“`html
Greetings to the wilderness — the Bitcoin Jungle.
Bitcoin Jungle represents a bitcoin circular economy situated in the Puntarenas province of Uvita, Costa Rica, where upwards of 600 vendors accept bitcoin. It’s also where Francis Pouliot has resided for the last three years.
This Canadian expatriate and founder of Bull Bitcoin desires other Bitcoin enthusiast expatriates traveling to the region, and Costa Rica broadly, to experience the sense of belonging he feels in the nation — embraced.
For this purpose, he and the Bull Bitcoin team developed a web application that operates within the Bitcoin Jungle wallet, an open-source, custodial Lightning wallet, and alongside other Lightning wallets.
Via the web app interface, Bitcoin aficionados can settle payments for nearly anything using bitcoin over Lightning, regardless of whether the vendor or counterparty accepts it.
Utilizing the Bitcoin Jungle app or the web portal directly, users can transact with bitcoin and have their bills reconciled in the local currency, colónes, via the nation’s national electronic payment system, SINPE (Sistema Nacional de Pagos Electrónicos). (This is akin to how Strike, Bringin, and Bull Bitcoin enable users to use bitcoin over Lightning to clear fiat invoices through the United States’ ACH system, Europe’s SEPA system, and Canada’s Interac system, respectively.)
As over 90% of the nation’s populace aged 18 and above utilize SINPE for everyday transactions, the Bull Bitcoin app facilitates participation for non-residents in the nation’s digital economy (you must reside in the country to establish a SINPE account) and/or for those desiring to adhere to a bitcoin standard.
“This permits individuals to live solely off of bitcoin,” Pouliot communicated to Bitcoin Magazine. “Every vendor that accepts fiat payments through SINPE in Costa Rica can now receive payments from a Bitcoiner.”
Functionality of the Bull Bitcoin Costa Rica Web App
When individuals utilize the Bull Bitcoin web app in Costa Rica, they make a payment to a backend Bull Bitcoin Lightning node. Once Bull Bitcoin processes this payment, it executes a fiat settlement via SINPE on the user’s behalf.
Bull Bitcoin manages hundreds of such transactions daily in Costa Rica. Between May 2024 and May 2025, Bull Bitcoin processed 32,774 conversions from bitcoin to fiat.
Pouliot takes pride in ensuring that the Bull Bitcoin web app is as reliable as a credit card since he understands that many individuals in the country, including himself, rely on it consistently.
“If you find yourself at a gas station in Costa Rica and lack a credit card after refueling your vehicle, you need that Lightning-to-SINPE transaction to function, or else you’re in trouble,” Pouliot clarified.
“This is how many of us exist here. We don’t utilize credit cards. We don’t possess cash. So, if I visit the gas station, this app better work perfectly. Otherwise, I just refueled my vehicle, and I’m dealing with a very upset gas station attendant,” he remarked.
“The success rate is significantly over 99% — nearly 100%. I don’t recall any Lightning payments failing. And that’s because Bull Bitcoin is operated by ardent Bitcoin supporters who are adept at navigating Lightning Network liquidity.”
Pouliot noted that the most challenging aspect of maintaining the app’s functionality isn’t operating the Lightning node or connecting the banking API. Instead, he stated that the biggest hurdle is acquiring the fiat liquidity in a less widely accepted fiat currency like the colón.
“There exists no international open marketplace for low-liquidity fiat currencies and bitcoin,” Pouliot clarified.
“Neither Kraken, Binance, nor Coinbase lists the colón — there’s no bitcoin-to-colónes order book. We need to sell the bitcoin to another party to obtain the fiat for paying the fiat merchants,” he elaborated.
He explained that, due to major bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges not listing the colón, he effectively establishes the exchange rate for it by creating a “virtual bitcoin-to-colón exchange rate.” To derive this rate, Pouliot considers the colón-to-U.S. dollar rate and the USD-to-bitcoin rate, then applies a 1% gross margin to ensure Bull Bitcoin remains profitable while keeping the service accessible for users.
He asserted that ensuring liquidity is indeed the primary challenge in this process and expressed respect for others globally who provide a similar service with comparable reliability.
“Whenever you notice a group of individuals who have achieved this fluid operation, understand that while it appears straightforward, it can be very intricate on the backend,” Pouliot mentioned. “That’s why, for example, I find Tando remarkably impressive.”
Kenya’s Tando
The Kenyan iteration of the Bull Bitcoin app isn’t merely a web app, but a fully functional app, although the team behind Tando drew inspiration from Bull Bitcoin’s achievements in Costa Rica.
“The Bitcoin Jungle team shared a video on their X where they entered a gas station and utilized bitcoin while the vendor received local currency,” Jason, one of Tando’s co-founders, revealed to Bitcoin Magazine.
