in the rankings.



And in a rarity for venture capital, ByteDance’s investors are currently keeping very, very quiet with such a historic outcome still glimmering just out of reach. Forbes reached out to every 2023 Midas List member invested in ByteDance, including new list No. 1 Neil Shen of Sequoia China, a ByteDance board director, and No. 71 Anton Levy of General Atlantic, whose firm also holds a board seat. None agreed to speak on the record about the investment or the company’s prospects.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/aa-1024x436.png" alt="" class="wp-image-58176" width="330" height="140" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/aa-1024x436.png 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/aa-300x128.png 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/aa-768x327.png 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/aa-1536x653.png 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/aa.png 1561w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 330px) 100vw, 330px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">(L-R) Adeyemi Ajao, Lauren Kolodny, and Steve Jang. CODY PICKENS FOR FORBES</figcaption></figure></div>


<a href="https://www.forbes.com/lists/midas/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Midas List 2023</a>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



The reason, Forbes heard in several conversations with investors who asked to remain anonymous, as well as secondary market experts and analysts, is simple: TikTok. The social media app is hugely popular in the U.S., with 150 million users, including five million businesses, but outsized in controversy, too. In March, Forbes reported that the FBI and Department of Justice<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/03/16/fbi-doj-investigating-bytedance-tiktok-surveillance-journalists/?sh=3c0efb77a6fc"> were investigating</a> ByteDance’s use of the TikTok app to surveil American journalists, including Forbes reporters. Other features, from a “heating” button that can<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/?sh=184f212e6bfd"> make posts go viral</a>, a library of “sensitive words” ByteDance<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2023/05/01/tiktok-bytedance-suppression-tool-trump-china-uyghurs/?sh=17df0706434c"> tracks on its apps</a>, to user data<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2023/03/21/tiktok-india-ban-bytedance-data-access/?sh=6ef55be62eca"> still accessible</a> in China years after its deletion, have helped make TikTok a political hot potato.



Several years after federal courts blocked the Trump administration from banning TikTok, some lawmakers and the Biden White House have resumed that call, with the government indicating that if ByteDance does not sell TikTok, the app will be banned. That uncertainty – and the looming role of the Chinese government, which has indicated that a sale is a non-starter – means that for TikTok’s venture capital investors, it’s best not to poke the bear. While some investors have unloaded smaller stakes and may continue to do so,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;has learned, Midas-making, billion-dollar-plus positions remain idling on the runway. And the secondary market – where ByteDance’s reduced $220 billion price tag has largely held up in recent weeks even as TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew took a beating in a heated Congressional hearing – has ground mostly to a halt.



Board seat holders Sequoia and General Atlantic declined to comment. ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.



“With rising China-U.S. tensions, do ByteDance shares become an issue?” mused one ByteDance investor who asked not to be named. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”



Several years after federal courts blocked the Trump administration from banning TikTok, some lawmakers and the Biden White House have resumed that call, with the government indicating that if ByteDance does not sell TikTok, the app will be banned. That uncertainty – and the looming role of the Chinese government, which has indicated that a sale is a non-starter – means that for TikTok’s venture capital investors, it’s best not to poke the bear. While some investors have unloaded smaller stakes and may continue to do so,&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;has learned, Midas-making, billion-dollar-plus positions remain idling on the runway. And the secondary market – where ByteDance’s reduced $220 billion price tag has largely held up in recent weeks even as TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew took a beating in a heated Congressional hearing – has ground mostly to a halt.



Board seat holders Sequoia and General Atlantic declined to comment. ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.



“With rising China-U.S. tensions, do ByteDance shares become an issue?” mused one ByteDance investor who asked not to be named. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-from-early-bets-to-billions">From early bets to billions</h2>



If it weren’t for the politics, another ByteDance investor recently told Forbes, investors would be happy to talk about a “monster” business primed for the public markets. The company took in about $80 billion in revenue and $25 billion in gross operating profit, numbers separately reported by<a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/revenue-at-tiktok-owner-bytedance-rose-more-than-30-in-2022-topped-80-billion?rc=viwsit" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> The Information</a> and<a href="https://www.economist.com/business/2023/04/13/bytedance-tiktoks-chinese-parent-reports-a-record-profit" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> The Economist</a> in recent weeks and confirmed to Forbes by two sources. That would put it at roughly the same scale as Tencent, the public Chinese tech holding company that recently carried a market cap of about $470 billion. And it means that were ByteDance to go public, it would likely supplant Alibaba’s public offering, which raised $25 billion at a market cap of $231 billion in 2014, as the largest tech IPO ever.


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/GettyImages-1244812372.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-58177" width="490" height="327" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/GettyImages-1244812372.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/GettyImages-1244812372-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/GettyImages-1244812372-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 490px) 100vw, 490px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Neil Shen. Photographer: Bryan van der Beek/Bloomberg via Getty Images</figcaption></figure></div>


When Shen first invested in ByteDance’s 2014 Series C funding round, his firm Sequoia China, the China-based fund manager for the global Sequoia brand, amassed a position of 10% of the company at a $465 million valuation. Shen could’ve gotten in for even cheaper a year before at a $60 million price tag,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-sequoias-neil-shen-built-a-china-powerhouse?rc=viwsit" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">but balked</a>. He’s since put more money into the company in most subsequent funding rounds, excluding one led by SoftBank in 2018.



Sequoia’s global growth funds also invested later into ByteDance; the firm purchased additional shares through secondary sales in 2020. Add it all up, and today Sequoia holds just over 10% of ByteDance still, per a source with knowledge – a position valued on paper at more than $22 billion. Shen and Sequoia declined to comment.



Another firm, Susquehanna International Group, reportedly holds an even bigger stake. SIG first backed ByteDance in 2012, and invested alongside Midas List No. 54 Yi Cao of Source Code Capital in two subsequent rounds before Shen. SIG holds about 15% of ByteDance,<a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-tiktok-investors-with-the-most-to-lose-from-a-u-s-ban?rc=viwsit" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> per the report</a>. SIG isn’t considered for the Midas List because it’s not strictly a venture firm. It didn’t respond to a request for comment.



Among VCs, other Midas List investors with ByteDance stakes include No. 10 Hans Tung of GGV Capital, No. 20 Scott Shleifer of Tiger Global, No. 37 Marc Stad of Dragoneer Investment Group and No. 71 Anton Levy of General Atlantic.



Several of those firms got into ByteDance indirectly through Musical.ly, a lip-syncing app acquired by ByteDance in 2017. Qiming Venture Partners, whose former partner JP Gan made the 2022 Midas List, sold its position in 2019 at a $95 billion valuation, according to data from startup tracker PitchBook, pocketing $113 million. GGV, another Musical.ly backer, sold much of its stake along the way, according to a source. Qiming and GGV didn’t respond to requests for comment. (The U.S. government began investigating the sale in 2019; in 2020, President Donald Trump declared the sale invalid by executive order, but the order was overturned in court.)



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<iframe loading="lazy" title="The World’s Top Venture Capital Investors Of 2023 | Forbes" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bqfQfjUeMZ4?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div></figure>



“People have sold quite a bit, and they’re debating selling more,” said one investor with knowledge of the thinking inside several ByteDance-holding firms. Firms with the largest stakes, or recent ones, including SIG, Sequoia, General Atlantic and Coatue, which invested in 2021, have mostly stood pat, according to three sources; Sequoia, in particular, hasn’t ever sold a single ByteDance share. “For the major shareholders, it would be hard for them to sell,” added one of the sources. All of the firms declined to comment.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">ByteDance shares feel the chill</h2>



ByteDance shareholders&nbsp;who do look to sell face a secondary market also spooked by Washington’s saber-rattling. Some deals are happening – SIG and SoftBank reportedly sold a $100 million-plus block of shares in March, per PitchBook – but not at the billion-dollar scale that would move the needle for ByteDance’s larger shareholders.



One point of debate is ByteDance’s fair price. Mutual funds AIG, Fidelity, BlackRock and T. Rowe Price still mark the company at share prices that imply a valuation range of $260 billion to $320 billion. Notice, a data provider that tracks bids and offers for secondary shares, estimates a real-time price of about $180 billion, similar to ByteDance’s December 2020 funding round. Notice shows a number of open buy and sell orders for ByteDance, with an order book totaling more than $3 billion in potential trade interest. But Notice has no record of any of those bids leading to trades, unusual for a big company with such interest, said Chuck Taylor, a Notice senior vice president. “It’s safe to say that many of the older indications of interest are not active,” he added.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
“Relative to other tech companies, it seems to be trading pretty cheaply, but there are these dark clouds.”
</blockquote>



Glen Anderson, a broker-dealer of ByteDance shares at Rainmaker Securities, said that investors continue to express interest in ByteDance at a $220 billion to $225 billion market cap price range, while sellers express a willingness to unload at a $235 billion to $240 billion range. “Pretty much all” of those bids and offers are in the ballpark of $50 million to $100 million positions, Anderson said. But the sellers are typically bundling a bunch of smaller stakes together, he added, not offering shares from one shareholder on ByteDance’s cap table.



“We’ve been surprised that, with all the noise in Washington, that marketplace hasn’t moved much in price,” Anderson said. Still, he pointed out that these numbers are half the value of 2021 transactions that implied a $400 billion-plus market cap, with the drop already factoring in regulatory uncertainty of a potential TikTok ban. ByteDance holders would hope to avoid the fate of investors in Juul, Anderson noted, the e-cigarette company that was ultimately whacked by regulators and saw its valuation written down 98% by acquirer Altria.



