A few weeks ago I came to this question completely fresh. Malawi has no forex. Every Malawian card fails abroad. The parallel market is illegal but it is the only option. So I asked: what if stablecoins could fix this?
That question took me down a rabbit hole I did not expect. Four articles. Two conferences. One hackathon. Countless conversations with people who know this space far better than I do.
And now someone has to ask me directly: so what do you think? Is Bitcoin the answer?
HOnestly, it is complicated.
Why I was wrong about stablecoins
When I started this journey I was excited about stablecoins because they seemed obvious. A digital dollar that you can hold on your phone, send anywhere, spend globally. For a Malawian watching the kwacha lose value every month, that sounds like freedom.
But Femi said something that stopped me. Stablecoins are chokepoints. The companies behind them are as bad as the US government, Swift, Mastercard, and Visa. And he was right.
USDT is controlled by Tether. USDC is controlled by Circle. Both are US companies with legal obligations to US law. They have frozen wallets before. They will freeze wallets again. And just a few days ago there were announcements about EU countries moving to restrict or ban stablecoins entirely.
So the framing I started with was wrong. Stablecoins do not free you from the financial system. They move you from one gatekeeper to another. You escape the Reserve Bank of Malawi only to land in the hands of a US fintech company. The cage is bigger and shinier but it is still a cage.
Bitcoin is different because nobody controls it. No company can freeze your Bitcoin. No government can instruct Satoshi to block your wallet because Satoshi does not exist anymore. That sovereignty is real and it matters enormously for a country like Malawi where the financial system has consistently failed its people.
So yes, stablecoins were the wrong framing. Bitcoin is the more honest answer to the sovereignty problem.
But Bitcoin is not the whole answer either
Technology is not Malawi's problem. Infrastructure is.
If the problem were purely technological, Bitcoin would already be the obvious answer. The technology exists. Lightning Network makes Bitcoin instant and cheap. The tools are there. The protocol works.
But I spent a hackathon building KwachaBridge, a marketplace for mobile money agents to swap kwacha for Bitcoin, and the hardest questions I got from judges were not about the technology. They were about liquidity. About agent incentives. About what stops an agent from posting 200% rates on my platform the same way they post 200% rates today.
And the honest answer is: nothing stops them.
A marketplace creates transparency and competition. But competition only drives prices down if there are enough participants competing. If there are only three dealers in Lilongwe willing to sell Bitcoin for kwacha, they do not need to compete. They can charge whatever the market will bear. If those three dealers decide 200% is their floor, a beautiful open source platform built on Nostr and Pontmore does not change that.
The liquidity problem is not a Bitcoin problem. It is a market depth problem. And market depth comes from adoption, which comes from trust, which comes from infrastructure, which takes time.
What infrastructure actually means
When I say infrastructure I do not just mean roads and electricity, though those matter too.
I mean the network of people and institutions that make a market function.
In Kenya, M-Pesa works because millions of agents across the country decided it was worth their time to become liquidity providers for mobile money. That network took years to build. It required trust, incentives, regulatory clarity, and a critical mass of users on both sides before it tipped into something self-sustaining.
Bitcoin in Malawi needs the same thing. Not just an app. Not just a protocol. A network of agents who trust the system enough to participate, enough users generating demand that agents compete on price, enough regulatory clarity that operating is not purely a legal risk, and enough time for all of that to compound.
None of that is a technology problem. All of it is an infrastructure problem.
So where do I actually stand?
I believe Bitcoin is the right foundation. The sovereignty argument is real. Lightning makes it practically usable for small transactions. The open source nature of the ecosystem means nobody can pull the rug out from under users the way a stablecoin issuer could.
But I do not believe Bitcoin alone solves Malawi's problem. And I do not believe any technology alone solves it.
What I believe is this. The technology is the easy part. Someone has to do the harder work of building the human infrastructure around it. The agent networks. The trust systems. The regulatory relationships. The education that helps ordinary Malawians understand why this is different from the informal dealer they already use.
KwachaBridge is a start at that infrastructure. An imperfect, unfinished, one-night-hackathon start. But a start. The platform creates the rails. The agents and users create the liquidity. The competition creates the fair pricing. None of those three things exist yet at any meaningful scale in Malawi.
Why I am still excited
Because unsolved problems are where builders live.
I did not come to Nairobi with a solution. I came with a question. I am leaving with a clearer understanding of why the question is hard, which is actually more valuable than a premature answer.
The path is Bitcoin. The tools are Lightning and open protocols. The work is building the infrastructure that makes those tools accessible and trustworthy for ordinary Malawians.
That work is going to take years. It is going to require people who understand both the technology and the specific context of markets like Malawi. It is going to require patience with the liquidity problem, creativity with the agent incentive problem, and persistence with the regulatory conversation.
I am not claiming I have figured it all out. I am claiming I know which direction to walk.
And I am walking.
This is part six of an ongoing series about Malawi, money, and what it takes to build something real inside a broken system. Read from the beginning at innocenciacodes.com/blog.