Anyone who has family in Africa or friends on the continent understands how difficult it is to transfer money via remittances outside of Bitcoin. With the recent government banning of Twitter and continual debasement of the naira in Nigeria, the process can be very frustrating. For many, it’s not necessarily the promise of profit that gets poor people on board to use Bitcoin, it’s the ability to remit value outside of the traditional financial rails.
The promise of participating for the first time in a system of exchange where the same rules apply to everyone, regardless of their access to traditional finance, is a major driver of Bitcoin adoption in places like Nigeria. Bitcoin’s future in Africa looks very promising, particularly given dynamics such as Kenya’s, where one-fifth of adults were still unbanked as of 2017, though it leads the continent in share of internet users.
Such dynamics create environments where people could soon be buying bitcoin by the millions, and this is becoming the case in Nigeria.
According to The Conversion, for instance, “The Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics said in 2020 that 40% or 83 million Nigerians live in poverty. Although Nigeria’s poverty profile for 2021 has not yet been released, it is estimated that the number of poor people will increase to 90 million, or 45% of the population, in 2022.”
Bitcoin has skyrocketed in the country, likely due in large part to this poverty and people looking to opt into bitcoin as a store-of-value measure. The country recently ranked in the top-10 out of 154 countries analyzed for crypto adoption.
Abubakar Nur Khalil And Recursive Capital
To explore this trend further, I had the honor of speaking with Abubakar Nur Khalil, a tech wiz newly coming out of the shadows of poverty in West Africa.
Whether it is by spear-heading Recursive Capital as its CEO or in his role as a Bitcoin Core contributor who has received $50,000 in bitcoin from the Human Rights Foundation for his work…