“If there were no regulatory risks for ByteDance, you would see a rally,” Anderson added. “Relative to other tech companies, it seems to be trading pretty cheaply, but there are these dark clouds.”



For Midas ByteDance backers, a brisk secondary market wouldn’t do more than alleviate pressure from potential limited partners looking for the funds they backed to return some cash. The big outcome remains an IPO, with or without the sale of TikTok. One ByteDance investor argued the ideal outcome would be for U.S. politicians to, having made noise on the issue and earned talking points, quietly move on from a potential ban. Then, ByteDance could consider a dual listing in the U.S. and Hong Kong, for maximum shareholder profits.



Failing that, the next best option for investors would be a sale of TikTok’s global business, opening the way for them to hold stakes in ByteDance and TikTok as separate entities — which could mean separate domestic IPOs. “Quite a few elements” of Congress would be sympathetic to a divestiture if it was done in the right way to address various national security concerns, said Jacob Helberg, an investor author who was appointed the commissioner of the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2022. (He added he’s skeptical of it doing so.)



Such a sale would have to clear China’s own laws around the export of technologies, Helberg said. One ByteDance investor agreed such a sale appeared unlikely at present for that reason. “I think it would be best for them to sell, but the Chinese government isn’t allowing them to do that,” the source said. “TikTok has access to models and algorithms they wouldn’t want shared.”



If no deal or truce can be brokered, investors would face a worse scenario: TikTok banned in the U.S. and other countries, and ByteDance’s business entrenched around China. Even then, regulatory clarity could set a path for a public offering in China, another path to an exit. “A ban would likely catalyze going public in Hong Kong in our opinion,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in an email.



That speaks to the real worst outcome for investors: no outcome at all. So long as TikTok remains in regulatory limbo, so do the exit scenarios for VCs. Their paper billions are enough to help with Midas status. But they can’t be banked yet.



“The investors I know are more nervous not about whether their investments will be liquid, but whether they’ll be able to repatriate those funds back to the U.S.,” said Helberg. “In the event of a geopolitical standoff over Taiwan, for example, you’d have to be completely delusional to assume that you’re going to be able to repatriate large amounts of funds in either direction. Capital flows would lock down.”



That’s why, despite ByteDance’s already outsized role in their portfolios, one investor laughed when asked why their peers wouldn’t talk about their investment on record. “That would be a great way to raise your hand for attention from the Chinese government, or a random U.S. lawmaker,” they said. “If not for the politics, we’d be shouting this deal from the rooftops.”



By Alex Konrad, Forbes Staff

In this photo illustration, a ByteDance logo is seen on a

For Top VCs, ByteDance’s Historic Windfall Remains A $220 Billion Mirage

That South Africa has just a single player featuring in Europe’s top five leagues is a telling indictment of the country’s football, which has seemingly been left behind by the rest of the world.



By Nick Said



England, Germany and France had seen a steady stream of South Africans since readmission to international football in 1992, Spain and Italy perhaps less so, but now that flow has dried up to almost nothing. 



Strasbourg forward Lebo Mothiba is the only player in any of Europe’s elite leagues, cutting a lone path for Bafana Bafana at a level all players should aspire to. And he is hardly setting the world alight, with a single start in his team’s first 23 Ligue 1 games this season. Bafana Bafana forward Lyle Foster should win promotion to the Premier League with Burnley at the end of this season, which will at least take that number to two… if Mothiba is retained.



The question, therefore, is why this should be. There are multiple issues at play and perhaps the biggest being the fact that the domestic Premier Soccer League (PSL) now pays on a par with many European leagues, while the reported low standard of the national team means foreign scouts are not looking towards South Africa and there is a lack of desire from players at home to put in the hard yards.



While moves directly from South Africa to English, French and German clubs have been relatively common in the past, they are now a rarity with players needing to prove themselves in ‘lesser leagues’ in Belgium, Netherlands or Sweden first. And with no real cash incentive to do so, there is a reluctance to take the risk when the comforts of home are as well paid.



“In the years leading up to 1996, our domestic league was basically semi-professional. Guys had jobs in the day and then went to training in the evening,” former Bafana Bafana coach Eric Tinkler tells FORBES AFRICA.



“If you wanted to make it as a professional, the only chance you had was to go abroad, and that meant you had to work unbelievably hard.



“That hunger, that desire to go overseas… it is now not the same as it was for our generation. I see it. For many players it is just about the money. And they are well paid in the PSL, so where is their motivation to really push themselves to the next level in their careers?” the current Cape Town City coach says.



“Money comes before performance these days. For us, it was the other way around. We really needed to perform to start earning anything decent from the game and to start making a living from it. That drove a lot of us.”



Tinkler played in Italy, England and Portugal, and understands fully well how competing at that much higher level inevitably improves players, which in turn is beneficial for the national team.



Among the side that played in the victorious 1996 Africa Cup of Nations final, all but one either was playing abroad at the time or would go on to do so. Captain Neil Tovey was the odd man out, likely only because readmission to international football came very late in his career and the ship had sailed. 



But he recognizes that the strength of that team was their leadership and football intelligence built by expanding their boundaries and playing abroad.



“When that [1996] side needed to dig deep, we were very intense in our thought and our process,” he says. “Since then, there have been some very good (Bafana) teams with some very good players. But I think, mentally, we were all like captains on the field.



“We all knew our responsibilities and we didn’t have to look to the (coach on the) bench. When things went a little awry on the pitch, we could take care of it and identify problems a lot quicker than teams can now.”



The rise of West Africa as a key source of players from the continent has also hampered South Africans’ chances.



While it is generally accepted that South Africa players are more technically proficient, they largely lack the physical stature of players from Nigeria, Senegal and Ivory Coast… and that real burning desire to test themselves in Europe. For players from those countries, it is everything to them.



For South Africans, it seems more of a ‘nice to have’. All the while the national team suffers as those countries rise.



“We are definitely not where we should be… or could be,” Tinkler adds. “We do OK until about the age of 13, we can compete on a global level until then. But where other countries start to ramp it up from there, we have not managed to do so. “In fact, we start to go backwards and the growth of many players becomes stunted. I wish I could give you a good reason why, but there are probably multiple factors on and off the pitch.”

AS Saint-Etienne v ESTAC Troyes – Ligue 1 Uber Eats

South African Football: What Has Changed For Players

These coins are designed to protect stablecoin holders from inflation. But they are complicated and it’s not clear whether they will actually work.



Stablecoins are digital tokens created to mirror the value of hard currencies like the U.S. dollar. They are critical for liquidity in the $1.2 trillion crypto market because investors need a steady, predictable place to park cash, in part because bitcoin, which will swing as much as 10% in a single day, has largely failed as a store of value. There are $120 billion in stablecoins outstanding. Unfortunately, their history is anything but stable.



In May 2022, TerraUSD, a stablecoin dreamed up by a Stanford-educated South Korean programmer named Do Kwon, famously collapsed because its value was based on an algorithm that proved to be unreliable in the face of an asset run. More than $45 billion in market value evaporated in a single day setting off a crypto market plunge. After being on the lam for nearly a year, Do Kwon was recently arrested in Montenegro. Then, there is the world’s largest stablecoin issuer Tether, which has $80 billion outstanding, but has long avoided even the most basic disclosures (like where it is located) and has been in trouble with regulators numerous times. On several occasions Tether’s U.S. dollar coin (USDC) has “broken the buck” and dipped below $1.00 in value.



Even the most regulatory compliant and transparent stablecoin, Circle’s USD Coin (USDC), which has $30 billion outstanding, has disappointed investors. When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed on March 10, USDC’s Boston-based issuer Circle admitted to having $3.3 billion on deposit at the bank, mostly uninsured. The price of USDC lost its peg, nosediving to $0.88 cents on March 11.



But stablecoins are still essential for serious players in the digital asset world, and hope springs eternal in crypto, so a new product has hit the market called promising an inflation-adjusted version of stablecoins. Dubbed “flatcoins” these new tokens are designed to to maintain purchasing power parity with a basket of goods by keeping up with inflation.



So far only about $100 million in flatcoins have been minted but with inflation stubbornly stuck at 4.6%, demand for these novel tokens is growing. Already Coinbase is actively looking to seed flatcoins on its new Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain Base.



“We are fascinated by the deep thought we’re seeing in decentralized stablecoin design and are particularly interested in ‘flatcoins’ – stablecoins that track the rate of inflation, enabling users to have stability in purchasing power while also having resiliency from the economic uncertainty caused by the legacy financial system,” wrote Coinbase in a recent post.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



Flatcoins are the brainchild of former Coinbase Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan and an Iranian born programer Sam Kazemian, who came up with a stablecoin protocol named Frax in 2021, and an inflation tracking index called Frax Price Index (FPI).



“The term flatcoin was basically meant to signify by me and Balaji that it stays flat to a standard of living, &#8221; says Kazemian who notes that his new flatcoin would be partially backed by collateral like USDC, and partially “stabilized” algorithmically.



