Tando Is Unlocking Spending Bitcoin For 40 Million Kenyans

Last month, Tando, the Kenya-based Bitcoin payments company, announced it had created a service that allows 40 million Kenyans to send and receive Bitcoin using the existing M-Pesa infrastructure. To pull this off, they strung together numerous pieces of technology, including in-house solutions, to make bitcoin’s Lightning Network act as a translation layer for millions.

Launched in 2024, Tando, the Kenyan payments company founded by Jason and Sabina Waithira Gitau, began as an attempt to solve a very specific problem: how do Kenyans spend Bitcoin like they do Kenyan Shillings (KES)? They quickly realized the best way to do that was to leverage the ubiquitous M-Pesa mobile money payment rail to provide a seamless experience.

They built an app that allows anyone with bitcoin to pay an M-Pesa invoice without needing local currency. Once a user enters their M-Pesa phone number and amount, they receive a lightning invoice to pay, and the recipient receives Kenyan shillings (KES). The app soon grew in virality and reach among the growing base of Kenyan bitcoin users.

As Gitau underscored in her panel at this year’s Oslo Freedom Forum, people can test out Tando using less than a dollar, without paying fees, or KYC, making it quick to validate and easy to adopt.

However, as Jason put it in an interview for this article, though the app resonated with many, “they still need a separate bitcoin wallet to use Tando.” To curb that, they again went back to the tried-and-true formula: combining and building on existing infrastructure. In this case, M-Pesa phone numbers and what are known as lightning addresses—a payment spec that lets users to receive bitcoin payments via email addresses.

They unveiled their novel approach last May, in which any bitcoin wallet that supports lightning addresses can instantly send bitcoin to a Kenyan phone number via M-Pesa. To achieve this, users claim their phone-number-prepended lightning addresses. This new service also gives the recipient, once they claim their address and pay a fee, a way to set up a non-custodial bitcoin wallet, enabling them to send and receive bitcoin.

Tando’s technique is reminiscent of a cousin project in South Africa called Machankura, which enables users to send and receive bitcoin offline over the Lightning network using Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) codes.

While there are privacy implications to linking phone numbers to payment infrastructure, the Tando team plans to continue iterating to strike a better trade-off and provide a more balanced experience.

Over the last few years, Africa has become home to projects looking to cement Bitcoin’s use as money, from circular economies and solutions like Machankura and Tando to infrastructure-led companies like MavaPay. The focus is not on price action but on utility and freedom money. This has fueled the ‘spend not sell’ movement, in which builders seek to familiarize users with earning and spending their bitcoin rather than trading and falling for get-rich-quick schemes.

More importantly for the Tando team, bitcoin is for everyone, so there should be no gatekeeping; from the president and office workers to the farmers, the bitcoin network treats them all equally.

Tando makes it possible to live entirely on Bitcoin in Kenya, an idea now promoted as the African way to use bitcoin. In the past few weeks, as bitcoin builders and leaders from Africa and beyond met for the first Bitcoin++ Nairobi conference, many on social media expressed surprise at seeing this in action, how easy the experience was, and how groundbreaking the idea of living on Bitcoin really is.

As Tando has shown, the combination of mobile money and freedom money is growing evidence that where there is a need, Africans will build, and where there is technology, they will pioneer and adopt.

African bitcoin builders continue to demonstrate that you do not need mass adoption or permission to live in the future.