2024-01-26 –, Machankura Stage
Welcome to Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town!
Opening remarks by the Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town Organising Team.
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 Galoy, a company developing free and open source software for bitcoin-native banking infrastructure as well as the co-organizer of the annual Adopting Bitcoin conference in El Salvador. With the El Zonte-born Blink Wallet, Galoy are building 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.
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, 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 started writing for Bitcoin Magazine in January 2021 and a series of events followed that led to thes creation of Bitcoin Ekasi in August 2021.