Here are the basics mechanics of the new inflation-protected stablecoins. The first thing the Frax programmers set out to do is identify a targeted standard of living to track. Kazemian built a feed with a blockchain data provider called Chainlink to publish each month’s CPI from the Federal Reserve’s Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) onto the Ethereum blockchain. With the current 12-month trailing inflation rate at 5%, Frax has a set of smart contracts programmed to automatically conduct algorithmic trading with a goal of profiting enough to match the monthly inflation print sent from Chainlink.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



In theory, this would mean that if a single tether or USDC is still worth $1.00, in a 5% inflation world an FPI would be redeemable for $1.05 of collateral. In order to earn the necessary amounts to cover the inflation premium, Kazemian’s team invests collateral in DeFi lending protocols such as Aave and Convex, which primarily focus on stablecoin markets. These DeFi protocols earn yield for letting borrowers access their tokens. These returns then become available for FPI minters to withdraw. However, FPI is run by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, which could make changes to its risk parameters in the future.



If this sounds complicated and risky, it is, especially relative to simply owning a stablecoin like USDC and simultaneously hedging with something like a gold ETF or even Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS), where the U.S. government effectively covers the inflation risk.



Even more complicated is another flatcoin called Nuon. Rather than simply matching the BLS’ inflation reading, it joined up with a sister company called Trustflation to produce real-time inflation data based on a proprietary methodology. For instance, while the BLS inflation has eight main categories: food and beverages, housing, apparel, transportation, medical care, recreation, education and communication, and other goods and services, Trustflation has 12. Additions include clothing/footwear and alcohol/tobacco. The company also weights categories differently than the BLS and pulls in data real-time through service agreements with various providers instead of just relying on monthly updates.



“When we studied inflation we realized that it was calculated by 477 people on a monthly basis in a nebulous fashion,” says Trustflation and Nuon CEO Stefan Rust. “We decided to use a developer approach, take the same metrics, pull it from API&#8217;s, and have it updated in real time.”



While no one would argue that the collection and indexing of official inflation data doesn’t have numerous flaws, including an antiquated monthly production schedule, Trustflation’s Moneyball-esque approach to calculating real time inflation data does not come without drawbacks.



“When inflation is between 1.5%, and 2.5% per annum, it&#8217;s probably a bit of overkill, but when topline inflation is 8% to 9% those numbers may be meaningful on a day-to-day basis,” says Peter C. Earle, an economist at the American Institute for Economic Research. “I think it&#8217;s interesting to capture daily or intraday inflation data, but I also think there&#8217;s a lot of statistical noise.”



That noise could become deafening if the data feeds which determine prices and return targets , known in the crypto world as oracles, become corrupted. Crypto forensics firms report that so called oracle manipulation attacks cost investors $362 million last year. It is not impossible to foresee a scenario where an oracle gets manipulated to force one of these platforms to employ a riskier trading strategy than anticipated.



But data collection is not the only worry flatcoin buyers need to worry about. Behind Nuon’s inflation-protection guarantee is a complicated and potentially risky proposition. When an individual “mints” Nuon, he must deposit ether in its protocol, which then automatically buys the same amount of Nuon on the open market and deposits it in a DeFi protocol such as Uniswap or Pancakeswap. Income generated from this deposit, known as “yield farming,” is added to a user’s collateral position (which is the original ether) essentially as an “insurance.” Thus unlike FPI, nuon positions are overcollateralized &#8211; for instance a user must deposit $1.30 worth of ether to mint $1 of nuon.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



So far both FPI and nuon are having trouble tracking inflation (see charts). According to CoinGecko, FPI is currently priced at $1.08, but in its almost 12 months in existence it has traded as high as $1.18 and as low as $0.92, which would imply that in the last 12 months, inflation has spiked as high as 18% and below 1%. Nuon has dramatically outperformed inflation in its short existence; it only launched in March. Right now it is priced at $1.24, but it has been as high as $1.44.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



Ifflatcoins are meant to be the next evolution of digital “safe money&#8221;, stablecoin’s biggest player’s have yet to sign on. Circle, which issues USDC, has no plans to issue a flatcoin. Circle already has more than $25 billion in short Treasury bills backing its USDC tokens, but it is precluded from buying TIPS, because they are not issued in durations shorter than five years. Tether did not respond to requests for comment.



Flatcoins are so new they do not yet appear in any of the current stablecoin regulation bills circulating around Capitol Hill. The bi-partisan draft introduced in April proposed a ban on new algorithmically derived stablecoins such as TerraUSD/LUNA, where the stablecoin was backed by a sister token. Flatcoins use computer algorithms to derive their valuations, however, in their current incarnation do not fit neatly into the bill’s specific description. Still, any new stablecoins would have to be issued by a licensed entity at the state or federal level, so these products would need a bank backer if they expect to ever go mainstream.



Rust says that there are no restrictions on users in the U.S. from minting Nuon right now. “I guess, they are in a bit of a gray zone [with regards to how flatcoins fall under securities regulation]&#8230;At the moment, all the indications are that stablecoins pegged to the dollar or euro will fall under some regulation.”



Forbes called various legislators and regulators involved with the recently proposed stablecoin legislation to ask about flatcoins but most hadn’t even heard of them yet. Said Representative Brad Sherman (D-CA), a noted crypto critic, “We already have something like that. They’re called TIPS.”



By Steven Ehrlich, Forbes Staff

Mid-section of young Asian woman using smartphone in city at night, against illuminated street lights bokeh, working with Bitcoin technologies, investing or trading Bitcoin on cryptocurrency. Business on the go

Beware Of Flatcoins, Crypto’s Inflation Busting Fad

Kenya is among several African countries that have experienced a decline in the local value of currencies.



By Terryanne Chebet



Kenya has had a tough few months: ballooning debt, an enormous wage bill, and a depreciating shilling exacerbated by global conditions. Now, the government is unable to pay its salaries. An increased import bill, investment portfolio outflows, and servicing of existing foreign debt have also resulted in the reserves falling below the statutory minimum of four months of imports, with the Kenya shilling depreciating to an all-time low of KES130 to the US dollar.



So, how did Kenya get here?&nbsp;



“It was a matter of &#8216;when&#8217; and not &#8216;if&#8217; KES would weaken to reflect its fundamentals. There have been successive external shocks since 2020, but the currency remained relatively stable relative to its peers. In this light, it is not surprising the sharp adjustment we have seen this year and which we see bringing it closer to its fundamental value,” explains Churchill Ogutu, an economist with IC Africa.&nbsp;



Kenya is among several African countries that have experienced a decline in the local value of currencies, with a 25% decline in value since 2020, to a large extent caused by the rising interest rate environment in the United States (US), which has witnessed a very aggressive rate tightening by the US Federal Reserve.&nbsp;



&nbsp;Kenya’s borrowing for the financial year 2022-2023 is also substantially behind target.



“Given the continued uncertainty in the global financial markets, it appears that [the government] will have no choice but to borrow at higher rates from the domestic markets,” adds Sunil Sanger, CEO of Orion Advisory.&nbsp;



Kenya is also looking to offload its parastatals to reduce pressure on funding and to raise capital.



Despite fears that Kenya could default on its external loans, experts say it is unlikely.&nbsp;



Ogutu notes that Kenya’s position may be fragile, but a default seems remote. “With FX reserves at multi-year low levels, it is higher than upcoming short-term external debt servicing costs. Thus, I see a muddling through regarding external debt servicing costs.”



He adds that a default on&nbsp;domestic borrowing seems to be more likely due to its outsized domestic debt servicing costs compared to external debt servicing costs.&nbsp;



The outflow of portfolio investments in equity and bond markets and higher import prices for commodities, particularly petroleum products has seen Kenya’s government importing petroleum products on a deferred payment basis. The government is pursuing the government-to-government oil importation deal with Gulf countries to alleviate pressure on the&nbsp;shilling.&nbsp;



The reduction in oil demand will also help to reduce the depreciation of the shilling though analysts argue that Kenya could have used the opportunity to build reserves and maybe even consider using those to start buying back its 2023 eurobond maturity, an action that could help to calm down the market nerves.



Ogutu argues that is short-term thinking. “At some point in time, the supply and demand in the FX market will still reflect the mandated OMC coming to the market sourcing dollars. Kenya may get a bit of reprieve in the short-term but ultimately, the supply-demand dynamics will come to play.”



Both analysts agree that the revival of the interbank market in the last few weeks is a positive sign and has helped to reduce some of the uncertainty in the exchange rate. However, given the economic environment both locally and internationally, it is difficult to see circumstances under which the Kenya shilling would appreciate from current levels. &nbsp;



However, Ogutu holds that the shilling isn’t out of the woods yet.



“I have the sense that the initial sugar rush in the FX interbank market has ebbed away, and the next FX guidance will be delivered with the imminent changes at the helm of CBK. That said, my base case is a continued further weakness with 140 on sight.”

African business

Kenya Currency Woes: How Did It Get There?

Words and Curation: Chanel Retief Art Director: Lucy Nkosi Additional Research &amp; Reporting: Lillian Roberts Photography: Katlego Mokubyane Photography Assistant: Sbusiso Sigidi Studio: NewKatz Studio, Johannesburg Videographer: Astro @astro.vsn Videographer: Thabo Mathebula Video Editor: Chanel Retief Styling: Bontlefeela Mogoye | Outfits supplied by: Wanda Wear; Markhams; Kworks_design; BailebyB Hair &amp; Makeup: SnehhOnline Beauty



<figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<iframe loading="lazy" title="#FORBESAFRICA30Under30 Class of 2023: Meet COVER STAR Khethokuhle ‘Kay Yarms’ Ngonyama" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ySHPXs2yFqw?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div></figure>



She has unmistakable style as she struts into the studio in Johannesburg for the FORBES AFRICA 30 Under 30 cover shoot.



