The African Bitcoin ecosystem has a credibility crisis

Five years ago, when I began convening the Africa Bitcoin Conference, I was driven by a simple conviction: that Bitcoin represented far more than another financial technology, that it offered our continent a chance to rethink one of the deepest structural constraints inherited from colonialism, monetary fragmentation. Africa is a continent of 54 countries and 46 currencies that barely speak to one another, most of them holding little or no value beyond their own borders, so that cross-border trade routinely requires converting local currencies into dollars, euros, or pounds before converting them back again, a costly detour that punishes African commerce at every crossing. Governments borrow in foreign currencies and repay in foreign currencies, exposing entire nations to exchange rate shocks over which they have no control, while many of our own currencies keep losing value, sometimes because our economies remain tethered to external monetary systems, sometimes because domestic political decisions have quietly hollowed out public confidence in them.

For me, this was never merely an economic question. It was, from the very beginning, a political one. As someone who has spent years challenging French neocolonial influence in West Africa, and the CFA franc system in particular, I recognized in Bitcoin a struggle I already knew intimately. My country’s first president, Sylvanus Olympio, was assassinated after pursuing monetary sovereignty for Togo, and whether one attributes that assassination solely to his monetary policy or to a wider political context, the episode remains inseparable from the long history of African attempts to reclaim economic independence. Bitcoin, then, appeared to me not as a speculative instrument but as part of a much older conversation, one about freedom, sovereignty, and the right of a people to determine the terms of their own survival.

“Bitcoin is not a speculative instrument, but a vital struggle for African monetary sovereignty.”

When we launched the Africa Bitcoin Conference in 2022, the ecosystem we were gathering around was still remarkably small, fewer than twenty initiatives across the entire continent genuinely working on Bitcoin, most of them concentrated on exchanges, trading, or remittances. Those services mattered, but they represented only one narrow dimension of what Bitcoin could offer, and I believed then, as I believe now, that Africa needed something considerably larger: builders working on solutions rooted in African realities, educators and researchers and entrepreneurs and policymakers and developers and communities labouring together to discover how open monetary infrastructure might solve the problems that actually confront ordinary Africans. That vision carried us through years of difficulty. Organizing a continental conference around Bitcoin was never an easy undertaking in a climate where anything associated with cryptocurrency was routinely dismissed as fraud, and convincing institutions, governments, businesses, and communities that the subject deserved serious discussion demanded a patience that, at times, felt inexhaustible.

Those early struggles, however, are not the story I want to tell today. The real story is what has happened to this ecosystem in the years since, and on paper, its growth looks spectacular. Hundreds of Bitcoin initiatives now claim to exist across Africa. New projects surface almost weekly, new communities appear on social media every month, and new organizations announce, with great confidence, ambitious missions to transform the continent. Many observers celebrate these numbers as proof that Bitcoin adoption is accelerating across Africa. I no longer believe that conclusion reflects reality. What I see instead is the emergence of an incentive structure I recognize all too well from parts of the international development sector: a project is created in the name of serving a community, the community becomes the marketing material, the photographs and the reports become fundraising instruments, and the community itself remains largely unchanged, while the one person whose life consistently improves is the founder who built the project in its name.

Bitcoin has simply become the newest label attached to this old model. Attach the word to education, to football, to a village, to agriculture, to youth programs, to women’s cooperatives, to almost any activity that photographs well, produce a few compelling images, present an inspiring narrative, and sponsorships, grants, donations, and international speaking invitations soon follow. Many of the organizations funding these initiatives genuinely want to help Africa, and their intentions are often sincere; they are eager to show the world that Bitcoin adoption is spreading. 

