Community Spotlight: Harlem Bitcoin

When Jon, one of the co-founders of Harlem Bitcoin, was first introduced to Bitcoin back in 2018, he was skeptical of it.

He asked a number of the questions that those new to Bitcoin tend to ask, questions like “What is it backed by?” and “What does it mean that it’s decentralized?”

The fact that he still remembers how challenging it first was to wrap his head around Bitcoin is part of what makes him the patient, understanding, and thoughtful Bitcoin community leader he’s become.

Having been to a number of Harlem Bitcoin meetups myself, I can say that Jon has a way about him when it comes to welcoming those new to Bitcoin to the group.

He distills information masterfully, and he and the Harlem Bitcoin team always make time for their community members to actually practice using Bitcoin (e.g., sending and receiving sats via a Lightning wallet).

And because Jon is gifted at meeting those new to the Harlem Bitcoin community where they’re at, we couldn’t be more happy to report that he’s recently begun to onboard those in the community to Fedi.

But we’ll get to that in just a minute.

First some background on Harlem Bitcoin.

The History of Harlem Bitcoin

“Harlem Bitcoin came together very organically,” said Jon. “I was using Twitter and listening to shows like Black Bitcoin Billionaires on the then popular platform Clubhouse to educate myself about Bitcoin, and I found some guys — Shakib, Jon, Jesse, and Dan — who wanted to start a Bitcoin group that met in person at a restaurant in Harlem.”

Harlem Bitcoin’s founders L-R: Jon, Jesse, Dan, and Shakib

That restaurant was Safari, which is owned by Shakib and located just north of Central Park in New York City. And in mid-2020, it’s where Jon and the other founding members of Harlem Bitcoin met and began working together with haste.

“The rubber immediately hit the road,” said Jon. “We came up with objectives. We decided that we wanted to be educational, we wanted to be Bitcoin-only, and we wanted to keep our messaging simple. We didn’t want to get too technical.”

Safari became Harlem Bitcoin’s homebase, but the scope of the project was not limited to monthly meetups at the restaurant.

Safari of Harlem accepts bitcoin!

Jon tapped into his background as a community organizer to catalyze the team at Harlem Bitcoin to begin having discussions with local people and organizations in the community about Bitcoin.

“We started going out to local civic associations and tenant associations to have meetings with people who didn't know much about Bitcoin, but who understood inflation,” explained Jon. “They knew that their groceries were becoming more expensive, but they didn’t know why.”

They quickly gained traction in the neighborhood and even garnered some attention from those outside of their community, as film producer Lauren Sieckmann and her team came to Harlem to document the success of the project.

Sieckmann featured Harlem Bitcoin in her film Unbanked, which was released in the middle of 2025.

Three of the Harlem Bitcoin founders with film director Lauren Sieckmann

The Importance of Bitcoin Education

Jon sees the work that he and the team at Harlem Bitcoin do as filling a void that exists within traditional educational spaces in the United States.

“Conversations about Bitcoin in educational spaces at the primary school, middle school, and high school levels are pretty much non-existent,” said Jon. “So,we try to teach some of the basics, like hard money like bitcoin is better than money that’s easy to make, like fiat currencies. We also touch on how money works and what the Federal Reserve is, concepts that often don’t get discussed in traditional educational spaces.”

One of the core principles that guides the work that Harlem Bitcoin does is that they are willing to speak with any group of people about Bitcoin, regardless of its size.

“One of the elders at a church ministry that I’m a part of once gave me some important advice: ‘don’t be afraid of small groups,’” said Jon. “It's always about quality, not quantity. If there are three or four people at a meeting and we have a good exchange, the latter is what really matters. If we get one person to spin up a Lightning wallet and then send them some sats to better help them understand how Bitcoin payments work — to give them that aha moment — there's nothing better than that.”

Speaking of Bitcoin wallets, there’s one in particular that Jon prefers: Fedi’s wallet.

Jon giving a talk at a Harlem Bitcoin meetup at Safari

Introducing The Fedi Wallet To Harlem Bitcoin

About a year and a half ago, Jon came across Fedi.

He downloaded the app, and like many of us who download new Bitcoin technology to our devices, it sat idly on his phone for some time before he engaged with it because he was nervous it might be difficult to use.

Before long, though, Jon began tinkering with Fedi only to realize it was easier to use than he’d imagined. That said, Jon did have a question here and there, and he didn’t hesitate to reach out to Fedi’s support team, which not only helped him to better understand how to use Fedi but incorporated some of his feedback into a revamp of the app.

“The customer service was amazing,” said Jon. “It’s a bunch of people you can contact and work with. I felt like I was a part of the development team.”

Not long after Jon felt comfortable using Fedi, he began introducing it to Harlem Bitcoin community members.

“We have our community members complete quizzes at Harlem Bitcoin, and we reward people with sats via the Fedi app,” said Jon. “There’s a federation that we recommend, and people join with ease.”

For some of the people who come to Harlem Bitcoin meetups, Fedi is their first Bitcoin wallet. For this reason, Jon doesn’t get into the particulars of the technology behind federations or even Bitcoin right away. Instead, he starts by simply having them use the technology.

A scene from a Harlem Bitcoin meetup at Safari

“All they have to understand at the beginning is that they just received value instantly and at less than a fraction of a penny in cost,” said Jon.

With that said, when it comes to teaching the Harlem Bitcoin community about how Fedi works, he doesn’t stop at its wallet. He now utilizes it for Harlem Bitcoin’s digital town square.

Harlem Bitcoin’s Digital Town Square On Fedi

In the Fedi app, you can join the Harlem Bitcoin virtual community, which the team at Fedi refers to as a community’s “digital town square.”

Within the virtual community, you can find Harlem Bitcoin’s public group chat as well as Mini Apps including one for Harlem Bitcoin’s “Bitcoin 101” resources and others that explain concepts like federations and ecash.

You’ll also find the “HBC (Harlem Bitcoin Community) Public Group”, where Jon, along with the other founders of Harlem Bitcoin and community members, share ideas related to Bitcoin, freedom technology, and financial inclusion.

A screenshot of the Harlem Bitcoin’s digital town square in the Fedi app

Fedi has become the place where Harlem Bitcoin keeps its conversations going between meetups.

“Fedi really empowers communities to do things together in the virtual space,” said Jon. “Anything can happen when people are working together, and Fedi is really capitalizing on that concept.”

And what Jon also loves about Fedi as a communications app is that when Jon wants to have a one-on-one conversation with a community member, he can do so within the app and that conversation stays between him and the other community member.

Not even Fedi’s development team can gain access to said communication.

This dimension of communication privacy that Fedi offers is a notable complement to the transactional privacy that Fedi enables, and Jon believes that people are going to come to value both sooner than later.

The Importance Of Privacy

According to Jon, we’re entering an era where people will become more conscious of privacy in their digital communications and transactions.

“There is going to come a time likely in the near future when people realize that traditional digital payment apps aren’t peer-to-peer and that people have very little privacy around identity and communication,” said Jon.

“Once people start opening their minds and valuing their privacy more, Fedi will become much easier for people to understand and value,” he added.

When exactly will the day come when most people begin to value their privacy? Jon can’t say for sure.

But he’s a staunch believer in the following proverb: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

Luckily for the people of Harlem who’ve yet to join the Harlem Bitcoin community, they have an exquisite teacher waiting for them in Jon — someone who remembers what it was like to be skeptical of new technologies like Bitcoin and unaware of the value of privacy in the digital age, and who approaches each interaction with the members of the Harlem Bitcoin community with compassion, understanding, and a deep-seated ability to empathize with their situation.