From The Bitcoin Jungle To The Sea, Let Lightning Be Free!

Uncover insights within the Bitcoin area. This article dives into: “From The Bitcoin Jungle To The Sea, Let Lightning Be Free!”.

Welcome to the jungle — the Bitcoin Jungle.

Bitcoin Jungle is a bitcoin round financial system positioned within the Puntarenas province of Uvita, Costa Rica, the place over 600 retailers settle for bitcoin. It’s additionally the place Francis Pouliot has known as dwelling for the previous three years.

For this motive, he and the group at Bull Bitcoin created an internet app that works each throughout the Bitcoin Jungle wallet, an open supply, custodial Lightning wallet, and along side different Lightning wallets.

Through the online app interface, Bitcoin fanatics pays for nearly something with bitcoin over Lightning, no matter whether or not the service provider or counterparty with whom they’re transacting accepts it.

Using the Bitcoin Jungle app or the online app straight, customers pays with bitcoin and have their invoice settled within the native fiat forex, colónes, over the nation’s nationwide digital cost system, SINPE (Sistema Nacional de Pagos Electrónicos). (This is akin to how Strike, Bringin, and Bull Bitcoin allows customers to pay with bitcoin over Lightning to settle fiat payments by way of the United States’ ACH system, Europe’s SEPA system, and Canada’s Interac system, respectively.)

With greater than 90% of the nation’s residents over the age of 18 utilizing SINPE for each day funds, the Bull Bitcoin app makes it very straightforward for nonresidents of Costa Rica to take part within the nation’s digital financial system (you have to be a resident of the nation to open a SINPE account) and/or for many who need to reside on a bitcoin normal.

“This allows people to live exclusively off of bitcoin,” Pouliot informed Bitcoin Magazine. “Every merchant that accepts fiat payments over SINPE in Costa Rica can now accept payments from a Bitcoiner.”

How the Bull Bitcoin Costa Rica Web App Works

When customers use the Bull Bitcoin internet app in Costa Rica, they make a cost to a Bull Bitcoin Lightning node on the backend. Once Bull Bitcoin receives this cost, it makes a fiat cost by way of SINPE on the consumer’s behalf.

Bull Bitcoin processes lots of of such funds each day in Costa Rica. From May 2024 to May 2025, Bull Bitcoin processed 32,774 bitcoin-to-fiat conversions.

Pouliot prides himself on ensuring the Bull Bitcoin internet app is as reliable as a bank card, as a result of he is aware of that many within the nation, himself included, rely upon it day in and day trip.

“If you’re at the gas station in Costa Rica and you don’t have a credit card and you just filled up your car, you need that Lightning-to-SINPE payment to work because otherwise you’re screwed,” defined Pouliot.

“This is how a lot of us live here. We don’t use credit cards. We don’t have cash. So, if I go to the gas station, this app better fucking work. Otherwise, I just filled up my car and I have a very angry gas station attendant,” he added.

“The success rate is well over 99% — almost 100%. I don’t even remember any Lightning payments failing. And that’s because the Bull Bitcoin is managed by hardcore Bitcoiners that know how to navigate Lightning Network liquidity.”

Pouliot added that the toughest a part of maintaining the app functioning correctly isn’t working the Lightning node or plugging within the banking API, although. Instead, he mentioned the most important problem is sourcing the fiat liquidity in a not-so-widely-accepted fiat forex just like the colón.

“There is no international open marketplace for very low-liquidity fiat currencies and bitcoin,” defined Pouliot.

“Neither Kraken nor Binance or Coinbase list the colón — there’s no bitcoin-to-colónes order book. We need to sell that bitcoin to someone else to get the fiat in order to pay out the fiat merchant,” he added.

Pouliot defined that, as a result of main bitcoin and crypto exchanges don’t checklist the colón, he primarily units the alternate price for it by establishing what he calls a “virtual bitcoin-to-colón exchange rate.” To calculate this price, Pouliot components within the colón-to-U.S. greenback price and the USD-to-bitcoin price after which provides a 1% gross margin price to assist Bull Bitcoin not lose cash on the alternate price whereas nonetheless maintaining the product accessible to customers.

He burdened that sustaining liquidity is actually the most important problem on this course of, and he tipped his hat to others world wide who provide the same service with a comparable diploma of reliability.

“Whenever you see a group of people that have achieved this seamless flow, know that while it sounds so simple, it can be very complicated on the back end”, mentioned Pouliot. “That’s why, for example, I find Tando so impressive.”

Kenya’s Tando

Kenya’s model of the Bull Bitcoin app isn’t an internet app, however a correct app, although the group behind Tando was influenced by what Bull Bitcoin has finished in Costa Rica.

“The Bitcoin Jungle team posted a video on their X where they went into a gas station and spent bitcoin while the merchant received the local currency,” Jason, considered one of Tando’s cofounders, informed Bitcoin Magazine. 

