Fedimint in South Africa: Zero Fees & Community Custody | SLP752

**Stephan Livera** (0:00)
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Rejoining me on the show today, Hermann, the founder of Bitcoin Ekasi, Bitcoin Circle Economy in Mosul Bay, South Africa, and Joshi, who is a core Fedimint contributor and developer, also appeared on the show a little while back, talking about Fedimint updates and Fedimint updates there. So let's give us a quick catch up. I know you guys have some updates to share on Fedimint and what you guys have been doing in Bitcoin Ekasi.

**Joschi** (0:28)
Yeah, so as we discussed the last time I was on the show, we are now able to run Fedimint on Start9s or on Umbrils or like other node-in-the-box systems or really any box that does have internet on it. You don't need any public IP anymore. You don't need to run this in the cloud. You don't need to configure a domain whatsoever, which solved many AOs that the system had. It was the biggest hassle in setting it up. This was up and coming the last time we talked about, maybe a year ago, got finally released in October and was shortly after deployed by Hermann and his fellow guardians in a four-guardian federation on Start9.

**Stephan Livera** (1:15)
Excellent. And Hermann, give us the update from your side.

**Hermann** (1:19)
Yeah, I mean, this is the second iteration of this federation. We did run a test one first, and we didn't really broadcast that too wide. It was just testing. The one we're running now is the second federation we set up, and this one really is being used as an everyday solution. And I've been making transactions on it almost every single day. I used it when I was traveling to Kenya recently. It blew my mind that I'm halfway across the African continent, and my mobile wallet is somehow connecting. It feels like magic. Somehow connecting back to a Start9 device sitting in my office and coordinating transactions between six other devices distributed across the province.
It's just insane, and it's been very reliable. The first one was a little shaky, the setting up. There were some issues to iron out.
But yeah, this one, we're really onboarding people and we're using it for real.

**Stephan Livera** (2:17)
Yeah, I guess a quick background for listeners, just to make sure everyone's caught up and following along. What we're talking about here is a federated eCash protocol called Fedimint. And then this is applying that and making it, let's say, practical for a federation. And in the context here, guardian means like, in this example, there are seven guardians and they are signing the transactions to allow on-chain transactions and this kind of thing. And then I presume you obviously must have a lightning gateway that's handling the lightning component of it. And so I guess, yeah, do you guys want to share any thoughts on how the migration went?

**Joschi** (2:59)
Well, just one more thing. The new federation has seven guardians to make it more reliable and more secure. And migrating between federation is really easy. So you just go to the dashboard of the old federation for the guardians, you configure a shutdown date and you configure the federation to migrate to, and then the users have it displayed in their app as a warning. And with a single click, they can join the new federation and then migrate their funds.
So we usually recommend to set a shutdown date, maybe two or three months in the future, run them parallel for a while. So the users, they see it as a banner, but they can still use the old federation and then migrate at their own time when they get the chance.

**Stephan Livera** (3:51)
And Hermann, from your side, when you're interacting with the end users, what does it look like for them?

**Hermann** (3:57)
I mean, it's kind of hard sometimes not to get into the weeds of Ecash. Like I try to, I'm very tempted because it's so fascinating, but try and onboard them like I would to any other Lightning Wallet.
It feels a lot more comfortable doing it. Like I've always had some reservations onboarding someone to like a fully custodial Lightning Wallet. It's always been the easiest way to get someone to use Bitcoin for the first time, but you have this little nagging thought in the back of your head, like I should really explain the trade-offs here, but you oftentimes don't have time for that. So it's a lot more, it just feels more comfortable onboarding someone to something that you know is slightly better than a, well, depending on who they are, a lot better than a centralized wallet like Wallet of Satoshi or whatever. But from the user's perspective, it's like onboarding someone to a regular Lightning Wallet. It's not much different. They download a Wallet app.