South African Bitcoin Circular Economy Project Deepens Community Ties

Forbes

29-03-2025

Bitcoin Ekasi, located in Mossel Bay, South Africa
Frank Corva
Founded in August 2021, Bitcoin Ekasi, a Bitcoin circular economy project based in a township in Mossel Bay, South Africa (Ekasi is slang for 'township' in Afrikaans) continues to expand thanks to the efforts of its dedicated members.
Hermann Vivier, founder and Chairman of Bitcoin Ekasi, shared that the continued success of the project hinges in part on the work of The Surfer Kids non-profit, which Vivier founded in 2010. The Surfer Kids is an organization that teaches marginalized youth commitment and dedication through surfing and also provides them with after-school educational support.
'Bitcoin Ekasi operates with The Surfer Kids as its umbrella organization,' Vivier told me in an interview.
'The secret to Bitcoin Ekasi's success is the fact that we have a long-standing relationship with the community with which we work. We started operating in this particular community where Bitcoin Ekasi is based in 2015,' he added.
This isn't to say that introducing Bitcoin into the community — one in which many of the residents have never even opened a bank account — was easy, though.
Luthando Ndabambi, Project Community Leader at Bitcoin Ekasi and The Surfer Kids, recalled how challenging it was to onboard both merchants and everyday people alike to Bitcoin three and a half years ago.
'In the beginning, it was tough,' Ndabambi told me in an interview.
'Most shop owners in the township had never heard of Bitcoin, except perhaps from negative associations with scams, which made them understandably suspicious,' he added.
'I spent a lot of time walking them through how it worked. I demonstrated the process by using bitcoin myself to buy products. It took a lot of patience, and building trust was a slow process.'
Now, however, 32 shops in the community accept bitcoin and the 21 employees for The Surfer Kids program earn their salaries in bitcoin. Many have been excited to see their bitcoin holdings increase in value since late 2022.
And some of the most recent community members that the Bitcoin Ekasi team has onboarded to Bitcoin are the principal and teachers at the local public elementary school.
Recently, the Bitcoin Ekasi team has been working more closely with the staff at T.M. Nanda Primary School, the local public school that approximately 75% of the youths who are part of The Surfer Kids program attend.
'We've built trust with the principal, teachers, and students through consistent engagement,' Thinus Mouton, Special Projects Coordinator at Bitcoin Ekasi and The Surfer Kids, told me in an interview.
'This has included regular visits as well as sponsoring a newly designed school emblem and entrance board,' he added.
'We also introduced the school staff and the students to international Bitcoin community members during the road trip that followed the Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town conference, which Hermann and Kgothatso Ngako, founder of Machankura, put on in conjunction with a local organizing committee including several of South Africa's most notable Bitcoin enthusiasts.'
Vivier highlighted some of the other work that the staff members from The Surfers Kids and Bitcoin Ekasi have done with the school.
'We do quarterly meetups with the teachers and the principal where, amongst other things, we discuss Bitcoin,' said Vivier. 'We have created wallets for all of them and they have some sats (fractions of a bitcoin) in those wallets that they spend at the local shops.'
Vivier, Ndabambi and Mouton all also mentioned that, for the past two years, the Bitcoin Ekasi team has recruited students from the school to join the Mi Primer Bitcoin diploma course that they offer at the Bitcoin Ekasi Center, a physical space dedicated to Bitcoin education in the community.
The team is looking to build a bigger and better version of this space by the end of this year.
The Bitcoin Ekasi project has had a center since the middle of 2022, as Vivier believed that it was necessary to have a location for in-person support if the community's residents were to truly adopt this new monetary technology.
'I knew from the very beginning we needed a place for support and education in the township itself,' said Vivier.
'It's for people who have issues with their mobile bitcoin wallets or for people who are curious about how to use Bitcoin. It's basically a walk-in support center,' he added.
'Imagine giving an iPad to your grandmother. If something goes wrong with it, she would have to have someone explain what happened and how to fix it to her in simple terms. You can't give her online resources to go and figure out what's wrong with the thing. This is what the Bitcoin Ekasi Center is for.'
