Bitvice We thought it would be great to look at what South Africans are doing to make Bitcoin better and more accessible to the world – this is the real ‘Proudly South African’ movement.
Most of the Bitcoin news is from the US or Europe, but at home, there are smart South Africans trying to bring Bitcoin closer to the people.
Have a look at what they are doing:
1. Exonumia & Bitcoin Ekasi
We’ve talked about these two initiatives before, but another introduction is definitely needed.
Exonumia is focused on educating millions of Africans about Bitcoin. They believe the best way to do this is through books in indigenous languages. After meeting Kgothatso, who runs Exonumia, our understanding of the project has become clearer. The size and scope of the project is immense in nature and there is a lot happening in the background; forming groups, funding, rights to books etc. We at Bitvice will continue to support this incredible project.
Bitcoin Ekasi, in cooperation with The Surfer Kids is ‘building a Bitcoin economy using the Lightning Network in a township in South Africa.’ They are working with Bitcoin Beach, which was the catalyst for El Salvador adopting Bitcoin. They are trying to build a small ecosystem of Bitcoin payments, which hopefully evolves into a national revolution.
2. Sparrow Wallet – Craig Raw
You might not have heard of Craig Raw, but he is certainly doing us all proud. He has built ‘one of the best Bitcoin wallets in the world’; Sparrow Wallet.
He has done this project out of his own volition, with his own time and money, and his work has evolved into a globally-accepted, world-class application.
He has recently updated Sparrow to include Whirlpool, which increases privacy for users. As we’ve illustrated before, one can use Whirlpool to remove their identity from KYC’d Bitcoin.
Sparrow can be used to set up self-custody wallets – single and multi-sig – and it has frontrun many large teams/wallets to be one of the first to offer taproot address generation.
3. Synonym
Synonym isn’t necessarily a South African initiative, but definitely a global one. It does however, have two key members on the team (Gr0kchain and Jason van den Berg) who are both South African.
This massive project, which has been in development for 25 months, is quite hard to summarise due to its enormous scope. But its main focus point is to move Tether ($72Bn Marketcap) to Bitcoin. Tether currently works on Ethereum, Tron and others. The two directors (one of them being the CTO of Tether) are intending to move a portion of its structure to Lightning Bitcoin.
Other products include a Podcast Paywall which is quite a unique idea. The product (which is currently live) only opens media to payers, once a threshold is reached.
They will also be working on anonymity on the internet and other great initiatives. You can read more on this thread.