“What’s it like to trend every week on Twitter?” we ask.



Khethokuhle Ngonyama, popularly known as ‘Kay Yarms’, laughs: “You know, I mostly trend for my work. So, it is really affirming. I have never really been good at anything, or rather I have never considered myself good at anything, just good enough. But when people speak about it and speak about how good I am at it, I am actually emotional. It just makes me feel like ‘wow I never thought I would be good at anything’.”



Originally from the idyllic city of Durban in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, Ngonyama says she has always found herself in major cities; she has lived in Johannesburg and now is based in Mother City, Cape Town.



“I think moving around has allowed me to really get to know and connect with my audience as well as the country I reside in.”



Unlike a number of brands and businesses where the need for capital is essential for launch, Ngonyama says she did not have that problem as her business was providing a service.



“I started out as a makeup artist providing services for everyone and sharing tutorials, tips and tricks on my online platform,” she adds. “I found that I reached a wider audience and so I eventually stopped doing private makeup and moved into teaching to do makeup in the form of tutorials, both online and offline.”



And although power on social media means social capital these days, there is also the dark side to it.



“The biggest challenge is probably having to grow a thick skin; sometimes, social media isn’t pleasant and sometimes the negativity can affect you. Also becoming a public figure – I&#8217;ve always been pretty reserved and introverted and coming out of my shell has been a bit challenging for me.”



But she is convinced her popularity and growth will keep going upwards.



“I think we are just growing, especially in Africa,” Ngonyama says. “I didn’t know about [other influencers] in other African countries but the power of social media has allowed me to feel more connected to them and to know them.”

Untitled design (7)

#FORBESAFRICA30Under30: Meet COVER STAR Khethokuhle Ngonyama- ‘I’ve always been pretty reserved and introverted and coming out of my shell has been a bit challenging for me’

Coinbase, Binance and other exchanges hold at least $2.25 billion of shadow ether, as the latest lucrative innovation in digital assets ramps up.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



Cryptocurrency exchange&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenehrlich/2023/03/01/coinbase-blockchain-plan-gets-warm-reception-success-hinges-on-converting-crypto-diehards/?sh=2113589f1fab">Coinbase</a>&nbsp;is sitting on a $1.5 billion pile of phantom cryptocurrency pegged to the price of ether. Binance has a similar $750 million stash. These tokens, created to be used in what are essentially lending programs, are just entries in the exchanges’ computers, but to outside observers they appear as assets sitting in their corporate crypto wallets.



Binance’s 400,000 tokens would suddenly come to life if investors decide to use the exchange as an intermediary in posting ether (ETH) collateral to the Ethereum blockchain through a process called liquid staking. But until they do, anybody seeking to determine the amount of Binance’s assets would have to subtract the value of the spectral crypto from the visible total, now $2.77 billion, according to data from Arkham Intelligence. Things might be clearer if Binance actually published its balance sheet, which would be expected to show a corresponding liability. However, despite 70 million customers worldwide, it doesn&#8217;t share financial details with the public.



“Those [tokens] not in circulation are held in a specific reserve account with strict controls and multi-party approval,” says a Binance spokesperson.



Coinbase–which declined to comment for this story and is&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2023/03/22/coinbase-crypto-exchange-faces-possible-sec-charges-company-says/?sh=659b5b0912fc">facing a likely enforcement action</a>&nbsp;from the Securities and Exchange Commission related to its staking offerings–does not count its unreleased assets on its balance sheet, but does disclose them in its SEC filings.



Welcome to the fast-growing world of liquid staking. Staking in crypto parlance involves posting a digital asset like ether to a blockchain as collateral in exchange for the right to process transactions and earn in-kind rewards like tokens. Staked tokens are normally locked up for a period of time so they can&#8217;t be immediately withdrawn and cause a run on the platform. Liquid staking, by contrast, allows holders of tokens like ether the opportunity to use a tracking token of sorts for trading while the underlying token is still sitting “staked” on the blockchain, continuing to earn yield. In some ways it allows crypto investors the chance to have their cake, or “stake,” and eat it too.



There is already more than $18 billion committed to platforms that offer the service, according to&nbsp;<a href="https://dune.com/hildobby/eth2-staking" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">data</a>&nbsp;from Dune. Investors can earn annual returns of 2% to 12% depending on the platform, according to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.stakingrewards.com/staking/?page=1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Staking Rewards</a>, and they keep control of their crypto. But they have to trust the integrity of the intermediaries and the security of the platforms to safeguard their assets.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



In December of 2020 Binance minted an astounding 100 million Binance ETH, known as “beths”, each representing one ether at a time when there were only 120 million ETH in existence. Until June 2022, if counted, that hoard would have added about $483 billion to Binance’s visible wallet assets, multiplying them fivefold. However last year it started destroying these phantom tokens and now only 1.5 million remain according to Binance’s own BNB Smart Contract (BSC) Chain&nbsp;<a href="https://bscscan.com/token/0x250632378e573c6be1ac2f97fcdf00515d0aa91b" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">explorer</a>.



It’s almost as if Charles Schwab manufactured a massive amount of an ETF like Invesco’s QQQ Trust and simply held the shares on its books without acquiring the corresponding stocks in the Nasdaq 100 index and putting them in a trust, the way ETF shares are normally created. And since there is no SEC or regulator involved, no one would care if those ETF shares fluctuated in value or amount or were simply discarded. This is effectively what Binance and Coinbase have been doing with the special staking ether they have created since 2020.



A Binance spokesman would not say exactly why so many tokens were minted in 2020, other than it was cheaper to manufacture them in bulk.



“There are no accounting standards that speak to any of this stuff specifically, and even the related standards are not specific,” says Francine McKenna an accounting lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Staking can take many forms, she adds, and existing rules do not contemplate “all the details of all these different variations on all these products.”



Creating billions worth of staking tokens out of thin air and then destroying them, is just the latest example of a crypto company playing by its own rules. Disgraced former crypto exchange FTX, played fast and loose with disclosure rules, and more recently Binance has come under scrutiny. A&nbsp;<a href="https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67092867/1/commodity-futures-trading-commission-v-zhao/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">civil complaint</a>&nbsp;by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission in March claimed that Binance consists of “an opaque web of corporate entities.” Last February, a&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierpaz/2023/02/27/binances-asset-shuffling-eerily-similar-to-maneuvers-by-ftx/?sh=7e80d91bccd4">investigation</a>&nbsp;showed that the exchange appropriated more than $1 billion of collateral meant to back stablecoins in August, shifting the assets to other uses without alerting the customers who were affected.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



Liquid staking joins&nbsp;a long list of dubious crypto industry innovations that have included initial coin offerings, algorithmic stablecoins and decentralized finance. Like its predecessors, liquid staking is a creative solution to a key pain point: the illiquidity that comes with staking ether.



Although digital assets–like traditional currencies–do not generate income by themselves, there are ways that investors can earn passive revenue from their holdings, similar to making a loan. Posting assets to blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, Algorand and Polkadot as collateral, give lenders (known as stakers) the right to earn fees by processing blockchain transactions. Ethereum for example, currently brings about 4.8% of annual return, and there is always the chance that a digital asset you have staked appreciates, magnifying your return. But this process has drawbacks.



Depending on the platform, it could take weeks to withdraw crypto once it has been staked. The situation has been even more extreme with Ethereum. Although staking was enabled for the blockchain in December 2020, withdrawals were not permitted until a major upgrade, known as the “Shapella update”, was completed on April 12, 2023.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-binance-asset-balance-history">BINANCE-ASSET BALANCE HISTORY</h4>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-in-billions-ethereum-and-bnb-chains">In $billions, Ethereum and BNB Chains</h4>



This chart erroneously shows the value of Binance&#8217;s digital assets, which were inflated by BETH tokens despite little actual ETH staking &#8211; only 2% of the value claimed.&nbsp;SOURCE: ARKHAM INTELLIGENCE



This illiquidity has been a major impediment for many would-be stakers and in response, a cottage industry of service providers, including Coinbase and Binance, have surfaced, willing to exchange an investor’s staked ether for a different tracking crypto token (such as beth). The ether is locked on the blockchain, while the new token is available for use in applications such as decentralized finance; it also can be sold. The blockchains available for liquid staking vary by geography and provider, with some like U.S. regulated Coinbase accepting Cardano, Cosmos, Ethereum, Solana and Tezos, while international investors using exchanges like OKX exchange and Huobi exchange can stake dozens of tokens.



Exchanges like Coinbase profit by taking a cut of the fees earned by staking customers. This has been a lucrative and growing business for Coinbase. In its quarterly filings, it includes staking fees within “blockchain rewards.” In 2022 these fees amounted to $275 million, or nearly 9% of revenue, up from $223 million or 3% of 2021’s top line.



While the idea seems simple, the reality is more complex, which can create risks for investors. For one, stakers have to trust centralized exchanges not to use these pools of new tokens themselves, effectively adding duplicative cryptocurrency to the market.



Then there is the issue of exchanges making up new rules as they go along. Until April 24, Binance limited the use of beths to deposits on its Binance Launchpool, essentially an initial public offering platform that allowed users to participate in unproven crypto-related projects that the global cryptocurrency exchange was endorsing. Now Binance offers a way for users to use beths for a wider variety of investments on the Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum, bringing the currency more in line with other liquid-staking tokens but in a unilateral action that can create additional security risks.