“`
“I was like, ‘That’s really neat.’ We thought it might work here if Safaricom [a Kenyan mobile telecommunications provider] has an API,” he remarked.
“And with just a bit of investigation, we determined that ‘Yes, we can achieve this.’”
Jason and his co-founder, Sabina Waithira, initiated the application in July 2024, allowing Kenyan users to settle bills in Kenyan shillings via M-PESA (Safaricom facilitated the launch of M-PESA), a mobile money platform functioning in over six African nations, while making payments with bitcoin through Lightning.
With Tando, users can pay bills, purchase items, and transfer Kenyan shillings with nothing except the recipient’s phone number and a Lightning wallet. (M-PESA solely requires a recipient’s phone number for transferring funds.)
The user sends bitcoin from the Lightning wallet they prefer, Tando’s Lightning node accepts the bitcoin, and Tando clears the fiat M-PESA bill for the sender.
All of this occurs within mere seconds.
I know from personal experience because I utilized Tando while attending the African Bitcoin Conference in Kenya in 2024.
While in Kenya, I used Tando to pay taxi fares and restaurant bills via M-PESA, which I otherwise couldn’t have done, as I wasn’t in the nation long enough to open an M-PESA account and fund it with Kenyan shillings. As a short-term visitor, it was significantly easier to spend bitcoin into the local economy through Tando, which doesn’t necessitate a sign-up process.
Simplifying Bitcoin Spending for Kenyans
Waithira wasn’t aware of the developments regarding Lightning-to-fiat transactions in Costa Rica until Jason pointed it out to her.
What drove her to realize Tando was instead her own experience attempting to use bitcoin in Kenya.
“I previously worked for Bitcoin Dada [a digital Bitcoin education platform and community for African women] and would sometimes receive payments in bitcoin,” Waithira shared with Bitcoin Magazine. “It was challenging to use that Bitcoin directly.”
While Waithira devised inventive ways to use her bitcoin, such as tipping servers at restaurants, she frequently encountered the same inquiry from those service workers: “How can I use this bitcoin?”
“We didn’t have a solid answer to this question,” Waithira stated. “Thus, this also inspired Tando.”
Waithira mentioned that “Kenyans are very quick learners and quite inquisitive,” making it easier to introduce them to Bitcoin and Tando, while Jason noted that Kenyans have been prepared for Bitcoin, given their experience with the mobile money transformation through M-PESA over the past fifteen years.
Waithira also indicated they aimed to make Tando as user-friendly as M-PESA is — to avoid intimidating users with a complex interface.
“We aimed to replicate the M-PERA experience,” Waithira described.
“I prefer not to think too much when using apps, and I don’t believe our clients do either,” she added. “We kept this in perspective throughout Tando’s design.”
Waithira and Jason evidently did something right, as Tando has been steadily gaining popularity among ordinary Kenyans. It now handles over 100 transactions each day.
Furthermore, beyond merely aiding more Kenyans to live on a bitcoin standard, the app inspired a developer on the opposite side of the African continent to create a similar solution for the citizens of his homeland, Ghana.
Ghana’s BitSpenda
Bright Kportiklah also participated in the 2024 African Bitcoin Conference and was among the many attendees who utilized Tando while in Kenya.
Inspired by his experiences in Kenya and the connections he established at the conference, the software developer returned to Ghana intending to create his own version of Tando.
Within a few months, Kportiklah had a beta version of a Lightning-to-fiat interface he had developed — BitSpenda — operational. He accomplished this partly due to assistance from experienced Nigerian Bitcoin entrepreneur Bernard Parah, founder and CEO of Bitnob, whom Kportiklah had met at the conference.
Bitnob is a nearly decade-old financial services enterprise that utilizes payment infrastructure built on Bitcoin and Lightning. Parah and the Bitnob team aided Kportiklah in connecting to local off-ramps in Africa, including mobile money systems in Ghana and Kenya and bank accounts in Nigeria. (BitSpenda currently caters to the citizens of these three nations.)
“Connecting to these local off-ramps via API as a small fintech is quite challenging,” Kportiklah conveyed to Bitcoin Magazine.
“When I mentioned to Bernard at the conference that I wanted to create something akin to Tando, he provided me a contact in Ghana,” he added.
This contact helped Kportiklah link BitSpenda to Ghana’s mobile money framework.
Kportiklah also mentioned that Kgothatso Ngako, the founder of Machankura (which enables users to send bitcoin over Lightning using a feature phone), and Onionsman of Bitpension (a bitcoin pension account service based in Nigeria) have provided valuable guidance on the project.
“I met all these individuals at the conference in Kenya, and they have significantly contributed to helping me develop this,” Kportiklah remarked.
BitSpenda launched on March 7 this year.
To utilize the web app, senders can search for the recipients they wish to send funds to by
“`html
telephone number in Ghana and Kenya and by bank account number in Nigeria.
