A household goods trader in Juja, a town in Kiambu County northeast of Nairobi, has been accepting Bitcoin since November 2025. Faith Mbinya processes four to five Bitcoin transactions a month at her shop, including one recent sale worth roughly KES 6,000 (about $46). Her reason for adopting crypto is straightforward. "I accept Bitcoin because it reduces the transaction cost, which is a very major problem when we go to our Kenyan local banks or local M-PESA," she told TechCabal. Mbinya's shop is not an isolated case. It is one data point in a broader pattern of grassroots crypto commerce taking hold across the continent.

Two distinct approaches have emerged for how merchants actually receive and settle crypto payments. The first, visible in cases like Mbinya's and described here as the Juja model, involves merchants holding digital assets directly. They absorb exchange rate volatility but pay near-zero fees. Mbinya uses Fedi, a community e-cash wallet app that consolidates Bitcoin receipt, currency conversion, and spending, built on the Fedimint protocol. Transfers within a Fedi federation are free; outbound transfers over Bitcoin's Lightning Network (a faster, cheaper payment layer built on top of Bitcoin) carry a 0.21 percent fee. The second approach, the Lagos model, routes customer payments through a fintech intermediary that converts crypto to naira instantly, so merchants never touch digital assets directly. Nigerian startups Mular, CoinCircuit, and Rach Finance all operate this way. Mular has processed roughly $500,000 in merchant payments. CoinCircuit, which launched in December 2025, has settled about 700 million naira (around $435,000) through its platform.

The Lagos model lowers the barrier for merchants who have no interest in managing crypto exposure. Trib3 Lagos, a fine-dining restaurant on Victoria Island, converts every crypto payment to naira at the point of sale. Restaurants like Spaghetti King in Yaba and Food'n'Vibes in Ilorin use Rach Finance for the same purpose. But critics of this approach note that it recreates a dependency on fiat currency, specifically the naira. Shalom Osiadi, CEO of Esca Finance, has described the constraint plainly: merchants cannot use crypto as a value transfer tool because their suppliers, landlords, and tax offices still demand fiat. The Lagos model accepts that constraint and works around it. The Juja model ignores it and bets on a future where Bitcoin holds more of the payment stack.

The merchant-focused framing reflects a shift in how payment startups are thinking about the problem. Tomiwa Ogunmodede, co-founder and CEO of Mular, put it this way: "We realised the merchant isn't actually the customer who needs convincing. The person who already holds crypto is the one looking for somewhere to spend it." That existing holder base is substantial. Sub-Saharan Africa recorded $205 billion in total crypto transaction volume in 2025, according to Chainalysis data cited in TechCabal's April 2026 analysis. Stablecoins (crypto tokens typically pegged to the US dollar) account for 43 percent of that volume, and 79 percent of crypto-active users in Africa hold at least one stablecoin, per a 2026 BVNK report. Nigeria alone ranked sixth globally on the Chainalysis Global Crypto Adoption Index, with an estimated 25.9 million active crypto users.

Community-level experiments predate the current wave of startups. Bitcoin Ekasi in Mossel Bay, South Africa, founded by Hermann Vivier through the nonprofit The Surfer Kids, has operated a Bitcoin circular economy in a township since 2021, with 32 shops now accepting Lightning payments and 21 nonprofit employees receiving salaries entirely in Bitcoin. In Kibera, Nairobi, Afribit Africa has onboarded more than 150 merchants and recorded over 2,000 Bitcoin transactions. Tando, a Kenyan app that bridges Bitcoin Lightning to M-PESA phone numbers, was processing more than 100 transactions per day by mid-2025. None of these initiatives has replicated at national scale. Bitcoin Ekasi remains a township-level model, and Tando's daily transaction volume, while growing, is modest relative to M-PESA's overwhelming dominance of Kenya's payments economy. They are proofs of concept, not yet blueprints for mass adoption.

Regulation is adding both clarity and cost. Kenya's Virtual Asset Service Provider Act took effect in November 2025, giving merchants a clearer legal footing, though the tax treatment of crypto payments received in kind remains ambiguous under current Kenyan law, a gap that affects merchants like Mbinya directly. The Finance Act 2025 introduced a 10 percent excise duty on crypto transaction fees. The earlier 3 percent Digital Asset Tax had applied to the gross value of transactions rather than fees alone, meaning the practical cost impact of the change varies depending on a merchant's fee and transaction profile. Nigeria's Investments and Securities Act 2025 classifies digital assets as securities and applies capital gains tax of up to 25 percent on crypto profits from 2026. South Africa has moved furthest on licensing, with the Financial Sector Conduct Authority issuing 248 VASP licenses under the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services (FAIS) Act.

The most structurally significant development for the region may be outside the retail layer entirely. In April 2026, South African crypto exchange VALR and pan-African payment network Onafriq integrated their systems, connecting crypto liquidity to approximately 1 billion mobile money wallets across 43 African markets. If that infrastructure proves reliable at scale, the question of which payment model wins at the shop level may matter less than whether the underlying rails between crypto and mobile money become seamless enough for most users to stop noticing the difference.