NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Friday, January 8, 2016

Kenyan based Pan African bitcoin trading platform, BitPesa has partnered with Airtel and MTN Money mobile wallets weeks after Safaricom asked third party integrator Lipisha Consortium to sever ties with BitPesa.

BitPesa in a blog post disclosed it has gone above and beyond M-Pesa with partnerships all across the continent such as Quickteller and Paga among others. BitPesa also said that signing up more partners is an opportunity for it to expand into more markets as well as sign up more users both in Africa and globally.

The firm said in a blog post that although bitcoin is not as popular in Kenya as hyped, Safaricom’s move was unwelcome as its own M-Pesa was beyond regulation when it launched but for some reasons the Central Bank of Kenya kept its cool and watched from a distance.

However, note that the Kenyan Government is a shareholder in Safaricom and this could have been one of the reasons M-Pesa was left unregulated.