CD189: MONEYBADGER - BITCOIN PAYMENTS IN SOUTH AFRICA

Jan 23, 2026 · 1h 12m

Carel van Wyk is the founder and CEO of MoneyBadger. MoneyBadger enables easy bitcoin payments at 650 thousand stores in South Africa. MoneyBadger on Nostr: https://primal.net/p/nprofile1qqsz85k206vm3vqdmlvcy9l4kyfqchlnf4hnctasxufa3ph0ck9decgpk49rf MoneyBadger on X: https://x.com/MoneyBadgerPay Wesbite: https://www.moneybadger.co.za/ EPISODE: 189 BLOCK: 933542 PRICE: 1112 sats per dollar (00:03:26) What is Money Badger? Mission and merchant focus (00:05:13) Paying anywhere in South Africa (00:05:27) 650,000 locations (00:07:04) Leveraging existing QR payment rails and the Pick n Pay breakthrough (00:10:01) How the flow works: bridging proprietary QR to Lightning (00:11:18) MoneyBadger app as translator vs. using any Lightning wallet (00:13:04) Fiat settlement, volatility handling, and business model (00:17:07) Why no Money Badger wallet? Integrations with Blink, Zeus, Aqua (00:20:20) A clever LNURL/Lightning Address pattern to decode merchant QRs (00:23:39) Pragmatic, a bit hacky, and works across wallets (00:28:04) Replicability beyond SA: Kenya’s M‑Pesa, Ghana, Latin America (00:32:10) Creating demand: Bitcoin Ekasi as proof-of-use for Pick n Pay (00:35:15) Real usage: growth to…

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ODELL host feed Carel van Wyk guest feed