Introducing Bitcoin Street Store

Hi, Radoy from team Bitcoin Street Store here. Some of you may know me from my work on Growr and AgriMint, winner at last year's Legends of Lightning tournament.

This season, we aim to bring another Africa-first solution to the market – this project is a proud collaboration between the teams of Bitcoin Cowries and Growr. Kumi Nkansah, the founder of Bitcoin Cowries and a well-known Bitcoin educator, came up with the idea that orange pilling people will be much more efficient if they could easily start trading their goods and services for bitcoin. We brainstormed and came with the idea that giving micro-merchants access to digital commerce tools has a life-changing potential.

What better foundation to build these tools than Bitcoin/Lightning for the payments & Nostr for the decentralized marketplaces? But we also realized that most of these merchants are low-tech and only have access to USSD – so we embarked on delivering borderless & censorship resistant commerce to millions over USSD!

Of course, we realize we're standing on the shoulders of giants like Ngothatso from Machankura who are already providing USSD-based Lightning payments, so we are focusing on building the USSD-enabled Nostr marketplace.

This month, we participated in the Build for Africa Hackathon and successfully delivered a first version of Bitcoin Street Store in just 5 days, starting very much from scratch! We are now continuing our journey at Nostrasia and Legends of Lightning 2.

We enable merchants to be onboarded & helped by knowledgeable agents to set up their marketplace presence (i.e. create their digital store & publish their products on Nostr). But merchants retain a full control over their Nostr identity & store, as they are connected to their mobile number and secured with a private PIN. Moreover, they approve any change to their store, and manage orders and deliveries over USSD.

We think we're making some great innovations that have the potential to impact positively 100 million African merchants. Stay tuned for updates.