Excerpt
I walk you through how you can create a Bitcoin community using the Fedi app, from setting up wallets to sending and receiving payments securely. Discover how Fedi helps people connect, transact, and support each other using Bitcoin and Lightning. Watch now to see how you can bring financial empowerment to your community!
Transcript
So the question is where the person wants to create the community where we can send satoshis to each other and also receive payments from outside from someone else. So I would say it depends on how important the community character of the solution has to be for you. If you want to really combine a community of people with a chat, compare it to a WhatsApp group. A WhatsApp group in which you can send bitcoin directly within each other. There’s one possibility. That’s an app that is called Fedi. That’s basically the best tool. It’s very new; it just had its launch, it’s public launch in August this month, and it enables you to build a community of people within a private group, and you can send satoshis from and to each other. So the first thing I’d suggest is that you tell your community members to download and install the Fedi app on their smartphones, and after backing up their seed phrases – their personal backup, it’s called, I think, in Fedi – they then shall join the Principal’s Federation. You can find that inside of the app. You join a Federation, and the Federation is basically a community of people who are securing the bitcoin together in a so-called multi-sig vault. And within the app, then after backing up your seed words, you will find a tab which is called Chat. And there you can start a private group and invite the members to your private group. And within that chat, you can then send and receive money. The next step is that one person has to start to add Lightning satoshis to the Fedi wallet. The satoshis will be locked in the principal Federation’s vault or in any Federation you choose in their vault. And then you can start sending funds inside Fedi to your community members. There are several options to add funds and to receive money into Fedi. So first, the easiest option, I’d say, is you request Lightning satoshis from someone who already has a Lightning wallet, like, for instance, someone who has funds in Wallet of Satoshi, in the Breez app, in Phoenix, in Zeus, or any other Lightning-compatible wallet. Or someone can directly send from an exchange that is offering Lightning withdrawals, like, for instance, I know that Kraken offers that, or Coinfinity, which is a European-based exchange, and there are others as well. So you basically request funds from the person from within Fedi. You say request, the Fedi app shows you an invoice, you send that invoice to the other person who wants to send you money, and they send the payment to the invoice, and the satoshis will land in your Fedi wallet. The other option to do this is someone can even use on-chain bitcoin or USDT on Tron to send you money into your Fedi wallet. The options to swap are indicated in the Fedi app itself. In the Fedi app, you have an area where you can see other apps, and one of those is called Swap, and this gives you the opportunity to swap USDT on Tron, USDT on Ethereum, and Ethereum into Fedi. So what happens is that if you open this Swap feature, then you can choose to swap Tether to Lightning, and then the app in Fedi will show you a QR code, which is the USDT TRC address to which the sender is sending their Tether. And then as soon as this is paid, it will show up in your Fedi wallet. There’s another way to swap it into the Fedi app. You use a website called FixedFloat, it’s ff.io. So you basically request funds from within your Fedi account. The Fedi app shows you a Lightning invoice, just like before, you copy this invoice and send it to the remitter, so to the person who wants to send you USDT, Solana, Cardano, whatever, all the altcoins that are available on FixedFloat. So the person goes to the ff.io webpage, selects the pair that they want to exchange, which is Ether, Solana, Cardano, whatever altcoins, to Lightning, and then they add your Lightning invoice to the destination field. And FixedFloat will immediately show you the amount of the altcoin or USDT that needs to be exchanged. The person then sends their altcoins to the address that FixedFloat is showing them, and as soon as this is done, the funds will be in your Fedi wallet. That means as soon as all your community members are onboarded into Fedi and have written down their seed phrase, they can receive sats from all over the world to pay for goods in Zimbabwe. For that, they will need to find a peer-to-peer partner because in Zimbabwe there are no exchanges, so you need to find someone on the ground who accepts bitcoin in any form, like Lightning, Liquid, or maybe even Solana, or whatever, in exchange for cash, for US dollar cash. But I think, well, I feel the best way to do it in general, to build up a community of Bitcoin and Lightning users, if you have a community where people exchange goods or services with each other, they can immediately pay themselves from within Fedi and don’t even have to swap to another coin. So that’s actually a very great option for communities to use money within their closed circle of people, in a trusted circle of people even more, which is very important in many countries with authoritarian leaderships and situations. The other option, of course, is to use, for instance, the AQUA wallet, because the AQUA wallet also offers the opportunity to use bitcoin on-chain, Lightning payments, and liquid. And on liquid, you can also have USDT, but it’s not the same USDT because it’s another blockchain. It’s not the same USDT as USDT on Tron or Tether on Ethereum, so then you need to swap again. AQUA doesn’t have a chat feature or a community feature like Fedi, but of course, you can start the community on a secure messenger like Signal or WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook. Therefore, I trust it less, actually, than Signal, but I know that WhatsApp is the most used messenger in many African countries, and so you can set up a group there and in parallel use the AQUA wallet. But of course, the more convenient and nicer option, actually, I believe, is Fedi. But you need to know that in Fedi you are not really having self-custody. With the AQUA wallet, you have self-custody. You alone are responsible for your funds. In a Federation, it’s the Federation that is responsible for the funds, and you have to trust that Federation. But in many cases, I believe that it’s okay to trust this Federation if it’s only for a small amount. So don’t save your life savings on a Fedi app. For your life savings, please use a mobile app that gives you self-custody, or even better, a hardware wallet.