The Lightning Network has struck Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. During a conference in Ghana, Strike CEO Jack Mallers announced that the Bitcoin payments company has partnered with the mobile app Bitnob to facilitate payments into Africa.
Mallers made the announcement on stage at AfroBitcoin, a Bitcoin conference in Ghana’s capital city of Accra. He stood alongside Bernard Farah, the Nigerian CEO of Bitnob, following a short presentation on how it works.
Money transfers into Africa take advantage of the Lightning Network, the layer-2 payments network built atop Bitcoin. The feature is called “Send Globally,” and it enables instant, low-cost payments to Africa.
The feature does not require people to use Bitcoin themselves, Bitnob CEO Bernard Parah explained on stage. The no-transaction-fee feature is currently available to Americans sending funds to Africans in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. By comparison, remittance services such as Wise take a small commission, while Western Union can charge upward of 10% for money transfers.
Dollar payments are instantly converted to Nigerian naira, Ghanaian cedi or Kenyan shillings and are deposited directly into a recipient’s bank account, mobile money wallet or Bitnob account.
Solving cross-border payments into Africa using Bitcoin would be a major boost to local economies. In Nigeria alone, $17.2 billion was sent in remittances to the country in 2020. However, according to World Bank data, “for every $200 sent in 2020, it cost the sender $17.8 (8.9 %).” That equates to roughly $1.5 billion lost in fees, or roughly the gross domestic product of Samoa.
If Nigeria were to eliminate remittance fees by using Bitcoin payment rails, Nigerians across the country would benefit financially. In Kenya and Ghana, the situation is similar. Thousands of Ghanaians and Kenyans live in the United States and regularly send money overseas. Crypto in Africa has surged in recent years, and remittance is one of the many reasons why.
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Mallers compared the instant peer-to-peer payment service to PayPal’s Venmo app, which allows rapid, frictionless payments between United States customers. Mallers said the Lightning Network has “just achieved dollars to Naira, Naira to dollars.”
The advancement is currently only available to Americans sending money to those living in Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria–English-speaking countries in Africa, although the rollout is set to continue across Africa.