“I was like, ‘That’s pretty cool.’ We thought that would probably work here if Safaricom [a Kenyan mobile network operator] has an API,” he added.

“And with just a little research, we figured out that ‘Yeah, we can do this.’”

Jason and his co-founder, Sabina Waithira, launched the app in July 2024, enabling Kenyan customers to settle payments in Kenyan shillings over M-PESA (Safaricom helped launch M-PESA), a cellular cash system that operates in additional than a half dozen African international locations, whereas paying with bitcoin over Lightning.

Using Tando, customers pays payments, purchase items, and ship Kenyan shillings with nothing greater than a recipient’s telephone quantity and a Lightning wallet. (M-PESA solely requires a recipient’s telephone quantity for cash transfers.)

The consumer sends bitcoin from the Lightning wallet of their selecting, Tando’s Lightning node receives the bitcoin, and Tando settles the fiat M-PESA invoice for the sender.

All of this occurs inside seconds.

I do know firsthand as a result of I used Tando whereas I used to be in Kenya for the African Bitcoin Conference in 2024.

Making Bitcoin Easier To Spend For Kenyans

Waithira wasn’t accustomed to what was taking place with Lightning-to-fiat funds in Costa Rica earlier than Jason introduced it to her consideration.

What motivated her to convey Tando to life was as an alternative her personal expertise of attempting to spend bitcoin in Kenya.

“I used to work for Bitcoin Dada [a virtual Bitcoin education platform and sisterhood for African women] and would sometimes get paid in bitcoin”, Waithira informed Bitcoin Magazine. “It was hard to spend that Bitcoin directly.”

While Waithira got here up with inventive methods to spend her bitcoin, like tipping waiters and waitresses at eating places with it, she ended up going through the identical query from these service staff time and time once more: “How can I spend this bitcoin?”

“We didn’t have a great answer to this question”, mentioned Waithira. “So, this is also what inspired Tando.”

Waithira added that “Kenyans are very fast learners and very curious”, which makes it straightforward to onboard them to Bitcoin and Tando, whereas Jason shared that Kenyans have been primed for Bitcoin, as they’ve already gone by way of the cellular cash revolution with M-PESA over the previous decade and a half.

Waithira additionally famous that she and Jason have aimed to make Tando as straightforward to make use of as M-PESA is — to not scare customers off with a sophisticated interface.

“We wanted to mimic the experience of using M-Pesa”, defined Waithira.

“I don’t like thinking when I use apps, and I don’t think our customers do either”, she added. “We kept this in mind as we designed Tando.”

Waithira and Jason apparently did one thing proper, as Tando has been gaining traction with on a regular basis Kenyans slowly and steadily. It now processes over 100 transactions per day.

And past simply serving to extra Kenyans reside on a bitcoin normal, the app impressed a developer on the opposite aspect of the African continent to create one thing related for the residents of his dwelling nation, Ghana.

Ghana’s BitSpenda

Bright Kportiklah additionally attended the 2024 African Bitcoin Conference and was considered one of many attendees who used Tando whereas in Kenya.

Drawing from the inspiration he felt in Kenya in addition to the connections he made on the convention, the pc programmer headed again to Ghana after the convention with the intention of constructing his personal model of Tando.

Within a number of months, Kportiklah had the beta model of a Lightning-to-fiat interface he’d created — BitSpenda — up and working. And he did this thanks partially to assist from seasoned Nigerian Bitcoin entrepreneur Bernard Parah, founder and CEO of Bitnob, whom Kportiklah had met on the convention.

Bitnob is an nearly decade-old monetary companies firm that leverages cost infrastructure constructed on Bitcoin and Lightning. Parah and the group at Bitnob helped Kportiklah connect with native off-ramps in Africa, together with cellular cash networks in Ghana and Kenya and financial institution accounts in Nigeria. (BitSpenda presently serves the residents of those three international locations.)

“It’s very difficult to connect to these local off-ramps via API as a small fintech,” Kportiklah informed Bitcoin Magazine.

“When I told Bernard at the conference that I wanted to build something similar to Tando, he gave me a contact to reach out to in Ghana,” he added.

This contact helped Kportiklah join BitSpenda to Ghana’s cellular cash system.

Kportiklah additionally added that Kgothatso Ngako, the founding father of Machankura (which permits customers to ship bitcoin over Lightning utilizing a function telephone), and Onionsman of Bitpension (a bitcoin pension account platform based mostly in Nigeria) have additionally suggested him on the mission.

“I met all these people at the conference in Kenya, and they have been so instrumental in helping me build this,” Kportiklah mentioned.

BitSpenda went reside on March 7 this yr.

To use the online app, senders can search for the recipients they need to ship cash to by telephone quantity in Ghana and Kenya and by checking account quantity in Nigeria.

