Wooden boat, before being assisted by volunteers from Spanish NGO Open Arms, in the Mediterranean Sea some 30 miles north of Libya, Saturday June 17, 2023. (` Photo/Joan Mateu Parra)Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved
At first glance, Sudan’s civil war that broke out in April 2023 is a power struggle between two people: Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, leader of the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces, and Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, leader of Sudan’s military junta. But years of economic marginalization and monetary inflation, which soared to over 350% in 2021, have fueled the conflict. When Sudan’s banking system collapsed, Bitcoin provided a lifeline to escape the war.
“It was almost impossible to send money home,” a Sudanese expat living in Ireland told me. He uses the online alias SudanHodl in Sudanese bitcoin groups to protect his family in Africa. “When my aunt called me about bitcoin, I realized it could have implications beyond my own little online world.”
Since then, SudanHodl, an Ireland-based Sudanese expat who uses this alias due to the security risks to his family locally, has been active in the Sudanese bitcoin scene from afar. As tensions mounted, SudanHodl had no other option to keep his family safe than bitcoin. When his parents boarded a bus from Kathour to the Ethiopian border, he transferred BTCBTC to a trusted merchant who exchanged the bitcoins for cash so his family could start a new life.
“They couldn’t take anything – no money, no gold, not even a mobile phone. Anything valuable would have been a serious threat to their lives,” he says.
Inspired by his own family’s experiences, SudanHodl began leading Sudanese bitcoin meetings and training remotely, including BTC Sudan, a group he co-organizes with local people in Sudan and over 500 Discord members. Since the war broke out, the Bitcoin community has helped many escape the war, says SudanHodl.
“There are traders, money changers, miners and just regular people using Bitcoin for savings – it’s an incredibly diverse community,” says SudanHodl.
In addition to BTC Sudan, SudanHodl also organized a Bitcoin fundraiser for Sudanese medical workers.
“The medical situation is extremely dire. There is no humanitarian aid. Physicians cannot purchase supplies. Some use plastic bottles as chest drains,” he says. With bitcoin, people can bypass Sudan’s broken financial system and transfer support directly to where it’s needed.
The civil war decimated the Sudanese economy
Sudan has been under transitional military rule since 2021, when Sudan’s revolutionary government was overthrown in a military coup. Since then, the junta largely controlled the Sudanese government, while the RSF largely controlled Sudan’s economy and owned most of the country’s gold mining operations. When talks to unify both forces under a democratic government failed, the situation escalated.
Between 2003 and 2018, Sudanese access to banking services fell drastically and remittances fell from almost 6% of GDP to 0.2% in 2017, according to the World Bank.
“Especially in rural areas, people work 16 to 18 hours a day and still can’t make ends meet,” says SudanHodl. “People are desperate. When the militias offered $500 to start fighting, it seemed like a good deal to them.”
“The Sudanese don’t trust the banks,” Rania Aziz, a Sudanese human rights activist and co-founder of the Sudanese grassroots initiative Interconnect, tells me in an interview. “Most people keep their money at home in gold or USD. When the RSF started ransacking people’s homes, many lost their life savings.”
While Aziz agreed with SudanHodl regarding the growing bitcoin economy in Sudan, Aziz also noted that bitcoin’s volatility can be scary for people who have very little money to begin with. “Bitcoin’s price fluctuations can be scary for people,” she says.
Personally, Aziz has found broader support for stablecoins. “It’s less scary to trust a new form of currency if the price doesn’t go up and down overnight,” says Aziz. But she also sees Bitcoin as the long-term solution due to its decentralized nature.
“Bitcoin is not an investment,” says SudanHodl. “There is a real need in Sudan for the capabilities of Bitcoin.”
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I’m Marketing Director at Wasabi Wallet and a freelance writer specializing in privacy, technology, human rights and civil liberties. I’m a co-organizer of the Lightning Conference, the largest Bitcoin Lightning Network conference to date, and a communications consultant for several Bitcoin projects and companies. I own BTC and use small amounts of XMR.
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