African Bitcoin Builders Take The Global Stage
Bitcoin builders from across Africa are getting invited to speak at some of the biggest Bitcoin gatherings in the world this October, and the pattern says something bigger than any single event. From Lagos to Cotonou to Cape Town to Nairobi, people who built payment tools for their own communities are now being asked to explain how they did it.
In Berlin, bitcoin++ will hold its payments edition from October 1 to 3, and BitSpenda co-founder Bright Kportiklah is on the lineup to speak on Bitcoin payments in the real world, with lessons drawn from building payment infrastructure across African markets. His talk is expected to touch on adoption, usability, and what it actually takes to get ordinary people using Bitcoin day to day, not just holding it.
Meanwhile in Benin, the sixth edition of Bitcoin Mastermind just wrapped in Cotonou. The event runs on one strict rule, Bitcoin only, no altcoins, and this year it packed in a developer day, adoption panels, and a hackathon final over three days. The event was started by Loïc Kassamoto and Mehoun Mèhou, the same pair behind btcflashxyz, a gateway that lets merchants accept and use Bitcoin, and Bitcoin Benin, the community that runs the annual gathering. One attendee summed up why the CFA franc region keeps producing Bitcoin builders: in a zone tied to a currency still managed out of Paris and Brussels, Bitcoin works as a savings tool and a remittance rail that does not need anyone’s sign off.
Down in South Africa, Bitcoin Ekasi founder Hermann Vivier is set to keynote Plan B Forum in Lugano, Switzerland, on October 23 and 24. His session is billed around Bitcoin circular economies, the idea of local ecosystems where people earn, spend, and save entirely in Bitcoin. Vivier has spent years building exactly that kind of ecosystem in Mossel Bay, and his message is consistent wherever he speaks, that buying Bitcoin is one thing, but building an economy around it is a different and harder job.
Closer to home in Nairobi, Minmo held an agent meetup at NodeNBO, bringing together the community members who work as Minmo’s Bitcoin agents, the trusted local go betweens who help people convert cash to Bitcoin and back. Minmo, founded in Kenya in 2025, runs on a simple premise, that most people trust a known person more than an app when it comes to buying Bitcoin, so it turns community leaders into paid, professional Bitcoin agents.