Migrants from Eritrea, Libya and Sudan sail a wooden boat before being assisted by aid workers of … [+]
At first glance, the civil war in Sudan, which 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 rose to over 350% in 2021, have fueled the conflict. As the Sudanese banking system collapsed, bitcoin offered a lifeline to escape the war.
“It was almost impossible to send money back home,” a Sudanese expat living in Ireland told me. He uses the online alias SudanHodl in Sudanese bitcoin groups to protect his family back in Africa. “When my aunt called me about bitcoin, I understood that it could have implications beyond my own little online world.”
Since then, SudanHodl, a Sudanese expat based in Ireland who uses this alias due to the security risks on the ground for his family, has been remotely active in the Sudanese bitcoin scene. When tensions intensified, SudanHodl had no other way to get his family to safety than bitcoin. As his parents boarded a bus from Khartoum to the Ethiopian border, he transferred BTC
BTC
“They couldn’t take anything with them – no money, no gold, not even a mobile phone. Anything valuable would have been a serious threat to their life,” he says.
Inspired by his own family’s experience, SudanHodl started remotely leading Sudanese bitcoin meetups and trainings, including BTC Sudan, a group he co-organizes with people on the ground in Sudan and over 500 Discord members. Since the outbreak of the war, the community has helped many escape the war with bitcoin, SudanHodl says.
“There are traders, money exchangers, miners, and just regular people using bitcoin as savings – it’s an incredibly diverse community”, SudanHodl says.
In addition to BTC Sudan, SudanHodl also organized a bitcoin fundraiser for Sudanese medical staff.
“The medical situation is extremely dire. There is no humanitarian aid. Doctors are unable to purchase supplies. Some are using 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.
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 has largely controlled the Sudanese government, while the RSF largely controlled the Sudanese economy, owning the majority of the country’s gold mining operations. As talks to unite both forces under a democratic government failed, the situation escalated.
Between 2003 and 2018, Sudanese access to banking services drastically declined and remittances fell from almost 6% of GDP to 0.2% in 2017, according to the World Bank.
“Especially in the countryside, people have been working 16-18 hours a day and were still not able to make ends meet,” SudanHodl says. “People are desperate. When 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 began looting people’s homes, many lost their life savings.”
While Aziz agreed with SudanHodl about Sudan’s growing bitcoin economy, Aziz also noted that bitcoin’s volatility can be scary for people who have very little money to start 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 when the price doesn’t go up and down over night,” says Aziz. But she, too, sees bitcoin as the longterm solution due to its decentralized nature.
“Bitcoin is not an investment”, says SudanHodl. “In Sudan, there is a genuine need for what bitcoin can do.”
