While Western financial media spent much of 2026 tracking Bitcoin Shatter From an all-time high in October 2025 near $126,000, security The Academy released a documentary documenting a different story.
Planting Bitcoin: Trezor Academy and the Bitcoin Revolution in Africa It follows educators, traders, and community members across sub-Saharan Africa who use Bitcoin not as a speculative asset but as a functional monetary instrument.
The film depicts Bitcoin education centers in South Africa where teenage students complete a Bitcoin diploma course and receive weekly rewards in Bitcoin, which some use to buy groceries for their families.
It profiles a shop owner who rejected Bitcoin over concerns about its volatility until a local mentor introduced him to stablecoin settlement, after which he became an adopter.
It documents a woman who traveled 14 hours to attend a grassroots Bitcoin conference and a former drug addict whose life has changed since engaging with the local Bitcoin circular economy.
The dividing line through all of them is exclusion from the current financial system. The film’s speakers describe populations—refugees, orphans, and people without official addresses or government-issued IDs—who do not have access to bank accounts, credit, or formal payment infrastructure.
Bitcoin, as one participant put it, “doesn’t recognize whether you’re poor or rich, what color your skin is, whether you have a government ID or not.”
String analysis registered More than US$205 billion of value was received online across Sub-Saharan Africa in the year to mid-2025, up about 52% year-on-year – the third-fastest regional growth rate in the world.
A greater share of those remittances fell below $10,000 than in any other region, a pattern consistent with daily use by individuals rather than institutional flows.
Remittance costs tell part of the story: sending $200 to sub-Saharan Africa through traditional channels carries fees approaching 9 percent, the highest of any region according to the World Bank.
On Bitcoin’s Lightning network, the equivalent transfer can cost a few cents.
Currency instability adds another dimension. When the Nigerian naira was devalued in March 2025, on-chain trading volume surged across the region as people moved their savings out of the local currency. For societies that have experienced rampant inflation over multiple generations, assets with fixed supply outside government control hold practical rather than ideological appeal.
Trezor Academy: Global Bitcoin Education
Trezor Academy, which has run more than 300 meetings, graduated more than 2,000 students, and now works in more than 30 countries, built the documentary around local teachers teaching their peers their own languages.
“This program is not going to teach everyone in Africa about Bitcoin,” says one of the teachers in the film. “What we are doing here is planting seeds through local educators from which circular Bitcoin economies will subsequently grow.”
Alongside the release, Trezor has added a donation option to its online store. Customers can contribute at checkout or donate without purchasing, with all proceeds going toward workshops, meetups and sponsorships of projects in the Global South.
