Dakar, the capital of the West African nation of Senegal, now boasts an annual Pan-African Bitcoin conference, over 10 merchants accepti
Dakar, the capital of the West African nation of Senegal, now boasts an annual Pan-African Bitcoin conference, over 10 merchants accepting Bitcoin, a local peer-to-peer BTC exchange and a budding Bitcoin community.
What’s more, the speed at which Bitcoin’s progress is unwinding is staggering. The city hosted the DakarBTC Days conference just 10 months after the country’s first “in real life” Bitcoin meetup. All of this is despite a brutal bear market that has put a big dent in Bitcoin adoption.
Why is Bitcoin bubbling in Senegal? Is this country on the path to “hyperbitcoinization,” or at least more entrenched Bitcoin adoption and use? Could Senegal be the next country to follow in El Salvador’s footsteps?
I wanted to find out. I had missed out on the inception of Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador in 2019, so I wanted to explore what a bottom-up, Bitcoin-circular economy might look like in West Africa. This is that story so far.
A colonial currency
The West African Economic and Monetary Union CFA franc is an awful currency. The French created it; they control its conversion rate; they even design and print the notes for use in Africa. A Frenchman sitting in the historic university town of Clermond-Ferrand conjures up the designs in use on CFA notes used by millions of Africans across 13 countries — despite the fact that they might never have set foot in Africa.
The CFA is currently pegged to the euro at a fixed rate of 655.957 to one. In 1994, the peg with the former French franc was slashed from 1:505 to 1:100. The currency devaluation, instigated by France and in collaboration with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, wiped out the savings of the Senegalese people. To cap it all off, French officials sit on regional central bank boards across French-speaking Africa and still hold substantial powers, including veto rights.
Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation once explained, “Unlike a typical fiat currency, the system was far more insidious. It was monetary colonialism.”
From Cuba to Turkey, South Africa to Serbia, I have never seen a greater demand or need for monetary emancipation than in Central or West Africa, and the most likely candidate for West Africa’s economic and monetary freedom is Bitcoin.
Making lightning connections
On Twitter in January 2022, I noticed that a few bars in the ex-pat area of Dakar have begun accepting Bitcoin. You can pay for a crêpe or a bissap (a refreshing local drink made with hibiscus flower) over the Lightning Network, at a spitting distance from the beach.
My thoughts immediately go to El Salvador’s grassroots adoption initiative, Bitcoin Beach, the efforts of which culminated in Bitcoin becoming legal tender in El Salvador. I know at once that I must speak to the person behind these efforts.
A tall, softly-spoken Senegalese man who spent a chunk of his professional life working in France, Nourou (not his real name), is a Bitcoin advocate like no other.
He returned to Senegal in 2021 and was disappointed to see that his friends and even family members had lost money to “Ponzi schemes like Petronpay — things like that — or limo” and other popular crypto scams in Africa. “So, we set up the Bitcoin in Senegal community,” he tells Cointelegraph.
“I was the first one in our first e-meet on Clubhouse. We were maybe three or four, but I kept going with two sessions per week, then one session per week because we used to have 10, 20 […] sometimes hundreds of people listening in.”
He arrived in Senegal at the onset of COVID-19. However, the pandemic chaos did not dash his dreams of making Bitcoin the go-to currency in his homeland.
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Peer to peer
While traveling in Senegal in February 2022, I attended the country’s first-ever Bitcoin meetup. Not only was this a milestone event in of itself — as previously meetups were conducted online or on the application Clubhouse — but the caliber of the guests in attendance is jawdropping.
The room is brimming with nonfungible token promoters, Bitcoin maximalists, entrepreneurs, central bankers and even professors from Dakar’s most prestigious universities. The atmosphere is a stark contrast with the Bitcoin meetups I usually attend in Europe or America, where, to be frank, it’s a bunch of white Millennial males preaching the fall of fiat…
cointelegraph.com