Coinbase has been&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2023/03/22/coinbase-crypto-exchange-faces-possible-sec-charges-company-says/?sh=15acd57712fc">told</a>&nbsp;it is likely to face enforcement action by the U.S. SEC that may involve its staking service. Like Binance, it minted a token for staking, this one called Coinbase wrapped staked ETH (CBETH). But in contrast to Binance, it began with a modest 500,000 units.



Some of the spare tokens minted are essential for an exchange’s liquidity. Exchanges need to keep a reserve available to satisfy regular daily staking volume. There are minor costs involved in minting tokens, and without a supply on hand it might not be possible to immediately provide liquidity to potential stakers. But having too many can create questions for customers and regulators.



How many is enough?



“If I’m an exchange with $1 billion in staked ether and I’m minting my internal tokens in $10,000 batches that&#8217;s not material,” says Paul Brody, principal and global blockchain leader at Ernst &amp; Young. “I would want to know, are they sitting on $1 billion in undistributed tokens or $10,000, $50,000?”



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



An alternate approach&nbsp;to liquid staking does away with the temptation to misdirect spare tokens, but creates problems of its own. Smart contracts–agreements that are automatically executed under specified conditions–address the problem of too many tokens on hand. There are decentralized liquid-staking providers such as Liquid Collective, Lido, Stakewise and RocketPool that exist almost entirely as sets of smart contracts. Lido is the world’s largest liquid staker, with $11 billion in deposited assets.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-liquid-staking-total-value-locked">LIQUID STAKING TOTAL VALUE LOCKED</h4>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-tvl-in-eth-staked-may-1-2023">TVL in ETH staked, May 1, 2023</h4>



Select firms providing staking services ranked by total value locked, measured in ETHs, May 1, 2023SOURCE: FORBES, DUNE



Smart contracts can automate the process, staking the original token on the appropriate blockchain, then minting the liquid version for the customer. “The transparency that is associated with more decentralized staking protocols is definitely a plus because users can verify for themselves that the protocol has a corresponding amount of ether for its liquid token supply,” says Christine Kim, vice president of research at Galaxy Digital, a New York-based investment management and technology firm. Among the drawbacks is that the immediate minting of staking tokens is that the process is more expensive than minting the tokens in advance the way “centralized” exchanges Binance and Coinbase have.



An even larger issue is that decentralized finance protocols are more susceptible to hacks. According to Chainalysis, DeFi hacks accounted for 82% of all stolen digital assets last year, totaling $3.1 billion. Of this sum, 64% was taken from software programs known as cross-chain bridges, which allow users to move assets between decentralized-finance&nbsp;protocols. They work by having owners lock up tokens in smart contracts in exchange for a new corresponding token replica. Although there are key differences between bridges and liquid-staking protocols–such as the locked up tokens sitting in a blockchain rather than crypto wallets–this type of arrangement can expose liquid staking holders to more risks. This is especially true when tokens are moved from Ethereum validators into other wallets for distribution.



With the Shapella update to Ethereum complete, the metaphorical stakes are going to rise. The ability to withdraw funds is bound to make the market more attractive to institutional investors. Nikos Panigirtzoglou, managing director for global market strategy at JPMorgan told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;that “Over the medium to longer term we expect Ethereum staking to grow and converge with that of other blockchains.” Cardano, Solana, Algorand and Polkadot have 35-70% of their tokens staked. Ethereum is at 15%, so even just doubling this percentage would add $35 billion in staked tokens at current prices. A good portion of those funds would likely be liquid staking protocols because of the ability to put these tokens to other uses while the underlying asset is staked.



Buyer beware.



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierpaz/"></a>By Javier Paz, Forbes Staff

Cryptocurrency Mining In Africa As Poor Sheperdherder Proves A Point

Liquid Staking: Crypto’s New Phantom Money Machine

<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-topline">TOPLINE</h2>



The Food and Drug Administration approved a first-of-its-kind RSV vaccine by pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline for older adults on Wednesday, in time to help the U.S. combat RSV infections and deaths this year after a severe 2022 season.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Key Facts</h2>



GlaxoSmithKline’s Arexvy is now approved for people ages 60 and older to prevent lower respiratory tract disease caused by respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).



RSV is a common respiratory infection that typically causes mild, cold-like symptoms, but can lead to serious lung infections for those most <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2023/04/06/first-fda-approved-rsv-vaccines-expected-later-this-year-the-top-vaccines-and-their-effectiveness/?sh=63e8e1185f81">vulnerable</a>, like children, older adults and those with underlying health conditions.



Each year in the U.S., RSV leads to between 60,000 to 120,000 hospitalizations and 6,000 to 10,000 deaths among adults 65 and older, the FDA said in a <a href="https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-respiratory-syncytial-virus-rsv-vaccine" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">release</a>.



The study that led to Arexvy’s approval found that the vaccine reduced the risk of developing RSV-associated lower respiratory tract disease by 82.6% and reduced the risk of developing a severe RSV-associated respiratory disease by 94.1%.



The most common side effects among those in the trial were injection-site pain, fatigue, muscle pain, headache and joint stiffness or pain, the FDA said.



The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to provide specific recommendations for GlaxoSmithKline and its vaccine in June, according to an ABC <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Health/1st-rsv-vaccine-older-adults-us-cleared-fda/story?id=99049816" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">report</a>, but the company expects it will have enough vaccines to meet demand ahead of RSV season in the fall and winter.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Tangent</h2>



Last year, the U.S. had an alarmingly bad RSV season, which some are attributing to lapsed Covid-19 pandemic health measures that had helped keep the public generally healthier and safe from RSV and the common cold. Between October and November in 2021, the CDC recorded 42,000 cases of RSV; in the same period in 2022, that number had swelled to 126,000, according to <a href="https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/view/rsv-surges-early-in-2022-but-appears-to-make-early-retreat" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Contemporary Pediatrics</a>.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">KEY BACKGROUND</h2>



The FDA is ahead of its time line, as it was expected to approve at least one RSV vaccine this year by the fall. The first attempt to create an RSV vaccine was in the 1960s, though it was&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2023/04/06/first-fda-approved-rsv-vaccines-expected-later-this-year-the-top-vaccines-and-their-effectiveness/?sh=63e8e1185f81">unsuccessful</a>&nbsp;and led to severe and lethal cases of lung inflammatory response in infants.&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;previously reported 11 potential RSV vaccines were being studied in trials—4 for infants and 7 for adults. GSK, whose vaccine was approved, was racing drugmakers Pfizer and Moderna to get the first-approved RSV vaccine. CNBC&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/03/rsv-vaccine-fda-approves-gsk-shot-for-older-adults.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>&nbsp;that Moderna is still planning to file an application for FDA approval in the first half of this year.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">CRUCIAL QUOTE</h2>



“Today marks a turning point in our effort to reduce the significant burden of RSV. . . . Our focus now is to ensure eligible older adults in the U.S. can access the vaccine as quickly as possible and to progress regulatory review in other countries,” said Tony Wood, chief scientific officer at GSK, in a press&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/media/press-releases/us-fda-approves-gsk-s-arexvy-the-world-s-first-respiratory-syncytial-virus-rsv-vaccine-for-older-adults/#:~:text=GSK%20plc%20(LSE%2FNYSE%3A,years%20of%20age%20and%20older." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">release</a>.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">FURTHER READING</h2>



<a href="https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-respiratory-syncytial-virus-rsv-vaccine" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FDA Approves First Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) Vaccine</a>&nbsp;(FDA)



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2023/04/06/first-fda-approved-rsv-vaccines-expected-later-this-year-the-top-vaccines-and-their-effectiveness/?sh=63e8e1185f81">First FDA-Approved RSV Vaccines Expected Later This Year: The Top Vaccines And Their Effectiveness</a>&nbsp;(Forbes)



<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/03/rsv-vaccine-fda-approves-gsk-shot-for-older-adults.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FDA approves GSK&#8217;s RSV vaccine for older adults, world&#8217;s first shot against virus</a> (CNBC)



By Molly Bohannon, Forbes Staff

Vaccinations at Egoli Township as Omicron Cases Spread

FDA Approves First-Ever RSV Vaccine After Brutal 2022 Season

By Godfrey Mutizwa



The World Bank says the climate change fight demands a focus on long-neglected structural challenges that are worsening the impact of natural disasters in Africa and other developing countries.



“Some of those structural challenges span from years of environmental degradation,’’ Anna Bjerde, the bank’s Managing Director for Operations told CNBC Africa last week after seeing villages devastated by Cyclone Freddy in Malawi in February and March.



The World Meteorological Organization says the cyclone may have been the longest in history. Over five weeks, it destroyed roads and other vital infrastructure in Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique. Officials estimate about two million people were displaced while more than a thousand died.



According to the United Nations, changing rainfall patterns and more extreme weather threaten Africans’ food, water and socio economic development and more needs to be done to help the continent cope better.



Bjerde, back in the region for the first time since taking up the operations role last month, says she was enthused by the energy of the Malawian people and the government’s response in helping rebuild communities.



“I saw an incredibly resilient population where a lot of people want to make a change, and a lot of innovation around sustainable solutions like renewable energy, like more climate-smart solutions in agriculture and solutions for the most vulnerable and poor to have access to clean water,” she said.