Once the sender has located the recipient they desire and decides to make a payment, a Lightning invoice or QR code is created, and, nearly immediately, the bitcoin the user transmits is converted into the recipient’s local currency and the transaction is finalized.
“Within 30 seconds, the recipient will obtain the funds, and the sender can verify on BitSpenda whether the money was received or not,” Kportiklah explained.
If a transaction does not succeed, which has only occurred in less than 1% of transaction attempts so far, Kportiklah can manually transfer the payment to the recipient and inform the sender that the transaction has succeeded.
As of late April 2025, the app had processed thousands of U.S. dollars’ worth of transactions. Kportiklah asserted that the app has inspired more Ghanaians to utilize bitcoin not solely because they believe bitcoin is a superior form of currency than Ghanaian cedis, the nation’s fiat money, but for another significant reason as well.
“Ghanaians are more inclined to utilize Bitcoin due to the value it provides in terms of finance,” Kportiklah noted.
“For instance, in Ghana, if you maintain your funds in your bank accounts, at the month’s end, the bank will impose fees, but this is not the case when individuals use bitcoin instead of their banks,” he added.
“Some individuals also simply perceive bitcoin as a currency that carries more value compared to the Ghanaian cedi and opt to use it for that reason.”
Kportiklah also pointed out that an app like BitSpenda is especially useful in Ghana, where outside of the Bitcoin circular economy that Kportiklah serves as the technical advisor for — Bitcoin Dua — nearly no merchants accept bitcoin.
And he aspires to not only provide this service to Ghanaians but to Africans in over a dozen nations.
“A year from now, we aim to be in no fewer than 15 African countries,” Kportiklah stated.
It’s difficult to doubt he’ll achieve this when, in less than four months, he successfully launched BitSpenda in three countries.
Kportiklah mentioned he is currently finalizing the required documentation to make BitSpenda accessible to members of the remaining 12 countries he intends to serve.
He must act swiftly, however, considering that the team from Tando is planning to expand into Uganda soon and that a new web app developed by a Senegalese programmer — Banxaas — now facilitates bitcoin-to-fiat payments in Senegal, as well.
A Labor Of Love
The irony in what Pouliot, Waithira, Jason, and Kportiklah have developed is that they’re less driven by earning money than they are by generating bitcoin wealth.
“This is not a lucrative venture,” Pouliot remarked dryly about Bull’s Bitcoin Costa Rica web app.
“In fact, this comes with a very high cost for us — it’s quite complex and has a lot of overhead. Thus, it’s approached with the attitude of ‘Perhaps one day it will be profitable,’ but we engage in this more to be part of the Bitcoin Jungle mission of upholding infrastructure to support Lightning,” he added.
“Not to imply that it will never become a profitable enterprise. I genuinely encourage individuals to see it as an opportunity for potential profit. However, on a larger scale, it’s very challenging to execute.”
Neither the creators of Tando nor Kportiklah have devised a monetization strategy as of yet.
“Our business model is that we acquire bitcoin,” Jason stated half-jokingly.
He mentioned that he and Waithira have received numerous requests from other wallets wishing to utilize their Safaricom API, and they are contemplating charging a fee for these wallets to do so. Nevertheless, this does not appear to be their primary focus, as they aim for Kenyans to recognize bitcoin as a means of exchange.
Kportiklah shares a similar perspective:
“The current goal is simply to create a tool that will assist people in utilizing Bitcoin effortlessly,” he stated.
Near the conclusion of my conversation with Pouliot, he reiterated the importance of recognizing that it requires a significant amount of effort from devoted Bitcoiners to achieve the “with ease” aspect, noting that projects like these are most effectively developed and managed at the local level by individuals who possess a thorough understanding of the traditional financial system with which they are interacting.
“These products are best constructed as grassroots initiatives because they necessitate knowledge of the banking landscape on the ground,” Pouliot clarified.
“This is why we don’t have numerous expansion strategies; however, I’m pleased to support other local initiatives with technology and guidance,” he added, before expressing admiration for what NostrPIX, another Lightning-to-fiat payment application, is accomplishing in Brazil.
He concluded by again commending his colleagues across the globe who are effectively building and running such interfaces:
“Whenever you witness a local group of Bitcoiners succeeding, be assured that they are truly remarkable and that it wasn’t an easy feat to accomplish.”
Don’t miss the opportunity to acquire The Lightning Issue — featuring a unique discussion with Lightning co-creator Tadge Dryja. It thoroughly examines Bitcoin’s most influential scaling component. Limited edition. Available solely while stock lasts.
This segment is an article highlighted in the most recent Print issue of Bitcoin Magazine, The Lightning Issue. We’re presenting it here to illustrate the concepts addressed throughout the complete edition.
Source link
“`
