I then met some of the bravest men and women I have ever had the opportunity to meet, who are human rights defenders and activists from around the world. You might have met, like if you come to Ghana, hope you were there, you will see Farida Nabourema from Togo, for example, Fadi Elsalameen from Palestine, Roya Mahboob from Afghanistan, who created the first Afghanistan all-women robotics team when women got not allowed to study and so on and so on and the list goes on. They all realized that the problems and challenges they had around the world, whether it was Latin America, Africa or post-Soviet regions of the world, although they seemed very different, and the authoritarian regimes that they were fighting seemed very different, they all had a common thread: these groups used weapon money and through high/hyper levels of inflation and many other mechanisms. They realized that if they wanted to push back against these forces, they had to be able to control their own money. So they weren’t Bitcoiners, but they came to Bitcoin because they needed to solve problems, but they ran into problems with scaling.
They wanted to roll these out to millions of people at a rapid scale in several of these regions. And what I realized there was that only Fedimint could do it. This was in May. It went away, Fedimint is an incredible open source protocol that we supported and allowed to organically grow, but I came back on June 1st, talked to – and now the co-founders have grown into myself, Eric and Justin Moon, another incredible soul. I explained what I had seen and observed and who I spoke to and we all agreed that we need to speed this up. And so Fedi was born. Fedi’s goal is to take Fedimint as the base protocol and to accelerate the adoption of bitcoin to billions of users in the coming years because we can’t wait. We have a technology that enables rapid deployment of bitcoin with incredible levels of privacy, high levels of security and direct integration with Lightning. So why are we waiting? There is no reason for that. And that’s where Fedi’s journey began.
