The Bitcoin Lightning–M-Pesa bridge we described in this article here is not just a clever payment trick. It is part of a much larger transformation that is starting to unfold across Africa.

To understand what is happening, you need to look beyond payments and see the broader economic implications.

This type of Bitcoin use is spreading rapidly across Africa, because digital local-currency rails are expanding everywhere. Safaricom is already expanding into many countries across the continent, and other operators are imitating the Safaricom/M-Pesa model.

Once those rails exist, integrating Bitcoin through apps like Tando becomes a trivial exercise.

This is enabling real capital formation across Africa.

Here, broken money used to be the norm. Now Bitcoin allows savings, capital formation, and productive investment from the bottom up in small, family-owned businesses.

What micro-credit initiatives once tried to achieve with enormous friction, Bitcoin now allows with almost no friction at all. Paradoxically, the bitcoin monetary revolution will launch Africa’s growth, while Western growth stagnates and falls back. And this is not tied to Africa’s abundant resources. It is a direct consequence of the clean capital formation through savings, rather than through fiat credit and debt, which Africans understand very well having lived through broken money all the time. Vice-versa the west is rapidly destroying capital formation through massive out of control credit creation. This is why development stagnates. Credit is used to enrich the elites, foster destructive wars, predate on the masses and not for productive investments.

The future?

Bright for Africa, immense development opportunities for a continent with immense resources which rapidly integrates bitcoin in the social and economic fabric. If anyone says that the same has been said for decades about Africa, there is one crucial difference: now they have bitcoin, before they had the debts and the slavery imposed by the fiat system.

This is why this will also slowly but inevitably change the political landscape. It will slowly neutralize the top-down corruption of local officials – this is by the way the elite which was educated in the West and financed by foreign powers - and weaken the system of financial colonization imposed through international banks and institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank.

Hakuna Matata with Bitcoin in Kenya.

Kwaheri.

PS: Contact us if you are a Charity or another organization which wants to learn how to use bitcoin to fund local projects and we will be happy to help. And if you have bitcoin capital to deploy in Africa let us know. There are lot’s of opportunities.