But countries like Malawi will need more help from the World Bank and other development institutions to help build climate resistant economies by improving their infrastructure, Bjerde said.



The bank has a twin approach to this, she said, outlining short-term measures such as providing extra resources to governments, and identifying long-term priority projects to build inclusive economies.



“The broader development community’s role is to continue to support with technical solutions, with financing, with building capacity and perhaps most importantly making sure that these solutions are really inclusive.’’



Developing countries also need to involve their private sectors, she said, addressing challenges such as access to markets and finance, providing basic infrastructure and rebuilding value chains as part of an overall effort to improve business environments, especially given rising public debt levels.



“I am very worried by the increased level of debt that we are seeing and actually… we are seeing right now that about of 60 percent of low income countries in the world either at risk of debt distress or already at debt distress levels,” she added.



The bank was playing its part in its new operating model which was discussed at this year’s Spring meetings in Washington DC. The model among other things seeks to boost the bank’s capital and address borderless global challenges at the country level.

Hurricane Along Coastline

Natural Disasters In Africa: World Bank Says Climate Change Fight Must Address Structural Deficits

Kazadi emigrated to South Africa as a child from DR Congo and built a digital marketing agency in his adopted country. In early May last year, the 29-year-old died under murky circumstances.



On April 28, 2022, Christian Kazadi was enjoying a sunrise safari in Botswana. Sporting a corduroy fleece jacket, shorts and white sneakers in an Instagram post from that day, Kazadi smiles as he leans back on a jeep, calling it a “bucket list experience.”



The 29-year-old founder of Johannesburg, South Africa-based digital marketing agency Click Media was in Botswana to attend the first ever&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;Under 30 Africa summit. It was a professional milestone for Kazadi, who had launched Click Media in 2016 with the last $30 in his bank account and bootstrapped it into a thriving business that ran social media campaigns for clients ranging from ESPN and Adidas to the National Basketball Association and KFC. Kazadi, who had yet to appear on&nbsp;Forbes’&nbsp;30 Under 30 list, was thrilled to have been awarded a spot at the conference.



But that Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Cc45W7Cq0CC/">post </a>was his last. Four days later, he was found dead in police custody 1,100 miles away in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.



A year later, Kazadi’s mysterious death remains unsolved. His family is still trying to piece together what happened to him between April 30—when he was set to return to South Africa—and May 2, when he died in Kinshasa. Investigations in South Africa and DR Congo are at a standstill, and no one—not the airport officials in South Africa that denied his entry nor the Congolese police that may have been involved in his death—has provided any answers.



“He never made it back home from the&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;event,” says Patrick Kazadi, Christian’s younger brother and cofounder and CEO of Click Media. “[We need] answers so the family can finally finish the grieving process and put the people who did this to justice.”



During his brief time in Botswana, Kazadi’s energy and entrepreneurial spirit made him stand out among his peers. &#8220;Even those who met him over the few days of the summit will convey how deeply they were touched by him,&#8221; says Pholo Kimbuende, a senior management consultant at consulting firm Guidehouse, who met Kazadi at the&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;Under 30 event. &#8220;The future just looked so bright, and the circumstances around his death were just utterly devastating.&#8221;



The mystery began on April 30, when Kazadi’s flight from Botswana landed in Johannesburg at 10:45 am. He wasn’t allowed to enter South Africa, despite having lived in the country since 2001 and possessing a valid work visa that ran from 2020 to 2023.&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;spoke to multiple friends and family members of Kazadi who confirmed he had previously traveled from South Africa to other African countries before and had never had any issues returning, although it is not entirely uncommon for immigrants to have difficulties at the South African border.&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;also called and spoke to several officials at Johannesburg’s O.R. Tambo International Airport, but they didn’t provide any information on Kazadi and instead referred questions to South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs. Home Affairs suggested that the family file a public records request, which they did but have yet to receive a response.



Kazadi was then made to book a flight to Kinshasa, DR Congo the following day. He arrived just past midnight on May 2. A Congolese citizen, Kazadi was born in the country but hadn’t been back since leaving with his family in 2001, when they emigrated to South Africa to seek asylum as refugees.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
“There’s foul play at hand. He was in Congo for less than 24 hours and he was murdered.”
<cite>Patrick Kazadi</cite></blockquote>



Later that day, a bizarre video appeared online, showing Kazadi behaving erratically at a funeral in Kinshasa. The video appears to show Kazadi getting inside the casket with his headphones on and shouting “Guelor,” the name of the deceased person at the funeral—who Kazadi apparently did not know, although Guelor happens to be the name of one of Kazadi’s younger brothers. People then appeared to surround him and drag him away from the casket. Kazadi was arrested at the funeral and held in a detention center, where a family friend went to check up on him on the night of May 2.



The next morning, Kazadi was dead. “There’s foul play at hand,” says Patrick. “He was in Congo for less than 24 hours and he was murdered.”



Photos and videos provided by Kazadi’s family and seen by&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;show Kazadi lying on what appears to be a road, shirtless and with deep cuts and welts on his head, arms, chest and feet indicating that he may have been tortured. In one of the photos, a Congolese policeman or soldier is seen standing in the background.



A member of the family that was hosting the funeral, who had urged the police to arrest him at the time, was called into the police station about a week after his death and gave the police her phone number. When they tried to get in touch with her in the following days, the police told Kazadi’s family that the number was disconnected.



Kazadi’s family told Forbes that the police officers who arrested him were briefly detained in May last year as local authorities investigated what happened, but no charges have been filed. Unfortunately, death at the hands of the police isn’t uncommon in DR Congo. 133 people died in detention in the country in the first six months of 2022, according to the<a href="https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/415610_CONGO-DEM-REP-2022-HUMAN-RIGHTS-REPORT.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> United Nations Joint Human Rights Office.</a>



A year after Kazadi’s death, the investigation has gone nowhere. Captain Parfait and Colonel Honoré of the Congolese National Police, the officers in charge of the investigation in the Matete district of Kinshasa, have told the Kazadi family’s lawyer that the case file for the investigation has gone missing. Neither responded to questions from&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;about the status of the investigation.



“If it was the police that murdered him, of course they would get rid of the docket,” says Patrick. “The court case hasn’t even started because they currently can’t locate the docket file.”



In South Africa, Kazadi’s mother submitted a public records request to the Department of Home Affairs last July for information on why he was denied entry into the country. Under South African law, government agencies must respond to requests within 30 days, with the option of a single extension of no more than 30 additional days. But 296 days after the family initially submitted its request—and despite being repeatedly contacted by both Forbes and Kazadi’s family over the course of several months—the ministry has yet to provide an update.



Still, asylum seekers and immigrants with visas often face harassment from South African authorities. In its<a href="https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/415610_SOUTH-AFRICA-2022-HUMAN-RIGHTS-REPORT.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">&nbsp;2022 human rights report on South Africa</a>, the U.S. State Department wrote that “security forces arbitrarily arrested migrants and asylum seekers, including those with proper documentation, often because police were unfamiliar with migrant and asylum documentation.&#8221;



The lack of progress on the investigations has also resulted in plenty of conspiracy theories online, with YouTube videos viewed more than a million times speculating that Kazadi was drugged or part of a cult. “They have a lot of incorrect facts,” says Patrick. “A lot of people in Congo don’t know what is going on.”



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



Ever since he arrived in South Africa at age 9 in 2001, Christian Kazadi worked hard to improve his life. He emigrated to Johannesburg with his mother and younger brothers to join his father, Samuel, a pastor and IT teacher who had already been living there for two years. Tragedy struck in 2007 when Samuel died while on a business trip to DR Congo, leaving the family without a breadwinner. (The cause of death isn’t known.)



The local church raised money to pay for the family’s rent, and his mother started selling clothes and toys at a flea market. But his father’s death forced Christian—then just 15 years old—to help provide for his family. He sold snacks at school during the week and packed meat at a grocery store on the weekends with his younger brother Patrick. Eventually he convinced the store to hire his mother as a cleaner, so she could stay closer to home instead of traveling to sell goods at different markets.



“It was nothing like close to minimum wage, but it was constant,” says Patrick. “That’s what started Chris’ mentality for entrepreneurship and hustling.”



Those wages helped them move to a larger house in 2011, where the family of five shared one room and subleased the other three rooms to make extra money. Chris was also a strong athlete in high school, placing in national competitions for track and field and basketball.



“We would sit at home and cut boxes and stack them up and put them as soles in our shoes,” says Patrick. “He would walk five kilometers to the closest court and play ball.”



Kazadi’s dream was to play professionally in the NBA, and he wrote in his application for the&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;Under 30 event that he won a scholarship to play college basketball in New York after graduating from high school in 2012—but his family couldn’t afford to pay for his trip to the U.S.



There also wasn’t enough money for Chris to attend college at home, and they couldn’t apply for government scholarships that were reserved for South African citizens. Instead he kept working at butcheries, making about 300 rand—roughly $30 at the time—in tips on a good day and doing other odd jobs like frying meat. He also landed an unpaid internship managing social media for South African professional basketball player KP Ndlovu that year, running the Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts for his company Loqdown Productions, which organizes basketball tournaments for young players in Johannesburg.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
“Chris was a warrior and a soldier. I’m so proud of what he did and the legacy and empire he built and left behind.”
<cite>Joe Arrangement</cite></blockquote>



Kazadi’s luck started to turn the following year, when South Africa launched the professional Basketball National League (BNL). His work for Ndlovu caught the attention of FX Productions, a small marketing agency that managed social media for the BNL. He got hired to create social media content for the league, earning enough money to support his family and allow his mother to quit her cleaning job.