But good intentions do not replace due diligence, and very few people stop to ask the difficult questions that would actually measure impact: how many people actually use the product, how many remain active six months later, what measurable economic problem has been solved, how much of the funding reached the community as opposed to administrative costs, travel budgets, and salaries, and what independent verification exists beyond a carefully selected set of photographs and social media posts. These questions are asked far too rarely, and in their absence the narrative becomes the product, the appearance of impact replaces impact itself. In many so-called adoption projects, participants barely understand what Bitcoin is; they are simply shown how to receive a small amount on a mobile wallet, and receiving five dollars does not constitute financial empowerment, let alone monetary sovereignty, yet these small demonstrations are repeatedly presented as evidence that entire communities are being transformed.

The numbers tell a different story, and here the timing matters as much as the scale. According to Chainalysis, Africa already had the fastest-growing rate of Bitcoin adoption in the world in 2021 and 2022, and I remember my own surprise when Togo, a country of barely nine million people, appeared that year among the top ten countries globally for Bitcoin adoption. That ranking had nothing to do with the community projects, the giveaways, or the podcasts that would only begin flooding our timelines afterward. Ordinary people were already finding their way to Bitcoin, quietly and on their own terms, well before anyone organized a meetup to announce their arrival. Most of the community projects that followed are not the ones driving that adoption at all, because the populations they claim to serve are, in the vast majority of cases, too poor to adopt anything in the first place; what these projects actually organize, more often than not, is a rotating cast of people distributing one dollar, two dollars, five dollars at a time, and calling the photograph that results “financial inclusion”.

If one combined every genuinely active participant across the many projects celebrated as proof of this adoption, I doubt the total would exceed ten thousand people. On a continent of well over one billion, that comparison becomes almost embarrassing. That is not a revolution and certainly not the transformation that so many public narratives suggest, and what concerns me most is not the failure inherent in experimentation, which is inevitable and even healthy, but the deception that has grown up alongside it. That deception is subtle. Bitcoin scams in Africa are no longer limited to promises of unrealistic investment returns; a more sophisticated form of exploitation has emerged, one that uses the poverty of communities as fundraising capital, distributing symbolic amounts of Bitcoin while collecting substantial funding elsewhere, presenting carefully curated stories in place of measurable outcomes, confusing visibility with impact, and replacing accountability with branding. This is gravely damaging: it erodes the credibility of Bitcoin in Africa, it misleads international supporters acting in good faith, it diverts scarce resources away from the builders doing serious work, and, most importantly, it exploits the very communities whose lives it claims to improve.

“Africa deserves genuine economic transformation, not just serving as a backdrop for Bitcoin fundraising.”

For too long, many of us have stayed silent, telling ourselves that criticism risks fracturing a young ecosystem that can ill afford division. I have come to believe that this silence is itself a form of complicity. If we truly believe Bitcoin can contribute to Africa’s future, then we owe this ecosystem the same standards we would demand anywhere else: real transparency, real accountability, real measurement, real communities, real adoption, real impact. I know that publishing this piece will make a great number of people unhappy, because they will recognize themselves in it. 

Much of what passes for evidence in this ecosystem lives on maps that can only be verified by scrolling through Twitter, dotted with projects whose only proof of existence is a thread and a hashtag, and a good number of the people building those projects move across this continent the way members of a cult move from one gathering to the next, from meetup to meetup, from conference to conference, convincing themselves each time that they are changing the world simply because they have changed rooms. Someone has to remain lucid in the middle of that motion and call a spade a spade, even when doing so disturbs a comfortable consensus. I am fully aware that this article will earn me enemies, some of them people I have shared stages and conferences with, but if the prospect of making enemies had ever frightened me, I would never have chosen to stand against a dictatorship, and I would certainly not have spent the better part of my adult life fighting one in my own country.

Africa deserves better than serving as a backdrop for fundraising campaigns, and Bitcoin deserves better than becoming another industry where a compelling story generates more value than genuine transformation. If this ecosystem is to mature, it must rediscover its original purpose. The objective was never to build organizations that survive on Bitcoin. The objective was, and remains, to build an Africa that can thrive because of it.

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