Putting Bitcoin on African Gaming Phones – Bitcoin Magazine
This is an opinion editorial by Heritage Falodun, a Bitcoin analyst and data scientist based in Nigeria.
Expanding Bitcoin adoption across the African continent will come not only through bitcoin’s declaration as legal tender, but also through easy and affordable access.
People’s opinions are colored with different perspectives, but mine is about painting the big picture of what Africans need: Africans want and will adopt any solution that can solve her problems in real time. Making payment rails less complex and being as low-tech as possible is actually one of the prerequisites for enabling financial inclusion and lowering user barriers to entry in Africa.
Machankura, for example, is a Bitcoin-focused payment solution that integrates Africa’s existing telecommunications infrastructure with the Bitcoin second-layer protocol known as the Lightning Network with the aim of enabling financial inclusion and bringing instant payment service to Africa’s nooks and crannies in a pinch. road. On the other hand, BitText is a Bitcoin open source project in the pipeline aiming to achieve the Machankura solution in a non-preservative way.
Let’s take a deeper dive into what this entails and understand why these solutions can work exceptionally well for Africans.
A feature phone is a class of mobile phone that retains the shape of previous generations of mobile phones, usually with push-button inputs and small, non-touch screens. Next, smartphones are portable computing devices that combine mobile phone functions and computing functions in one device, distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, which enable wider software functionality.
Typical feature phone. Image source: Science Museum.
Unlike many other regions around the world where smartphones make up almost the entire market, in Africa, feature phones make up a significant share of the mobile phone market. Not surprisingly, “Of the 40 to 50 million mobile phones shipped in Africa per quarter, more than half are feature phones,” according to Statista. In fact, in the first quarter of 2022, smartphone shipments totaled 19.7 million units, while nearly 22 million feature phones were shipped. The reasons behind this are not far-fetched: smartphones are more expensive compared to feature phones, and a high percentage of the African population probably uses feature phones because they are cheaper, even if they lack the juicy features of smartphones.
Image source: Statista.com
Since a large portion of the African population uses these devices, promoting financial inclusion for this set of users in a decentralized manner requires building products that can be used on feature phones. Realizing that Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) technology works interoperably on both feature phones and smartphones, African Bitcoin developers have taken it upon themselves to develop Machankura and BitText via this communication protocol.
Users can think of Machankura as similar to Wallet of Satoshi, but in its skeleton form, without a cumbersome user interface. Instead of having a smartphone app, you interact with the wallet via the USSD menu. Machankura manages the requests through its custom Application Package Interface (API) infrastructure with Lightning Network. Users broadcast requests over mobile networks and not an internet connection, the request is then accepted and forwarded over the internet and the Lightning Network via the Machankura database and existing Bitcoin and Lightning nodes.
As of this writing, Machankura appears to be working well, with the website indicating that it has coverage in at least six African countries – Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda – with the USSD codes and step-by-step instructions for use included also.
Calling any of these codes in these jurisdictions should directly result in users sending bitcoin, receiving bitcoin, reviewing account details (balance and transaction history) or purchasing goods/services.
Image source: author
When they look at the smartphone wallets feature, they are happy to link your email address to your account for identification and retrieval purposes, so you can install them on multiple devices or retrieve the account on a new device. In Machankura’s case, it is linked to your phone number. Assuming your phone or sim card is stolen, it means your money is also stolen or if someone sim switches your number they can access your funds. You are expected to leverage Machankura as a wonderful payment infrastructure rather than a long-term self-storage product with the hope of anticipating various improvements and updates as it continues to evolve.
BitText appears to be an open source version of Machankura, throwing its two hands in the air in anticipation of global contributions that can fix and improve this Bitcoin-on-USSD solution by better targeting self-storage, security and privacy, as well as transaction interoperability with Bitcoin’s Layer 2 Lightning Network.
Banking the unbanked by building products focused on addressing Africans’ specific settlement and payment system problems, while leveraging decentralized innovation like Bitcoin, is a journey Bitcoin developers in Africa have embarked on intensely over the past couple of months. This effort led by various initiatives and the collective support of the plebs and the Africa Bitcoin ecosystem deserves thanks.
This is a guest post by Heritage Falodun. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