By January 2016, Kazadi was ready to strike out on his own. Against his mother’s wishes, he quit his job to take advantage of his own connections with the league and its teams to launch his own marketing firm. As an asylum seeker at the time, he couldn’t register the company himself. So he relied on a South African friend and used his entire savings—$30 at the time—to register the new company, which he named Click Media Productions.



His first idea was to host basketball tournaments, using his connections at the BNL to convince brands to sponsor his events. But the costs of organizing them—paying for kits, referees and venues—added up, leaving Kazadi in debt. So he turned back to focusing on social media, eventually making enough money to pay back the debt.



By 2017, the firm had grown enough that it was hosting regular tournaments. The first big break came that year, when Click Media handled digital marketing for the NBA Africa Game, which brought NBA stars like Dirk Nowitzki and Luol Deng to play in Johannesburg.



That growth allowed him to make his first hires to manage the firm’s new clients, which began to sign long-term contracts with Click Media. “This was my first official job, and it&#8217;s all because of Chris,&#8221; says Kaymo Moeti, who worked as a social media manager at Click Media from 2017 to 2018 and now runs marketing for a hip hop festival. “Everything that I learned, I learned from him. He&#8217;s the one that really taught me what I knew to help me get those opportunities.&#8221;



Click Media worked on the next NBA Africa Game in 2018, and the exposure helped put the company on the map, leading to new social media campaigns for clients ranging from ride-hailing app Bolt to rapper Lil Yachty. That same year, he obtained a South African work visa through Click Media. In December 2021, the company was named the best digital marketing agency in Johannesburg at the MEA Business Awards, organized by MEA Markets, a business publication focused on the Middle East and Africa.



&#8220;Chris was a warrior and a soldier,&#8221; says Joe Arrangement, a musician and music promoter who worked with Kazadi and Click Media. &#8220;I&#8217;m so proud of what he did and the legacy and empire he built and left behind.&#8221;



In March 2022, Click Media ran a social media campaign for cognac brand Hennessy and the NBA at a basketball court in Zoo Lake, Johannesburg. In an Instagram post from the video shoot, Kazadi hyped it up for his followers: &#8220;We got something really exciting coming to Zoo Lake soon,&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;With some of your favorite celebrities.&#8221;



Two months later, he was gone.



Click Media is now run by his brother Patrick, who wants to carry Christian’s legacy forward and keep growing the company until it achieves his vision of becoming the top digital marketing agency in Africa.



&#8220;As the CEO of Click Media, with the good God&#8217;s grace and blessing, I will complete that which we started,” Patrick said in an emotional tribute to his brother at his memorial service last June. “Kazadi lives.”



The Kazadi family has a<a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/in-memory-of-christian-kazadi" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> GoFundMe page</a> to raise funds to pay for legal fees for investigating Christian&#8217;s death and to provide financial support for the family.



By Giacomo Tognini, Forbes Staff

Chris Kazadi

The Mysterious, Unsolved Murder Of Under 30 African Social Media Entrepreneur Christian Kazadi

Where does the continent fit into the chatbot conversation, and why it needs its own startups that focus on AI.



By Tiana Cline



The ability to be able to have a conversation with someone else is a fundamental part of what it means to be a human being but today, it’s becoming more and more confusing to figure out whether you’re talking to a bot… or not.



Technology has advanced to the point where AI-powered conversational chatbots, like ChatGPT or Meta’s BlenderBot 3, are deceptively realistic. (More so when they go off the rails and say things like ‘I want to be alive’, which is exactly what Bing’s AI bot expressed earlier this year.) While chatbots like these are trained to avoid expressing personal or biased views, and are known to make factual mistakes and mix up information, they’re becoming smarter, more streamlined and sometimes, a little strange…



“Conversational AI is one of the first applications of NLP in artificial intelligence and this kind of technology has existed since Eliza in the sixties,” explains Professor Mpho Raborife, the deputy director at the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.



Natural Language Processing, or NLP, is a way for computers to understand human language. NLP uses AI tools like machine learning and neural networks to process and interpret large amounts of data.



“With the rise of big data, ChatGPT was inevitable. It’s trained on a very large dataset and the technologies behind it make it a lot more advanced than other conversational AI applications.”



One of the reasons for this, explains Raborife, is that ChatGPT uses reinforcement learning alongside sophisticated algorithms that manipulate its dataset. “It’s so sophisticated that people don’t realize that it really possesses no intelligence whatsoever,”



she adds, “it really doesn’t understand the meaning behind anything, it just know how the words are supposed to work but not what they mean.”



OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a research experiment gone wild that has shown the incredible potential of conversational AI yet Africa is still being left behind. Consider smartphone voice assistants like Siri or Alexa – both examples of conversational AI used regularly; they work with English but struggle to understand local accents. They don’t support African languages.



“We know that the Global North is not going to include our languages. Therefore, we need to find a way to make sure that we create an environment that the startups that come from Africa which do incorporate our languages have the same kind of impact,” Raborife adds. Duolingo, for example, is a popular language learning mobile app that uses an AI system called Birdbrain to personalize its content. Duolingo has 43 different languages (including made-up dialects such as Klingon, High Valyrian and Esperanto) but only isiZulu and Swahili are available when it comes to African language learning courses.



“When we talk about AI, our languages are not supported or even represented by these technologies,” says Raborife. “But conversational AI has the potential to bridge the language divide as it can be used in a variety of ways because it surpasses literacy levels. If people cannot read or write, they can use their voice to access services and this is something that is important to Africa.



This is why we need our own startups that focus on AI.”



Recently launched, Lelapa AI is an African AI research and product house looking to make a real difference within the continent with a special interest in agriculture, education, energy, healthcare, microfinance and language. 



“There are so many problems on the continent that AI-type technologies can help with so there’s a responsibility for us to use our skills to help create better lives for everyday Africans,” says Pelonomi Moiloa, Lelapa AI’s co-founder and CEO.



“What we intend to do is use technology in a very smart, resource-efficient way because there are challenges on the continent like rolling blackouts, water shortages and network issues…” Lelapa AI have already debuted an app called VulaVula which offers NLP-as-a-service for under-represented languages.



Moiloa describes VulaVula as an underlying technology that supports other technologies. A banking chatbot, for example, could use VulaVula’s AI language capabilities to help customers interact in their own languages.



“The idea is that if an organization has a place for us to plug our models into and we can collaborate agreements around how that work can be done, then – ideally – if we have the resources and capacity we will help businesses do what they need.”



For Moiloa, creating African data sets to work from may be challenging but it’s also something she sees as a competitive advantage for Lelapa AI. “We’re having to think around clever ways of dealing with Africa’s data scarcity problem. We have to create models that are able to cope with less amounts of data, but models that can get really good at curating and gathering data,” she says.



And the fact that ChatGPT doesn’t necessarily draw its information from African data sets (it was apparently trained using real human conversations) means startups like Lelapa AI have the opportunity to develop responsible methods of dealing with problems that are relevant to the continent.



“I don’t think we should be trying to develop our own ChatGPT but maybe we can develop other textual tools that can help solve the problems that ChatGPT is meant to – but at the moment, it seems to be creating more problems,” she ends.

Asian woman using smartphone surrounded by beams of light. Metaverse and Artificial Intelligence

Talking A-‘bot Africa: The Potential For Conversational AI

Remember the thousands of flight cancellations, endless lines and lost baggage nightmares from last year? Experts warn it could be even worse in 2023. Here’s how to book smarter and fly right in the midst of another Air-mageddon.



Pack your patience, travelers. Those hoping that last summer’s <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2022/07/19/why-delayed-flights-not-going-away-soon/?sh=207391ee5727">“airport chaos” headlines</a> were a distant memory are in for a nasty case of déjà vu.



The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) expects 2023 summer air travel volumes to surpass pre-pandemic levels, and industry experts are warning that many of the problems that led to last year’s meltdown have not been resolved.



“This summer’s travel demand will be as strong as we’ve seen since before the pandemic, and potentially the strongest ever,” says Geoff Freeman, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association. “That kind of demand in a system that is woefully underfunded and understaffed is likely to create substantial frustrations among travelers.”



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
The FAA asked airlines to pull back slots in New York and Washington, D.C. airports this summer, reducing the number of available flights.
</blockquote>



As the head of the non-profit trade organization representing the $1.2 trillion U.S. travel industry, Freeman worries that a repeat of last year’s air travel mayhem will hurt overall tourism spending. “More than half of Americans would travel more often, they say, for leisure in the next six months if the experience were not as much of a hassle as it is today,” Freeman says, adding that “it did not need to be this way.”



It’s virtually impossible to overstate the Air-mageddon of Summer 2022. After the aviation industry ground to a virtual halt during the pandemic, it could not ramp up fast enough to handle the massive post-pandemic crush of people finally traveling again. Tens of thousands of flights were delayed and cancelled, travelers were left stranded, countless pieces of baggage were lost, and an aging and outdated infrastructure creaked and strained under the stress of it all.



While many of those flight disruptions were blamed on airlines’ supply-chain issues and pilot shortages, the meltdown also exposed cracks in the country’s aviation infrastructure and staffing deficiencies. Flash forward one year and many of those same problems still exist.



