2025-01-24 –, A | Machankura Stage
Opening Remarks
Opening Remarks
Kgothatso Ngako, is a catalyst aiming to accelerate the adoption of Bitcoin across the African continent. He has founded both exonumia.africa, project translating Bitcoin literature into African languages, and machankura.com, service that allows people to send and receive Bitcoin even without an internet connected device, through USSD and other text based interfaces.
Kemal is a graduate of the Geschwister-Scholl Institute for Political Science at the Ludwigs-Maximilan-University of Munich and the Director of Marketing at Blink, the Everyday Bitcoin Wallet as well as the co-organizer of the annual Adopting Bitcoin conference in El Salvador. The El Zonte-born Blink Wallet is built to be the bottom-up bitcoin adoption weapon for communities around the world to make bitcoin payments accessible and secure for the masses. He is also the founder of the Istanbul Bitcoin Meetup and the Yirmibir Bitcoin Community, developing Bitcoin educational resources in Turkish language. Previously, Kemal was the Director of Marketing at Galoy, developing the open source bitcoin banking infrastructure that powers Blink.
Hermann Vivier is the co-founder of The Surfer Kids (est. 2010) and founder of Bitcoin Ekasi (est. 2021). Hermann first became interested in Bitcoin in late 2013 as a result of the banking crisis and subsequent bank bailouts in Cyprus. In May 2015 he and his wife adopted Bitcoin as a form of payment. They operate a South African tourism business (Unravel Surf Travel) catering for the Eastern European and Russian markets, and the first Russian-Ukrainian conflict meant that Bitcoin was (in certain cases) the only form of payment available to receive money from their clients. Following the global covid lockdowns and the resulting slump in their tourism business they started looking for ways to become more active in the Bitcoin space. Hermann came across the Bitcoin Beach project in El Salvador in 2019 and started writing for Bitcoin Magazine in January 2021, two events which eventually led to the creation of Bitcoin Ekasi in August 2021.