Weekly Brief 2026/19
Pick n Pay is now accepting Bitcoin at thousands of stores across South Africa — groceries, airtime, municipal bills, paid through a QR scan. In the same week, BTCPay Server reported that Unbankworld processed more than $40 million in Bitcoin payments across 41,416 transactions in six months on open-source infrastructure. BTC Map logged 2,500 net new merchants in April, with South Africa leading. And PeachPayments added four more e-commerce merchants to its Bitcoin checkout: TravelwingsZA, Flook, Plume Africa, and Lug to Lug.
On the ground, Afribit Kibera in Nairobi now counts 400-600 active Bitcoin users — earning, spending, and trusting each other before trusting the technology. At Kenyatta University, 98 students enrolled in self-custody workshops and paid for meals with 21 sats. In Kisii County, a Bitcoin Chama help group pools 1,100 sats every Sunday to buy household goods for one member. In Maputo, 63 people installed self-custody wallets and sent their first Lightning transactions at a Bitdevs meetup. In Bolivia, more than 15 pizzerias accept Bitcoin. In the Dominican Republic, adoption starts with one conversation — and one pizza shop said yes.
The infrastructure is scaling. The communities are compounding. The checkout counter is the same.
South Africa is an interesting case-rand inflation and a large unbanked population create genuine pull demand, not just merchant novelty. When adoption compounds in that kind of environment it tends to be stickier. Would love to see Lightning vs. on-chain split in the transaction data.
I wonder how much of received bitcoin these shops will hold or at least use it to pay their employees.
Otherwise... they are just throwing the sats to Saylors & Co.
Without a proper real circular economy, all these "accepting bitcoin" shops are in fact a source for Saylor & Co. and some day people will remain without sats and will be forced to go back to fiat.
People have no idea how much damage they are doing by accepting BTC and instantly selling it for fiat. You are much better not accepting it at all.