Once the sender has discovered the recipient they’re searching for and decides to make a cost, a Lightning bill or QR code is generated, and, nearly immediately, the bitcoin the consumer sends is transformed into the recipient’s native forex and the transaction is settled.

“Within 30 seconds, the recipient will receive the money, and the sender can see on BitSpenda whether the money was received or not,” defined Kportiklah.

If a transaction fails, as has solely occurred in lower than 1% of transaction makes an attempt to date, Kportiklah can manually ship the cost to the recipient and notify the sender that the transaction has gone by way of.

As of late April 2025, the app had processed 1000’s of U.S. {dollars}’ price of transactions. Kportiklah claimed that the app has inspired extra Ghanaians to make use of bitcoin not simply because they really feel that bitcoin is a greater cash than Ghanaian cedis, the nation’s fiat forex, however for an additional necessary motive, as nicely.

“Ghanaians are more willing to use Bitcoin because of the value it offers in terms of finance,” defined Kportiklah.

“For example, in Ghana, if you keep your money in your bank accounts, at the end of the month, the bank will charge fees, but this isn’t the case when people use bitcoin instead of their bank,” he added.

“Some people also just see bitcoin as a currency that has more value as compared to the Ghanaian cedi and choose to use it for that reason.”

Kportiklah additionally famous that an app like BitSpenda is especially useful in Ghana, the place outdoors of the Bitcoin round financial system that Kportiklah serves because the technical advisor for — Bitcoin Dua — nearly no retailers settle for bitcoin.

And he aspires to not solely provide this service to Ghanaians, however to Africans in over a dozen international locations.

“A year from now, we should be in no less than 15 African countries”, mentioned Kportiklah.

It’s laborious to doubt he’ll accomplish this when, in below 4 months, he was in a position to roll out BitSpenda in three international locations.

Kportiklah mentioned he’s presently finishing the required paperwork to make BitSpenda obtainable to members of the remaining 12 international locations he needs to service.

He’ll must hurry, although, on condition that the group from Tando is trying to develop into Uganda quickly and {that a} new internet app constructed by a Senegalese developer — Banxaas — now allows bitcoin-to-fiat funds in Senegal, as nicely.

A Labor Of Love

The irony in what Pouliot, Waithira, Jason and Kportiklah have created is that they’re much less motivated by being profitable than they’re by making bitcoin cash.

“This is not a profitable endeavor”, deadpanned Pouliot about Bull’s Bitcoin Costa Rica internet app.

“Actually, this has a very high cost for us — it’s very complicated and there’s a lot of overhead. So, it’s done with the mindset of ‘Sure, maybe one day it’s going to be profitable,’ but we do this more to be part of the Bitcoin Jungle mission of maintaining infrastructure to facilitate Lightning”, he added. 

“Not to say that it will never be a profitable business. I actually encourage people to consider that to be a potentially profitable business. But at scale, it’s really hard to pull off.”

Neither the founders of Tando nor Kportiklah have discovered a monetization scheme but.

“Our business model is we get bitcoin”, mentioned Jason half-jokingly.

He added that he and Waithira have fielded quite a lot of requests for different wallets who need to use their Safaricom API, and that they’re contemplating charging a payment for these different wallets to take action. This doesn’t appear to be as a lot of a precedence for them as getting Kenyans to view bitcoin as a medium of alternate, although.

Kportiklah is of the identical thoughts:

“The goal for now is just to create a tool that will help people to spend Bitcoin with ease”, he mentioned.

Toward the top of my interview with Pouliot, he highlighted as soon as extra how necessary it’s to needless to say it takes quite a lot of work from devoted Bitcoiners to tug off the “with ease” half, noting that initiatives like these are finest created and managed on the native degree by those that have a stable understanding of the normal monetary system with which they’re interfacing.

“These products are better built as grassroots projects, because they require knowledge of the banking system on the ground”, defined Pouliot.

“This is why we don’t have that many expansion plans, but I’m happy to support the other local initiatives with technology and advice”, he added earlier than noting that he thinks what NostrPIX, one other Lightning-to-fiat cost app, is doing in Brazil is cool.

He concluded by as soon as extra providing reward for his colleagues world wide who’re efficiently constructing and managing such interfaces:

“Whenever you see a local group of Bitcoiners pulling it off, be sure that they are fucking awesome and that it wasn’t easy to do.”

Don’t miss your probability to personal The Lightning Issue — that includes an unique interview with Lightning co-creator Tadge Dryja. It dives deep into Bitcoin’s strongest scaling layer. Limited run. Only obtainable whereas provides final.

This piece is an article featured within the newest Print version of Bitcoin Magazine, The Lightning Issue. We’re sharing it right here to point out the concepts explored all through the complete subject.

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