Bitsacco in 2026 and Beyond

In 2025, we began our journey as Bitsacco - a bold effort to integrate a modern financial tool, Bitcoin, to the familiar structure of a Savings and Credit Cooperatives (SACCOs).

We focused on building a secure, local foundation in Kenya, developing products for membership, personal savings, and group savings. Our growth from 120 members at launch in January 2025, to over five hundred members, with over two BTC cumulative community savings by close of year is testament to the proven need of tools that give people easy access to Bitcoin through a familiar model.

Over that one year, we grew to deeply appreciate the power of community is Bitsacco’s greatest strength, and it must be the center of everything we build. We also faced significant challenges acquiring legal recognition and licensing as a fully registered SACCO in Kenya, a painful process that has since taught us to ask for fewer permissions, and focus more on community building and service.

A Community-First Pivot

Our new direction is rooted in the fundamental belief that the way you save to grow yourself and your community shouldn't be such that you have to keep asking permission to do it. Bitcoin is a powerful, novel financial tool that does not require permission to access and utilize. When localizing and bringing this tool to our community through familiar financial structures like Chama saving groups, we must take great care not to lose the fundamental permissionless and accessible nature of Bitcoin.

To lose the permissionless nature of this financial tool, is to concede too much - even in the name of familiarity and adoption.

Through 2025, we spent way too much energy and focus in pursuit of formal setup as a SACCO. While familiar, we learned that this structure is restrictive and centralizing. Our efforts to lean hard on the familiarity of SACCOs, ultimately overshadowed what truly matters: empowering our members and growth community, in a sovereign way.

While we were asking for permission to bring Bitcoin to our members via a SACCO vehicle, the landscape in Kenya evolved with new regulations being passed that ultimately, reduce the clarity on how we can simply and permissionlessly provide value to the members of Bitsacco.

These new regulations may well provide clarity to specific Virtual Asset Providers (VASP) in the country, but we are not looking to build a VASP. We set out to build a community with individual freedoms, collaboration and shared growth among members, all powered by a core invention that is Bitcoin.

To stay true to that mission, we are letting go of all restrictive legal identities and structures that would lessen our freedom to build our community. Bitsacco doesn't have to be a cooperative to keep serving and empowering its members.

Our mission remains the same—to give people access to Bitcoin via tools that are familiar. Our implementation will no-longer qualify as a Savings and Credit Cooperative–by the legal sense of the word. We are aiming to be truly global and community-first.

Doubling Down on Community

The new Bitsacco is an Open Community built upon the pillars of privacy, self-sovereign collaboration, and Bitcoin financial education.

We are building, curating, localizing and availing tools that support non-censorable access to Bitcoin for every member of our community from within the community:

• Self-Sovereignty & Censorship Resistance: We are focusing on solutions that ensure every single member of our community is in direct, individual control of their funds. Every member gets control on the custody of their funds within the community.
• Collaboration, without Centralized Control: As we build a community of self-sovereign individuals, we also provide tools for peer-to-peer collaboration amongst the members of the community. This allows bitcoin savings groups to emerge and self-govern their collective savings within the community, without Bitsacco being a centralized entity controlling the funds of all groups and individual members of the community.

Tools in the Bitsacco Community

As we built the Bitsacco community in Kenya through 2025, we had a front-row seat in witnessing the emergence of bitcoin tools that have since proved themselves as value add to members of our community.

• Tando: Tando is a widely adopted and effective tool that empowers anyone in Kenya to easily spend their Bitcoin. Proposed and built just weeks ahead of the Bitsacco project, almost all the members of the Bitsacco community have used Tando in the past year. Bitsacco platform has had a withdraw bitcoin to kenya shillings experience which is narrowly equivalent to Tando’s own send money to phone number experience.

The new Bitsacco community experience now integrates Tando as a first-class tool for every member to spend their Bitcoin, anywhere in Kenya

• Minmo: Minmo is a super simple and private way to acquire Bitcoin from Kenya shillings. The very earliest version of Minmo was built to give every member of Bitsacco a direct way of saving Kenya shillings and getting Bitcoin in their SACCO. Minmo has now evolved to support the same function to more communities beyond Bitsacco, and is evolving to support other currencies beyond Kenya shillings.

The new Bitsacco community experience explicitly integrates Minmo as the primary tool for any member of the Bitsacco Community to buy Bitcoin.

• Fedi: Fedi is an open source private bitcoin wallet with chat and mini apps. We are leveraging Fedi as the platform where we curate how Bitsacco members interact, learn, save, and spend - privately. The design of Fedi as a super app on Bitcoin allows us to directly embed tools like Tando and Minmo alongside the chat, built right into the app. Now Bitsacco doesn’t have to build a Bitsacco community app from scratch!

We leverage the best of Fedi, and localize it for our community needs using functional and effective mini apps like Minmo, Tando and more

• Bitsacco Guides: Onboarding and empowering the members of the Bitsacco community has always involved a good degree of self and collaborative education on personal , group saving patterns and financial education in general. Bitsacco Guides is a new instructional and educational mini app available directly within the Bitsacco community.

This tool ensures every member has access to comprehensive resources so they can make the best use of all the other tools and features available in the Bitsacco community.

Looking ahead, we recognize the vital role of credit in financial empowerment. We are actively inviting partners to collaborate with Bitsacco on building a Credit/Loans mini app. Such a tool would formalize lending and credit services for our members, complimenting the above educative, savings and spending mini apps for a complete Bitsacco community experience.

A New View into Bitsacco Community

Community was and will always be the core of Bitsacco.

We are inviting our existing members to join this exciting new experience of Bitsacco. This evolution involves migrating your Bitsacco membership, personal and chama savings into the private, self-custodial Bitsacco Community on Fedi. We have prepared a series of Guides available at bitsacco.com/guides to get you started.

This is more than a platform change — it is an invitation to access the Bitsacco Community in a private and truly permissionless way. Should you need any support in this migration, join our community chat on Fedi or on Whatsapp.

We are always available to help you access and make the best of the Bitsacco community experience.

A Global, Open Template for Building Communities on Bitcoin

Familiar and informal savings structures, such as Chama group savings, SACCOs and other community-based group savings, are foundational to financial well-being across the Global South.

Bitsacco is a model for building communities on Bitcoin, by localizing, building and curating familiar and effective tools for use by the members of that community. We leverage the existing, familiar patterns of personal, group savings, credit, and transactional structures already present in these communities to enhance effective adoption of Bitcoin in our communities. The goal is to grow the value accessed and utilized by members or groups within the community.

If you are a community, leader, or organization that has expressed interest in collaborating to replicate, research or further the Bitsacco model for the benefit of your community, you can now fill this form to partner with us. partner with us