Why African Designers +Bitcoin = The Future
Bitcoin adoption in Africa isn't bottlenecked by technology. It's bottlenecked by design. 400 million unbanked adults across Sub-Saharan Africa stand to benefit from Bitcoin, but the tools they encounter are built by engineers, for engineers. Confusing onboarding flows, unexplained self-custody, and jargon-heavy interfaces are silently killing adoption before it starts. This talk makes the case that designers, specifically African designers, are the missing layer in Bitcoin's growth story on the continent. Drawing from BitDesigners Africa's experience running community meetups and workshops across Nigerian cities, I'll break down how UX decisions make or break real-world Bitcoin adoption, what happens when you put designers and developers in the same room solving onboarding problems, and the concrete path from curious designer to open-source Bitcoin contributor. This isn't a theoretical pitch. It's a field report from the people building the bridge between Bitcoin and the next hundred million users, and a call to take design as seriously as we take code.