Ask people to name a "Bitcoin town" and you will hear El Salvador's Bitcoin Beach, maybe Lugano, maybe a Costa Rican jungle.
The atlas we keep says something else. Of 66 towns, beaches, islands and local programmes trying to run on Bitcoin, 26 are in Africa. That is twice as many as Europe (13), and more than Latin America and the Caribbean (14).
And the African ones are not just listed. 14 of the 26 show dated activity in the last 12 months, the most of any region.
How a place gets a status
Every place in the atlas rests on one page run by the operator or programme itself, with the spot on that page where the facts sit and the day we checked it. The status is graded from dates, not from vibes:
- Active: dated activity within 12 months of our last check.
- Quiet: the operator's site is up, but no dated activity in the last 12 months. Quiet is not closed.
- Ceased: the operator says it has ended.
- Unverified: we could not open the operator's own site, or only a directory lists it.
Adoption figures (merchant counts and the like) are reported exactly as the operator gives them and are never audited, which is why every record carries a separate note on how sure we are that we read the source right.
The count today (atlas v0.5.0)
| Region | Active | Quiet | Unverified | Ceased |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 14 | 10 | 2 | 0 |
| Latin America & Caribbean | 8 | 5 | 0 | 1 |
| Europe | 6 | 6 | 1 | 0 |
| North America | 6 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Asia | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Oceania | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Multi-country | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
The active African places sit in Kenya (Makueni, Githurai, the Tena Bitcoin Estate), South Africa (Bitcoin Ekasi, Plettenberg Bay), Mozambique (three programmes), Tanzania, Zambia, Benin, Nigeria and the DR Congo. Most are small circular-economy projects: a few dozen merchants, a school programme, Lightning payments for local trade.
The one place marked Ceased is in Brazil: Praia Bitcoin in Jericoacoara, whose operator announced its sunset in February 2026. It stays in the atlas, because a record of what stopped is as useful as a record of what runs.
Use the data
The whole register is one CSV, free under CC BY 4.0, with the evidence URL, the page locator and the date checked on every row:
import pandas as pd
places = pd.read_csv("https://billasaari.com/atlas/data/places.csv")
# status by region
print(pd.crosstab(places.region, places.status))
# the most recently active places, with the page that proves it
recent = places[places.status == "active"].sort_values("last_dated_activity", ascending=False)
print(recent[["name", "country", "last_dated_activity", "activity_url"]].head(10))
- The atlas, on a map: billasaari.com
- How a status is graded: billasaari.com/atlas/method
Know a place we are missing? The atlas takes suggestions: send the place's own page, and it is checked before it enters the register.
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