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Bitcoin—and most other digital assets—promise cheap, fast cross-border payments. But there’s a catch: you need a smartphone and internet access to use them. In much of Africa, where millions of people still use feature phones, that design shuts them out. Kgothatso Ngako, a South African software engineer and former Amazon Web Services (AWS) developer, founded Machankura in 2022 to solve this design flaw. The startup allows people to send and receive Bitcoin using the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) technology, the same short-code system Africans use to check airtime, transfer mobile money, or query their account balance in traditional banking. Machankura’s mobile-first approach targets Africa’s vast base of feature phone users. In 2024, the continent counted 710 million unique mobile subscribers, yet only 416 million—28% of the population—used mobile internet, according to GSMA’s “The Mobile Economy Africa 2025” report. About 860 million Africans remain offline, constrained by device cost, expensive data, and limited digital skills. This divide persists despite growing smartphone purchases. A report by Omdia, a global research firm, found that smartphones accounted for 55% of all mobile handset shipments in 2025, leaving feature phones at about 45%. For hundreds of millions of Africans who can dial a short code but not download an app, smartphone-built digital asset platforms remain out of reach. Using Machankura, a user dials a local code from any phone—feature or smartphone. A text-based menu appears. They can create a wallet linked to their phone number, check their balance, or send Bitcoin, without needing an app or internet connection. The ambition is to do for Bitcoin what M-PESA did for payments: embed it into a technology that hundreds of millions of Africans already use daily, Noelyne Sumba, Machankura’s Director of Operations, said in an interview with TechCabal. “USSD is already familiar,” she said. “People use it every day for financial services. We are extending that to Bitcoin.” Who uses Machankura and how Machankura operates in Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Malawi, Zambia, Nigeria, Namibia, Tanzania, and Uganda. In each country, users dial a local USSD code to access their wallet. The service is now connected to over 39,000 phones, including feature devices, according to Sumba. Yet, the user base is not evenly distributed. Adoption is concentrated in urban and peri-urban areas, and primarily among younger, digitally-aware users, aged 35 and below, who understand crypto but may lack the devices or data to use conventional wallets. “It’s the young people who are mostly tech-savvy, but because either they cannot afford internet connectivity, or most of them have feature phones, it’s very easy for us to onboard them,” said Sumba. “I’ll be more than happy to get to the older generations, but it will take a while.” Beyond peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers, Machankura users spend Bitcoin through a network of partner platforms connected via the Lightning Network. In Kenya, users can send Bitcoin from their Machankura wallet to Tando, which converts it into M-PESA credit, allowing them to pay for goods and services at zero transaction fees on Tando’s end. In South Africa, MoneyBadger, a local off-ramp partner, has integrated the Lightning Network into its point-of-sale (PoS) system; through a recent partnership with Scan to Pay, it now covers over 650,000 merchant locations, including major retailers like Pick n Pay. Users can also purchase airtime, data, and digital vouchers through services like Bitrefill. Sumba cites examples of daily use: In Kisii, a town in western Kenya, members of Bitcoin Chama use feature phones to transact in Bitcoin for everyday purchases. In Kibera, Nairobi’s largest informal settlement, the Afribit project has onboarded 2,600 residents into a similar circular economy where merchants accept Bitcoin and participants earn satoshis through community work programmes. In South Africa’s Mossel Bay, Bitcoin Ekasi pays all staff salaries entirely in Bitcoin and has onboarded local shops to accept it. “These are the circular economies we’re building for,” said Sumba. “We want that local mama mbogas [female vegetable sellers] to be able to say, ‘You know what, you can still pay me in Bitcoin.’” Since its launch, the startup has processed over 19 Bitcoins (BTC) in total transaction volume across its markets, according to Sumba. At current market prices, that’s over $1.2 million in routed value. How Machankura works Machankura sits between two distinct infrastructure layers: Africa’s telecom networks and the