Built Here, Used Everywhere: Closing the African Open Source Founder Gap
summary
Panel lays out concrete work: a Rust reimplementation called joinmarketRS to make CoinJoin usable without full nodes; an SMS gateway stack (SMSWithoutBorders) that bridges offline SMS to Twitter/BlueSky/Gmail during shutdowns; and a community on-ramp/off-ramp toolkit (Minmo) targeting mobile‑money agents and Lightning flows. Founders describe multi‑year unpaid dev as the de‑risk proof, grant paths that require early asks, and realistic budgets (a single $100k can fund two devs for ~2 years).
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:05African open source in Bitcoin
- 7:52Protocol design vs African needs
- 15:03From contributor to lead
- 23:26Robin vs Batman roles
- 30:27Building African open source community
- 38:11Open vs closed source in Africa
- 50:29Funding African open source
- 1:01:29Funding requests and progress
- 1:06:44Closing and Q&A
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