The current center, though, is simply a house in the community that the Bitcoin Ekasi team turned into a small educational hub. Vivier never planned for this location to be permanent.
The current Bitcoin Ekasi Center
Frank Corva
'Our current Bitcoin Ekasi Center has always been a temporary thing, and we've been planning to build a proper support center for a long time,' said Vivier.
In April 2024, he submitted an application to the local government to purchase a small plot of land in the community, and, as of March 27, 2025, he received a preliminary 'yes,' though, the details of the purchase still need to be negotiated.
If approved, the center will become a more official hub for the community, something to complement the newly-renovated Surfer Kids center and freshly-built international-standard skate bowl, which was funded by a Discovery Grant from Block last year.
The recently-renovated center for The Surfer Kids
Frank Corva
If you take a closer look at the header image for this article, you'll notice the logos of Bitcoin companies and organizations painted on the sides of houses in the township.
Vivier conceptualized this, as he wanted to freshen up the look of the homes, which are set against the picturesque backdrop of the ocean.
He decided to use some of the organization's donation money to pay the residents of the homes 7000 sats per week (just over $6 at today's bitcoin-to-USD rate) under the agreement that they either save the sats or spend them in the community — they just can't trade them for South African rand (the local fiat currency).
'It's been a great way to get extra sats flowing into the community,' said Vivier.
'Plus, now we've come up with an additional requirement, which is that the people receiving those payments also clean up around their homes, which helps to drive the idea of being responsible for your property and taking pride in the appearance of your community,' he added.
Ndabambi, who's been on the front lines of the Bitcoin Ekasi project since its inception, said that aside from the number of shops he's onboarded to Bitcoin, he's most proud of being able to reward the youths in The Surfer Kids program with sats for their successes and to see people in the community beginning to embrace Bitcoin.
'People are starting to feel hopeful, realizing they can save with bitcoin and build something for the future, which is an option they didn't have before,' said Ndabambi.
With that said, Ndabambi noted that education is still a major challenge.
'Many people in the community struggle with reading and writing, so explaining Bitcoin, something they can't physically touch, to them is challenging,' he said. 'People are afraid of losing money or being scammed, so I'm always working to help them overcome those fears and build their confidence in the technology.'
Mouton seconded the notion that education is a challenge and added that he, a white South African who isn't from the township, like Vivier, sometimes feels that simply earning the community's trust can be difficult.
'Winning the trust of residents directly can be challenging due to language and cultural differences, said Mouton. 'But by enabling these trusted locals to lead, I help bridge the gap indirectly, which feels like the most effective way to build credibility in a community I'm not originally part of.'
For Vivier, the project's biggest success is simply that he can continue to run a daily program through The Surfer Kids to support dozens youths from a low-income neighborhood.
'It's amazing that we can sustain this, because, for the kids in the program, The Surfer Kids is everything,' said Vivier.
The biggest challenge that persists, according to Vivier, is simply managing funds as a non-profit.
'Being a non-profit, you're reliant on donations,' said Vivier. 'I'm grateful for the 10 years that I spent running The Surfer Kids before starting Bitcoin Ekasi project because I learned the hard way that you have to manage funds today as if there is no future funding.'
Vivier also noted that fundraising and spending in bitcoin is what gives the project leverage that other non-profits don't have.
'We're entirely reliant on donations, but because we operate on a bitcoin standard, we get three times the amount of work done with the same amount of funds donated,' he explained.
'Not only are the donations put to good use in supporting the kids, but our low time preference approach means we think very carefully about what we spend on so as to benefit from the long-term price appreciation of our reserves,' he added.
'Meanwhile the fact that we spend in bitcoin, which drives adoption, means that the positive ripple effects of the bitcoin has far wider wider effect than fiat donations would.'