Bitcoin Lightning Network. On the telecom side, when a user dials the Machankura code, the request travels through the mobile network to Africa’s Talking, a communications application programming interface (API) provider that offers USSD connectivity across African mobile operators. Africa’s Talking routes the session to Machankura’s servers. The user then interacts with a real-time, session-based text menu limited to 160 characters per prompt and timed to 20 seconds per response. For most of its markets—Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, and Zambia—Machankura uses Africa’s Talking as its aggregator. In Côte d’Ivoire, Tanzania, and Uganda, local providers handle the USSD integration due to regulatory constraints. “They [Africa’s Talking] were very open to working with us,” said Sumba. “Thanks to Africa’s Talking, we were able to have the service in as many countries as possible. Even when we kicked off operations, we started with all the countries we could integrate into.” USSD infrastructure carries real costs. In Nigeria, acquiring a USSD code through Africa’s Talking costs ₦200,000 ($145), with a monthly maintenance fee of ₦70,000 ($51) plus value-added tax (VAT); per-session charges vary by carrier. In Kenya, a Safaricom setup runs KES 145,000 ($1,122) with KES 70,000 ($542) monthly maintenance. These are fixed costs that Machankura bears regardless of transaction volume, an important consideration for a startup processing micro-value transactions. For users with smartphones and internet access but limited technical skills, Machankura also offers a WhatsApp-based interface as an alternative channel. On the Bitcoin side, Machankura connects to the Lightning Network, a second-layer protocol built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. Lightning allows near-instant, low-cost transactions by routing payments through channels between nodes, rather than recording every small transfer directly on the base chain. Machankura runs
Read MoreJosephine Inika has a rule about the work she puts out into the world: if you need to scratch your head to understand it, she has failed. This is not an easy rule to follow when your job is explaining cryptocurrency to Nigerians. “The way everybody was explaining this thing, nobody was going to understand,” she says. “I didn’t understand. I have never been a fan of complicated explanations or complicated language because, to me, it is a form of gatekeeping.” Today, as Head of Content at Obiex, a crypto fintech platform, Inika has built a career on the opposite principle. She calls it clarity over cleverness. It is not just a style choice. That is the entire point. The long way to the right place Inika did not arrive at crypto marketing by design; she arrived by experiment. Before Obiex, she tried pageant coaching, event planning, product management, talent management, and even a brief stint in coding. She co-founded Iko Africa, a literary social publishing platform, and ran it for a year before stepping away in 2025. She worked in media, fashion, legal, and design. She was, by her own description, in the wilderness. The turning point came in 2021. A friend recommended she replace her for a content writer role at a crypto writing exchange. She had a portfolio of random work—product descriptions, hair reviews, and crucially, a few pieces about crypto she had written on the side. She sent them in. They liked what they saw. She joined. The person she became at Obiex was shaped by all those experiments. Marketing plus operations plus writing plus startup experience. It was not a waste of time. It was preparation for work that required all of it at once. “All my years in the wilderness led me to what is turning out to be quite a fertile land,” she says. “I do not regret it. It led me here, and it’s going to push me even further.” Why say purchase when you can say buy When Inika started writing crypto content, there were fewer AI shortcuts. She had to read everything herself, understand it, and break it down. That grind taught her something foundational: if she could not explain it simply, she did not understand it yet. Her process now is relentless simplification. She asks: what does this mean? What does it do? How does it work? What is the benefit? She leads with the benefit because that is what people care about. She uses first-principles thinking. She asks why, repeatedly, until the jargon changes to accessible language. When someone on her team writes a copy, she asks them to explain it back to her. Then she tells them, “The way you just said it to me? Write it like that.” She refuses to use complicated words when simple ones exist. “Why say ‘purchase’ when you can say ‘buy’?” she asks. She is not interested in sounding smart. She is interested in being understood. This philosophy extends to where she does her research. She does not just look at what other brands are saying. She goes to Reddit and Nairaland, discussion forums, to look at what crypto influencers are posting, what actual users are asking about, and what words they use when they are confused. “A mistake a lot of marketers make is we start making content to impress other peers instead of writing for our audience,” she says. “You think you’re writing for your audience. No, you’re writing so your other marketing peers can say, ‘Wow, you cooked.’ But your audience is like, ‘I don’t understand.’” The project that taught her to pre-mourn In 2024, in her first year as Head of Content, Inika tried to produce a major crypto report. It failed spectacularly. “That project failed so spectacularly,” she says. But it taught her something critical: how to do a pre-mortem. Most people do post-mortems after a project fails. Inika now does pre-mortems before a project starts. She thinks through all the ways it could fail within a specific timeframe, then figures out how to plug those holes ahead of time. It does not make failure impossible. But it reduces the room for it. “Failure to plan is a planure to fail,” she says. “It’s a ridiculous statement, but it’s true.” The cultural context problem Simplifying is not enough. You also have to localise. Inika learned this when Obiex started expanding beyond Nigeria into Ghana, South Africa, and Kenya. The copy she wrote for Nigerians would not work in Ghana, even though the countries are social neighbours. “Cultural context is something we don’t pay enough attention to in marketing,” she says. “We know it in our heads, but implementing it can be difficult. The copy I write for Nigeria will not fly for even a country as close by as Ghana.” Now, when she approaches a new market, she starts with footwork. What are their slang terms? What cities are notable? How do people think about money? What do they respond to? She treats it like being a foot soldier, learning the lay of the land before she writes a single word. This is harder than it sounds. Crypto is already complicated. Layering in regional differences, regulatory nuances, and cultural contexts means every piece of content is a negotiation between clarity and specificity. But Inika has learned that you cannot skip the context. Without it, even the clearest writing lands wrong. The myth that you cannot kill There is one thing Inika has learned she cannot fix with better copy: the perception that crypto is fast money. “That’s a myth that’s above me,” she says. “It’s a cultural crypto thing at this point. There’s nothing I can do about it because sometimes it is indeed fast money. There’s enough evidence of loss and enough evidence of profit. So it is what it is.” What she does instead is inject nuance. She gives people context. She explains what could happen if they do X, and what could
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Table of contents MacBook Air M5 MacBook Pro M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro Apple just announced two new laptops, the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, both powered by the new M5 chip. They are faster, smarter, and more expensive. The price increases are real, and we will get into the exact numbers. But the bigger story here is what these machines can now do. The M5 chip is built specifically to handle AI tasks directly on your laptop, without sending anything to the cloud. That means faster responses, more privacy, and no extra monthly bills for computing power. If you are buying in Nigeria, the exchange rate of ₦1,378.32 to the US Dollar makes these machines a significant investment. This article covers the full specs, the pricing, and what you actually get for the money. MacBook Air M5 Image source: apple.com/newsroom The MacBook Air remains Apple’s best laptop for most people. The 2026 model keeps the thin, fanless aluminium design but adds a new “Sky Blue” colour option alongside Midnight, Starlight, and Silver. More importantly, Apple has moved the base storage to 512GB, ending the era of the cramped 256GB entry-level configuration. This is the first MacBook Air to come with Apple’s N1 wireless chip, which brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 to a consumer laptop for the first time. MacBook Air M5: Technical specs The M5 chip inside the Air is built on TSMC’s third-generation 3nm process (N3P), which packs in 15% to 25% more transistors than the previous process. That efficiency gain is what keeps the laptop completely fanless and silent, even during demanding tasks that would have