Second partners with Tando, Mavapay, JunubBTC to bring Ark-powered Bitcoin settlement to Africa

Nairobi, Kenya - June 23, 2026

Second (@secondhq) has partnered with Tando (@tando_me), Mavapay (@mavapay), and JunubBTC to bring Ark-powered Bitcoin settlement to mobile-money systems across five African countries.

The settlement layer is powered by Bark, Second’s implementation of the Ark protocol: a fully open-source, self-custodial stack in which every payment gateway keeps absolute self-custody, and settles bitcoin instantly over the Ark protocol without routing fees.

During bitcoin++ Nairobi, the open-source edition (June 17-19, 2026), Matthew Vuk (@matthewvuk2) of Second partnered with Tando to swap out their existing Phoenix (phoenixd) LSP infrastructure for a Bark client that connects to an Ark server for liquidity. The change replaces only Tando’s lightning infrastructure layer, while the application layer and the M-PESA payout are untouched.

It removes the two costs of running a Lightning node as a receiving business:

there are no channels to open and no inbound liquidity to provision (the Ark server’s Lightning gateway supplies capacity on demand),

Tando no longer pays inbound-liquidity fees. In practice, moving from the phoenixd LSP to a bark client cuts Tando’s liquidity costs by an estimated 50-80%: capacity now comes from the Ark server’s Lightning gateway on demand, rather than from pre-provisioned, fee-bearing channels with an LSP. Senders can still pay from any Lightning wallet; Ark-native wallets pay over arkoor at 0% routing fees; and Tando keeps full self-custody throughout.

Bhang (@DevOpsbhang), of JunubBTC in South Sudan, has joined to build a Tando-like solution for his country, working with the Second and Tando teams to demo it on MTN MoMo (Mobile Money). The collaboration lets users move value between M-PESA in Kenya and MTN MoMo in South Sudan directly, with no liquidity management and no routing fees on the Ark settlement layer. Each country runs its own bitcoin-to-mobile-money gateway and holds absolute self-custody of its own funds.

At the Nairobi BitDevs, Matthew presented the collaborative work between Tando and JunubBTC: a mobile-money gateway with 0% routing fees between Kenya and South Sudan, with settlement powered by the Bitcoin Ark.

"The Ark server is a coordinator, never a custodian,” said Matthew. “It abstracts away the channel and liquidity management, so an operator runs a gateway without running a Lightning node, and keeps absolute self-custody. Their balance is held as real VTXOs that they can always exit unilaterally and broadcast on-chain; they are not just leaves or IOUs pointing at money held overseas. For Africa, that sovereignty is the whole point: these gateways should not depend on closed-source servers, or on custodians off the continent. And because every gateway settles on the same Ark, each new gateway has a compounding network effect of cost benefits.

The Mavapay (@mavapay) team, present at Nairobi BitDevs, has joined the working group, led by Theophilus Isah (@Extheo) and Solomon Eze (@IgboPharaoh), to extend the system beyond mobile money to bank accounts in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, and Kenya. Mavapay’s app already converts Bitcoin into naira, cedi, shilling, or rand and pays it out to a bank account or mobile-money wallet in under a minute over the Lightning network; settling that flow over Ark is the next step.

Together this would enable swaps across five countries and their currencies (the Nigerian naira, Ghanaian cedi, South African rand, Kenyan shilling, and South Sudanese pound), reaching a combined population of more than 400 million people in Africa. It would be the first Ark-powered settlement network of its kind, built on a fully open-source stack that guarantees the sovereignty of every gateway operator.

The system introduces a new custom Cashu NUT-05 extension that lets holders of blinded tokens in a Cashu mint melt them directly into a mobile-money gateway over Ark, at 0% Ark-network fees. Because the tokens are blind-signed, holders can privately redeem ecash for mobile money, or direct bank deposits, across the five African partner countries.

Mikey (@_mykhael), a core contributor to the Cashu project (@cashubtc), will lead a Cashu application built specifically for the African market on top of this network, moving value between local currencies and blinded ecash. It uses bark-powered Cashu mints hosted locally in Africa, which unlock a new form of proof-of-reserves made possible by the cosignatures of the Cashu Mint’s Bark client and the Ark server. The Ark server can cryptographically attest a minimum (lower-bound) balance for a mint whose Lightning node has been replaced by a Bark client.

The bitcoin++ (@btcplusplus) week has proven once again that magic happens when people gather in one place.

Meeting Matthew at BTC Prague set off a two-week sprint where I’ve learned more about Ark than ever before.

Ark introduces incredible benefits for scalable, privacy-preserving, and seamless bitcoin transactions, and seeing it integrated across Tando, Mavapay, and Cashu is a massive milestone.

I’m so excited to watch the ideas born during this week continue to grow.

-- Sharon Murugi (@Murugi___), Communications Lead, Btrust (@btrustteam)

With the working group now established, the partners are preparing to launch a shared application layer and product suite for African markets: an open-source, self-custodial settlement network following the model of Tando where value moves freely between local currencies, mobile money, and Bitcoin, with every operator sovereign over their own funds and no money held off the continent.

The first corridors, Kenya’s M-PESA and South Sudan’s MTN MoMo, are already running on a testnet; bank rails and additional countries follow as Mavapay and new partners join. What began as a two-week hackathon sprint is becoming the settlement backbone for a continent-scale, sovereign Bitcoin economy.