First, the United States has been woefully slow to update its aging aviation infrastructure. The issue was fully exposed in January when an outage of one of the Federal Aviation Administration’s critical systems led to a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2023/01/11/faa-us-flights-temporarily-grounded-due-to-systems-outage/?sh=7b9060662219">nationwide ground stop of all flights</a>&nbsp;for several hours.



Since then, the FAA has been ramping up its ambitious, multi-year, multi-billion-dollar effort, known as NextGen, to modernize the system. Of the agency’s 2023&nbsp;<a href="https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2022-03/FAA_Buget_Estimates_FY23.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">annual budget of $23.6 billion</a>, $1 billion is earmarked for NextGen.



“Aviation infrastructure and technology have been chronically underfunded for years,” says Freeman. “These problems have been driven by a slate of missed opportunities over the years from Congress and within the federal government.”



Another salient challenge is the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers. Travel Cassandras were quick to recognize a bad omen when the FAA asked airlines to pull back slots in New York and Washington, D.C. airports this summer, reducing the number of available flights.



Delays in two major markets can easily create a ripple effect nationwide, but the issue is of particular concern to airlines like JetBlue with strongholds in the Northeast. The New York-based carrier posted a loss for the first quarter of the year and its $3.8 billion&nbsp;<a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-block-jetblue-s-proposed-acquisition-spirit" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">acquisition of Spirit Airlines is being challenged</a>&nbsp;by the Department of Justice. On JetBlue’s earnings call earlier this week, CEO Robin Hayes noted the “very challenging [air traffic control] backdrop” and said the FAA’s request for 10% voluntary reductions by carriers “creates a significant headwind for the American travelers flying this summer.”



Few people understand the challenges of air traffic control better than Paul Rinaldi, a former 16-year air traffic controller at Washington Dulles International Airport and 12-year president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA).



He believes the U.S. should pull the Air Traffic Organization (ATO), the agency’s operational air navigation arm, out of the FAA, which is also responsible for regulatory oversight. This separation is already in place in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and most other countries, and it is the longstanding recommendation of the International Civil Aviation Organization.



Next, says Rinaldi, the U.S. should fund the ATO through a tax-funded program we already have called the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.faa.gov/about/budget/aatf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Aviation Trust Fund</a>, which was established in 1970. When a passenger buys an airline ticket, the price includes aviation-related excise taxes that go into the trust fund, he explains, “which could fund the ATO to the point that the FAA wouldn’t have to interrupt modernization projects while hiring and it would have some financial stability.”



The current shortage of air traffic controllers is hardly new—it can be traced back to the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/saranyakapur/2013/02/13/the-budget-sequester-explained-and-what-it-means-for-you/?sh=3438d0bd2b20">2013 United States budget sequestration</a>, says Rinaldi. “They closed the air traffic control academy,” he explains “They looked at reducing hours and many air traffic facilities. They looked at closing and cutting more than 100 federal contract towers, and stopped most modernization projects.”



“And when you look at our short staffing now,” Rinaldi continues, “we have never made it back up since sequestration. And now here we are 10 years later, almost to the date and we’re looking at the same type of draconian cuts.”



It’s not clear that Congress has learned anything from past mistakes. The proposed budget by House Republicans would cut the FAA’s operations by $1.4 billion. One-time budget cuts would reduce staffing not just for the coming year, but for the next decade.



“Every time there’s a threat of a government shutdown, the agency spends weeks preparing for it. And then Congress, at the eleventh hour, kicks the can,” Rinaldi says. “We keep going through the same exercise, and nobody&#8217;s really working on modernizing the system or getting a system that works. We’re just waiting on Congress, to see if they’re going to fund the system.”



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
How to Protect Yourself from Flight Disruptions
</blockquote>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-in-a-summer-filled-with-massive-flight-disruptions-it-will-be-everyday-airline-passengers-who-bear-the-pain-here-are-some-steps-that-can-reduce-your-risk">In a summer filled with massive flight disruptions, it will be everyday airline passengers who bear the pain. Here are some steps that can reduce your risk:</h2>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-choose-the-earliest-possible-flight-of-the-day">🛫&nbsp;Choose the earliest possible flight of the day.</h3>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-statistically-your-flight-is-less-likely-to-get-canceled-the-earlier-in-the-day-you-fly-kathleen-bangs-a-former-commercial-airline-pilot-and-current-spokesperson-for-flightaware-told-forbes-last-year-in-the-summer-stormy-weather-tends-to-be-more-problematic-in-afternoons-and-evenings-but-any-time-of-year-early-flights-have-the-least-cancellations">“Statistically your flight is less likely to get canceled the earlier in the day you fly,” Kathleen Bangs, a former commercial airline pilot and current spokesperson for&nbsp;<a href="https://flightaware.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">FlightAware</a>, told&nbsp;Forbes&nbsp;last year. “In the summer, stormy weather tends to be more problematic in afternoons and evenings. But any time of year, early flights have the least cancellations.”</h4>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-s-more-there-is-often-a-domino-effect-where-one-canceled-flight-leads-to-a-second-and-then-a-third-late-day-flights-get-canceled-more-often-because-planes-never-make-it-to-their-departure-airport-one-of-bangs-favorite-flightaware-tools-can-give-travelers-an-early-heads-up-that-a-problem-may-be-brewing-enter-your-flight-information-and-then-click-the-where-is-my-plane-now-link-just-under-the-flight-number-you-ll-be-able-to-see-if-the-plane-is-ahead-of-schedule-on-time-or-behind-schedule-and-act-accordingly">What’s more, there is often a domino effect, where one canceled flight leads to a second and then a third. Late-day flights get canceled more often because planes never make it to their departure airport. One of Bangs’ favorite FlightAware tools can give travelers an early heads-up that a problem may be brewing.&nbsp;<a href="https://flightaware.com/live/findflight" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Enter your flight information</a>, and then click the “Where is my plane now?” link just under the flight number. You’ll be able to see if the plane is ahead of schedule, on time or behind schedule and act accordingly.</h4>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-keep-an-eye-on-the-weather-forecast">⛅&nbsp;Keep an eye on the weather forecast.</h3>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-storms-and-other-weather-events-can-compound-the-country-s-already-fragile-air-travel-map-what-s-important-to-understand-especially-as-america-enters-hurricane-season-on-june-1-is-that-bad-weather-in-a-specific-region-can-quickly-turn-into-a-national-air-travel-problem-because-of-how-airlines-reuse-planes-and-crews-for-multiple-trips-during-the-day">Storms and other weather events can compound the country’s already fragile air travel map. What’s important to understand—especially as America enters hurricane season on June 1—is that bad weather in a specific region can quickly turn into a national air travel problem because of how airlines reuse planes and crews for multiple trips during the day.</h4>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-be-flexible">😎&nbsp;Be flexible.</h3>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-cancellations-on-friday-can-have-an-echo-effect-on-saturday-as-the-previous-day-s-passengers-scramble-to-be-re-accommodated-before-your-departure-day-think-ahead-to-what-you-would-do-if-your-flight-is-canceled-stay-flexible-with-your-dates-as-it-may-be-hard-to-catch-another-on-the-same-day-or-even-the-next">Cancellations on Friday can have an echo effect on Saturday, as the previous day’s passengers scramble to be re-accommodated. Before your departure day, think ahead to what you would do if your flight is canceled. Stay flexible with your dates, as it may be hard to catch another on the same day or even the next.</h4>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-for-large-fixed-events-such-as-weddings-or-cruise-departures-it-can-be-wise-to-pad-a-getaway-with-an-extra-day-to-give-yourself-extra-wiggle-room">For large fixed events such as weddings or cruise departures, it can be wise to pad a getaway with an extra day to give yourself extra wiggle room.</h4>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-use-your-phone">📱&nbsp;Use your phone.</h3>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-before-flying-download-the-airline-s-app-and-program-the-customer-service-number-into-your-contacts-the-moment-a-flight-is-canceled-there-will-be-a-stampede-to-the-service-counter-but-you-ll-likely-be-able-to-book-yourself-on-a-new-flight-much-faster-on-a-smartphone">Before flying, download the airline’s app and program the customer service number into your contacts. The moment a flight is canceled, there will be a stampede to the service counter. But you’ll likely be able to book yourself on a new flight much faster on a smartphone.</h4>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-know-your-rights">📖&nbsp;Know your rights.</h3>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-if-your-flight-is-canceled-or-delayed-consult-the-department-of-transportation-s-aviation-consumer-protection-website-which-shows-side-by-side-comparisons-of-what-each-airline-offers-in-the-event-of-a-controllable-delay-or-cancellation-for-example-vouchers-are-provided-if-disruptions-are-caused-by-an-issue-such-as-understaffing-or-a-mechanical-glitch-but-not-if-flights-are-delayed-or-cancelled-for-reasons-outside-an-airline-s-control-such-as-weather">If your flight is canceled or delayed, consult the Department of Transportation’s <a href="https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/airline-customer-service-dashboard" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Aviation Consumer Protection website</a>, which shows side-by-side comparisons of what each airline offers in the event of a controllable delay or cancellation. For example, vouchers are provided if disruptions are caused by an issue such as understaffing or a mechanical glitch but not if flights are delayed or cancelled for reasons outside an airline’s control, such as weather.<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/"></a></h4>



By Suzanne Rowan Kelleher, Forbes Africa

Tag: Coronavirus Pandemic

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA