Weekly Brief 2026/18
In Berlín, El Salvador, a person can spend an entire day using only Bitcoin — coffee, food, transport, groceries, phone bills — and that has been true for three years. No pilot program, no corporate sponsor. Just a community that decided to build it. Meanwhile, Block laid out a stack this week that embeds Bitcoin across its merchant and consumer products: 5% BTC back at Square merchants, automatic conversion of Cash App P2P payments into bitcoin, Bitkey self-custody, and NFC tap-to-pay coming to Square terminals.
On the ground, students at the University of Goma in the DRC bought 25 chickens from the campus farm with Bitcoin — the first African college to accept it. In Zambia, a village runs on Bitcoin for water, restaurant meals, and local merchant purchases. Kenya's Bitcoin Chama is scaling a full circular economy in Kiamokama ward — 8 salaried staff, 25 beehives, and a target of 25,000 families. South African merchants keep adding checkout through PeachPayments while Nick Darlington launched Bitcoin Friendly SA to grow the local payment ecosystem. In Aruba, one of the longest-running community BTCPay Server instances is migrating after five years of uptime.
Three years in El Salvador. Three months in Zambia. The pattern is the same — people build what they need.
These examples are compelling, especially the circular economies emerging organically.
Do you have any visibility into retention and frequency of use in these communities?
It’s one thing to enable spending, but another to see Bitcoin consistently used as a medium of exchange rather than just an entry/exit rail.
The Berlín / El Salvador data point is actually more durable than most circular-economy claims because it's been observed continuously for ~3 years across multiple researchers (https://galoy.io, tourism interviews, on-chain analysis of Wallet of Satoshi inflows in that geofence). The base rate for "circular economy" pilots that survive past 18 months without external grant funding is roughly 0.
What separates Berlín from the other 200+ "Bitcoin towns" announced since 2021: (a) Lightning-first not on-chain, so fees don't kill micro-transactions, (b) at least one anchor merchant who pays staff in BTC creating recurring sat velocity, (c) a local dev community fixing UX bugs in real-time. Without any one of those three, the loop breaks within a quarter.
Block's stack announcement is interesting because Square's 5% BTC-back is the first time a major US payment processor turns the merchant side of every transaction into a buy order at scale. If retention plays out the way Cash App's P2P-to-BTC conversion has, that's a structurally different demand source than retail spot buying.