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Machankura Brings Bitcoin to Africa via USSD

What is Machankura (8333)?

A feat of technological ingenuity that promises to lower the barrier of access to the Bitcoin ecosystem is live and working today. Machankura strips away the sophistication that excludes billions from access to convenient and even life-changing  financial innovation. 8333 achieves this by leveraging legacy USSD technology – tailoring and integrating it with cutting-edge blockchain technology which forms the foundation of the future of finance.

Machankura’s breakthrough brings Bitcoin to the centre of the mobile and money revolutions underway, not only in Africa, but globally.  With Machankura, 8333 is bringing real financial inclusion to the populace in developing markets.

How Does Machankura (8333)  Work? 

Source: https://machankura.com/

Getting started with Machankura is simple and straightforward. First it depends how you want to use it i.e. for sending or receiving  crypto or purchasing items using Bitcoin. What’s great is that anyone with a mobile device in the countries where Machankura is currently available can effectively use the service. The mobile device does not even need to be a smartphone in order for the user to receive or send the smallest units of Bitcoin (satoshis/sats). 

However, in order to fund your account i.e. if not receiving ‘sats’ from another party or simply loading up your Machankura balance in order to send others sats via text; you need to find download a Lightning Network wallet such as Bitcoin Beach which is available for download on Google Play and App Store. 

Once you have a Lightning wallet, you can simply deposit/receive sats or BTC from another Lightning wallet or load up the wallet by buying bitcoin on a reputable exchange such as BTSELuno, FTX or Binance.

In our case, we sent Bitcoin using an on-chain address from our recommended platform, BTSE. 

Source: https://www.btse.com/

Within a few minutes, the transaction cleared in our Bitcoin Beach Lightning wallet and we could now proceed to send satoshis and make micro transactions to other mobile users simply using USSD. 

 

So we proceeded to initiate the process using Machankura. First, we had to register using the applicable country code. Being in South Africa, we used the code *134*382*382# to register.

Next we had to create a password. 

Once you’re a registered Machankura user, it’s easy to then send, receive or shop with Bitcoin. 

All that was left was to load up our Machankura wallet with the sats in our Bitcoin Beach wallet in order that we could then send another mobile user some sats using Machankura (8333). 

We retrieved our Lightning addresss on Machankura which was simply ‘mobile number’@8333.mobi.

We could now send funds from Bitcoin Beach wallet to Machankura to find out if it is indeed fact that one can send satoshis to another using any phone and without the need for even an internet connection – only via a regular mobile network.

We received instant notification of receipt of the satoshis sent from the Bitcoin Beach wallet to our Machankura wallet.

Now we could send the satoshis to another mobile user. 

To send, you simply choose the number of sats you wish to send to another mobile number.

And just like that we were able to send Bitcoin/sats to another mobile using USSD. 

For more about this Bitcoin breakthrough, go to machankura.com or 8333.mobi.

The digital currency revolution here and Africa will  be the next frontier of crypto adoption. If you’re a blockchain-powered business or project interested in developing markets across the continent, Proudly Associated is your gateway into Africa.