Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town

My husband (Hermann Vivier, Founder of Bitcoin Ekasi) and I have been operating Unravel Surf Travel since 2011. I am Russian. We met in Amsterdam in 2008, while studying. With South Africa being such a well-developed tourism destination, yet largely absent from the rapidly expanding Russian tourism market at that time, going into tourism and marketing South Africa in my native country, was an easy choice.

In 2014 conflict first escalated between Russia and Ukraine and international financial sanctions were first used against Russia. That's when we faced the prospect of being financially separated from our clients for the first time. As a result, we started accepting payments in Bitcoin in 2015. Fortunately, my husband had already been studying Bitcoin since 2013, so accepting it as payment (on the odd occasion) was pretty straightforward. Rather ironically the first clients to ever pay us in Bitcoin were Ukrainians, not Russians.

Those sanctions were however not nearly as devastating as the ones that followed in 2022 when Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine. Between 2015 and early 2022, a small minority of payments were made in Bitcoin, as most people could still access international payments. From February 2022 onwards, however, the vast majority of our payments have been received using Bitcoin.

Flipping the business from majority fiat to majority Bitcoin was not a small adjustment. But it was manageable because we were prepared.

It is important to understand that this can happen to anyone. The international financial system is increasingly being weaponised to punish governments, regardless of whether the citizens of that country (and other countries) deserve to suffer.