Key Takeaways:
Tando's integration with M-Pesa lets 40 million Kenyans send and receive Bitcoin using only a phone number, bypassing the need for a separate wallet.
Tando, a Kenyan payments startup founded in 2024 by Jason and Sabina Waithira Gitau, launched a service enabling 40 million Kenyans to send and receive Bitcoin using their phone numbers via M-Pesa and the Lightning Network. The service lets any Bitcoin wallet that supports Lightning addresses send bitcoin directly to a Kenyan phone number, with the recipient receiving Kenyan shillings through M-Pesa.
"Bitcoin is for everyone, so there should be no gatekeeping," Jason Gitau, co-founder of Tando, said at the 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."
Users claim a phone-number-prepended Lightning address, after which they can receive bitcoin and, for a fee, set up a non-custodial wallet to send and receive bitcoin themselves. The company built the service by combining M-Pesa's mobile money infrastructure with Bitcoin's Lightning Network, which acts as a translation layer between the two systems. The approach mirrors that of Machankura, a South African project that enables Bitcoin transactions over the Lightning Network using USSD codes on basic phones.
Living on Bitcoin in Africa
The launch comes as a growing number of African builders push a "spend not sell" movement that prioritizes Bitcoin's utility as money over speculative trading. Tando makes it possible to live entirely on Bitcoin in Kenya, an idea that drew attention at the recent Bitcoin++ Nairobi conference, where attendees demonstrated paying for goods and services using the platform.
Africa has become a proving ground for Bitcoin payments infrastructure, with projects such as Machankura and MavaPay building on existing mobile money rails rather than requiring users to adopt new financial habits. M-Pesa, operated by Safaricom, processes more than 700 million transactions per month across seven countries, making it one of the most widely used mobile money platforms globally.
The Tando team acknowledged privacy trade-offs from linking phone numbers to payment infrastructure and said they plan to iterate on the design to provide a more balanced experience. For now, the service offers a bridge between Bitcoin's permissionless network and Kenya's dominant payment rail, giving millions of users a way to spend bitcoin without holding local currency.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
