Community Spotlight: Bitcoin Victoria Falls

The story of Bitcoin Victoria Falls began in 2023, when Adam Cowperthwait, an American, visited the popular border town of Livingstone, Zambia and had a vision that it could become another Bitcoin circular economy, like El Zonte, El Salvador’s Bitcoin Beach.

After visiting Livingstone, home to the popular tourist destination Victoria Falls, the socially-minded Cowperthwait, who’d traveled to Zambia as a board member of the Free Haven Community Initiative, made little haste in his efforts to connect with Bitcoiners in Zambia to get the project off the ground.

Victoria Falls, at the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe | Photo credit: Sammy Wong

He reached out to Bitcoin for Fairness founder Anita Posch, who’d been to Zambia on a few occasions. Posch quickly connected him with Humphrey Simwinga, who she’d met while engaging with the Bitcoin community in Lusaka, Zambia, Simwinga’s home city.

A photo of Humphrey Simwinga from the Bitcoin Victoria Falls website

It wasn’t long before Simwinga became Cowperthwait’s co-founder in Bitcoin Victoria Falls, Zambia’s premier Bitcoin circular economy.

But perhaps what’s more interesting than how Cowperthwait and Simwinga found one another is how Simwinga found Bitcoin in the first place.

Simwinga’s Bitcoin Journey

While Simwinga was completing his studies in nuclear engineering, Simwinga ran a small online business that was generating extra income, and he wanted to invest some of his earnings.

“In 2018, I was researching and thought that maybe I could invest in the U.S. market,” Simwinga told me in an interview. “But I was surprised to find that it wasn't easy for a foreigner to invest in these markets, much less a Zambian for some reason. That frustrated me a bit.”

Determined to find some way to invest, he continued his research, which eventually brought him to Bitcoin. He’d come across it a few times at this point, but this time he decided to do his due diligence on it. It didn’t take long before Bitcoin started to click for him.

“The more I looked into it, the more it started making sense,” said Simwinga.

So, in the depths of the 2018-2019 bitcoin bear market, Simwinga made his first bitcoin purchase.

While he was happy to start buying bitcoin during a bear market, he does have some regrets from that time.

“I bought some altcoins like Ethereum,” he said with a lighthearted laugh. “But, later on, I learned the difference and went Bitcoin only.”

What resonated most deeply about Bitcoin with Simwinga was something he’d learn from Posch: Bitcoin is fair.

“The idea that Bitcoin is fair money, which anyone can have access to despite what country they’re from, was really interesting to me,” said Simwinga.

Thanks to Simwinga and Cowperthwait’s efforts, the idea of Bitcoin as fair money isn’t only interesting to him but to the over 200 students it has graduated via the My First Bitcoin diploma program and the 118 merchants that the Bitcoin Victoria Falls team has onboarded to Bitcoin.

Education is at the center of the work that the team from Bitcoin Victoria Falls does

And that latter number would be larger if Simwinga and the Bitcoin Victoria Falls team didn’t have to put the brakes on their merchant adoption program.

Merchant Adoption Overload

While 188 is an incredible number of merchants to onboard in a small city with only about 178,000 inhabitants, the number would have actually been higher if the sats Simwinga and Michael Pelete, the manager of Bitcoin Victoria Fall’s Merchant Adoption Program, hadn’t run dry by mid 2025.

“Because our initial efforts were in education, we wanted to create an incentive in which the students who were graduating could earn some sats,” said Simwinga. “So, we created the Merchant Adoption Referral Program where students could talk to merchants or shop owners they'd frequently buy things from and get them to start accepting bitcoin payments. The students would earn 8,000 sats if the merchant began accepting bitcoin.”

Turns out, the students were more motivated than Simwinga or Pelete could have imagined.

“The program was more successful than anticipated,” Simwinga said with a laugh, as what he said seemed like an understatement. “Our budget could no longer support their efforts, so we had to begin to focus on the merchants we’d already onboarded instead of adding more.”

One of the over 100 merchants who accept bitcoin in Bitcoin Victoria Falls

Because so many merchants had been onboarded in Livingstone, Simwinga decided to move there full time as opposed to commuting once a week from Lusaka, a 450-kilometer trip, to focus his efforts on what is happening on the ground in the burgeoning bitcoin circular economy.

It was also around this time that Simwinga noticed another issue: Zambians wanted to spend their bitcoin — even if merchants didn’t accept it.

Taking inspiration from Kenya’s Tando, a Lightning-to-fiat interface app, he created BitZed.

BitZed and Fedi

BitZed enables Zambians to spend sats from a Lightning wallet and to have the payment settle in Zambian kwachas over Zambia’s mobile money network, MoMo.

This lets Zambians who prefer to live on a Bitcoin standard do so regardless of whether those with whom they transact prefer to be paid in bitcoin or not.

For this reason, we at Fedi couldn’t be more excited that BitZed is now a Fedi Mini App. That is, Zambians can now spend from their Fedi wallet and have their payments settle over Momo using BitZed.

Simwinga said that he’d been interested in Fedi since 2022 but that, since BitZed has been added as a Mini App, he’s genuinely excited about it.

“With BitZed inside of Fedi, it’s easier for people to make payments with it,” said Simwinga. “Fedi makes using BitZed easier because users don’t have to worry about swapping between different wallets while making payments anymore.”

Simwinga added that Fedi has also become a go-to app for those in the Bitcoin Victoria Falls community to move sats from on-chain to Lightning, something users can do with Fedi’s Swap Mini App or the Boltz Mini App.

What’s Next For Bitcoin Victoria Falls?

Simwinga is happy with the progress that he and the team at Bitcoin Victoria Falls have made in helping their community members to both save in bitcoin and spend it.

As part of the next phase of Bitcoin adoption, he’d like to see more people in the community earning in bitcoin, which he admits is “a bit of a challenge.”

He’d like to see more Bitcoiner tourists come to visit Livingstone and was happy to share that he’s recently hosted both Joe Nakamoto and the team from Tando.

Simwinga and Sabina Gitau from Tando in Livingstone | Photo from Tando’s X account

An X post from the Tando account on March 22, 2025, after the team’s visit to the country

“When visitors come, it motivates the merchants,” said Simwinga. “When the merchants see tourists using Bitcoin, they think to themselves ‘People are actually using it!’ and they are excited to be a part of the larger Bitcoin community.”

Beyond that, Simwinga and the Bitcoin Victoria Falls team will continue to focus on their educational efforts in the community, because said efforts are sorely needed.

Much of the educational work that they do is around undoing the damage that crypto scammers have done. Simwinga couldn’t emphasize this point enough.

“Crypto scammers have almost destroyed the perception of Bitcoin entirely,” said Simwinga. “Up to now, most people haven’t wanted to hear anything related to Bitcoin because they think it's a scam. So, that has been the biggest challenge as far as education is concerned.”

With that said, Simwinga was quick to point out that they’ve reached hundreds of “open-minded” people directly in Livingstone with their educational efforts and many of them have spread what they’ve learned to friends and family.

Between the continuous education of these open-minded Zambians and the incredible number of merchants the Bitcoin Victoria Falls team has onboarded, it was hardly surprising to hear Simwinga say that maintenance via education is not only his primary focus but his team’s “greatest success.”