throttled older models. Here is what you get: Processor: Apple M5 chip, 10-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores Graphics: Up to 10-core GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading Neural engine: 16-core with per-core Neural Accelerators, 4x faster AI than M4 Unified memory: 16GB (base), 24GB, or 32GB at 153GB/s bandwidth (28% faster than M4) Storage: 512GB (base), 1TB, 2TB, or up to 4TB with 2x faster read/write speeds Display: Liquid Retina (13.6″ or 15.3″), 500 nits brightness, P3 wide colour Networking: Apple N1 chip with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread support Battery: Up to 18 hours of video playback, fast-charge with 70W+ adapter Camera: 12MP Centre Stage with Desk View support Audio: Three-mic array, four-speaker (13″) or six-speaker (15″) system Ports: 2x Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C), MagSafe 3, 3.5mm headphone jack Size: 0.44″ thick (13″), 0.45″ thick (15″), fanless aluminium body The 153GB/s memory bandwidth is the number that matters most for AI work. It means data moves almost instantly between the CPU and GPU, eliminating lag when running generative AI models locally. Wi-Fi 7 offers nearly double the throughput of Wi-Fi 6E, which makes a difference if you work from busy offices or co-working spaces. The N1 chip also includes Thread support, positioning the MacBook Air as a hub for Matter-compatible smart home ecosystems. US pricing Pre-orders open on Wednesday, March 4, 2026, at 6:15 a.m. PST (3:15 p.m. WAT) via the Apple Store online and app. In-store availability begins on Wednesday, March 11, 2026, across 31 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and China. The $100 price increase over the previous generation is offset by the jump from 256GB to 512GB base storage. Nigeria pricing The Nigerian tech market prices Apple products based on import tariffs, value-added taxes, and local resellers’ currency hedging. At ₦1,378.32 per dollar, the raw conversion for the 13-inch base model comes to ₦1,514,773.68. Authorised dealers like iStore, Slot, and iConnect add their local costs on top of that. Here is what to expect at retail: Nigerian stock typically arrives 10 to 14 days after the global launch, as local channels coordinate with European supply hubs. iStore Nigeria and Slot are expected to begin receiving stock in the final week of March 2026, with “Special Experience” events planned to showcase M5’s on-device AI features to the local developer community. MacBook Pro M5 Pro and M5 Max Image source: apple.com/newsroom The MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max is the most significant architectural update for Apple’s professional laptops since the 2021 redesign. These machines are built for high-intensity professional work: high-resolution 3D rendering, large-scale data processing, and training local machine learning models that require serious memory and processing power. Technical specs The M5 Pro and M5 Max are built on a “Fusion Architecture” that lets you independently configure CPU and GPU core counts, a first for the Mac lineup. M5 Pro: Up to 14-core CPU (10 performance + 4 efficiency cores) Up to 20-core GPU 25% performance uplift over M4 Pro Up to 48GB unified memory at ~250GB/s bandwidth M5 Max: Up to 16-core CPU Up to 40-core GPU Up to 128GB unified memory at ~546GB/s bandwidth (double the Pro model) Full specs side-by-side: Both the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models now come with Thunderbolt 5 ports, offering up to 120Gbps of bandwidth, triple what Thunderbolt 4 provided. That makes them capable of driving multiple 8K displays or connecting to ultra-fast external storage arrays used in film production. A new “Nano-texture” glass option is available for the Pro line, cutting glare in bright environments without affecting colour accuracy. This matters for on-set colourists and designers working outside a controlled space. The 16-inch model now delivers a record 24 hours of video-streaming battery life, enabled by the N3P process and a 72.4-watt-hour battery in the 14-inch model. Professional audio comes from a six-speaker system with force-cancelling woofers and a studio-quality three-mic array. US pricing The highest-tier MacBook Pro configurations, such as the M5 Max with 128GB of unified memory and 8TB of storage, can go well above $7,000, putting them in the territory of a high-end desktop workstation replacement. Nigeria pricing The MacBook Pro market in Nigeria is split between institutional buyers and high-net-worth creative professionals. At ₦1,378.32 per dollar, the base M5 Pro 14-inch converts to roughly ₦3,030,925.68 before
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