INTO AFRICA

Jack Dorsey was seeking a fresh challenge after easing away from frontline duties at the tech unicorn he founded. In late 2021, he officially stepped down as Twitter CEO, but the writing was on the wall long before then. At the start of the year, Dorsey had demonstrated where his true passion now lay with the formation of ₿trust, a project that neatly aligned two of his pet hobbies: Bitcoin and philanthropy.

Dorsey had long been a vocal Bitcoin advocate and had travelled to Africa in 2019, and in 2021 predicted that “Africa will define the future (especially the Bitcoin one).” He also tweeted in 2020 amid Nigeria’s #EndSARS protests that “The people of Nigeria will lead #bitcoin.” It came as no surprise, therefore, that his Bitcoin-based charity should be targeted at the African continent.

Jack Dorsey’s reputation, coupled with the novelty of creating, in ₿trust, a fund endowed with 500 BTC (worth around $24M), ought to have easily garnered headlines, but he had another trick up his sleeve. Dorsey launched the fund with the support of hip-hop mogul Jay-Z. The world was watching.

While Jack Dorsey and Jay-Z were the star names behind the charity, it was not just its mission that was benevolent: so too were its founders, who would be benevolently recusing themselves from funding decisions. Dorsey emphasised that ₿trust would operate as a “blind irrevocable trust,” taking zero direction from either him or Jay-Z. In other words, once established, the trust would work independently of its benefactors’ influence.

Speaking of benefactors, the fund’s announcement summoned a few more would-be donors from the woodwork: TRON founder Justin Sun publicly tweeted that he was happy to donate to ₿trust’s mission in Africa and India, and Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao likewise volunteered to contribute.

Making Bitcoin Work for Everyone

At a time when Bitcoin was attracting attention from institutional quarters – Tesla’s $1.5B BTC investment had been revealed days earlier – ₿trust recentred discussion to those who stand to benefit the most from decentralised currency: the unbanked and hard-to-bank, particularly citizens of developing nations buffeted by high inflation. Many of the countries within the African and Indian regions that ₿trust was targeting fell into this bracket.

When the board members for ₿trust were announced in late 2021, following a rigorous screening process that called for appraising more than 7,000 applicants, all four positions were filled by Africans. ₿trust may have been conceived in Silicon Valley, but it was genuine about its desire to catalyse Bitcoin adoption in Africa. With the fund up and running, Jack Dorsey was happy to take a hands-off approach provided its actions aligned with his stated goal to “make Bitcoin the internet’s currency.”

While ₿trust took some time to get up to speed, by 2023 the charity was driving BTC adoption, including the acquisition of an African Bitcoin developer training program called Qala, which was rebranded as the ₿trust Builders Programme.

Since then, a string of smaller grants has helped to support external projects, developers, and events focused on driving Bitcoin adoption and infrastructure improvement across the African continent. In India, meanwhile, the fund has connected Indian student developers to global open-source projects, and has even supported Latin America’s Bitcoin developer community.

By early 2025, ₿trust reported that it had “trained hundreds of developers,” helped start Bitcoin meetups in multiple cities, and was supporting a range of open-source projects and conferences. Bitcoin Core contributor and ₿trust CEO Abubakar Nur Khalil recounts a number of successes in funding African startups to date, citing “the deployment of over $1.8m across over 34+ grants, with over half directly to developers in starter and long-term grants, and the rest among events and Bitcoin developer education programs. These include a long-term grant to Bitshala and Bitcoin for Open-Source (B4OS) plus the setup of over 13 bitdevs across Africa, and the creation of the ₿trust Developer Day conference.”

While it took a while to reach critical mass, the trust has become an active engine driving Bitcoin education and development in areas that were previously under-resourced. Jack Dorsey’s ₿trust might not be the most vocal Bitcoin charity, but it has been one of the more effective, quietly making Bitcoin more accessible to developers – as well as users – in developing nations.

In the process, it’s highlighted the benefits of bringing Bitcoin-native infrastructure to developing nations, where the technology can provide precious financial services, from empowering the unbanked to facilitating cheaper remittances and protecting savings from inflation. In 2022, for example, South African developer Kgothatso Ngako launched a service that enables Bitcoin transactions through basic mobile phones using USSD codes with no internet needed.

Such solutions can be tailored locally and driven by people who understand the problems firsthand. ₿trust lays out a blueprint for how Western resources can support African and Asian tech development without micromanaging it.