Bitcoin Lightning transfers are now possible using SMS services

Things are moving swiftly in the crypto world and fast-paced innovations come to solve real-world problems. And one that brings anyone closer to crypto from the touch of his or her mobile phone is through a service that enables SMS transfers of Bitcoin sats using the Lightning network. With this SMS service, anyone can go from having no crypto to having Bitcoin and then go spending it. Built by South African developer Kgothatso Ngako, the new SMS-based service is named Machankura, which is a South African word for money. This could truly free the world from falling currencies and light hope even in the poor countries.

The solution brought to market is enabled by USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) which is an application interface that uses just shortcodes to interact with an application, making it simple and widely available on feature phones. This removes the need for an Internet connection and ensures a bigger user base that could use the service.

It seems that in order to be able to send BTC through SMS you need to register an account with a 5-digit pin, and from there on it will transparently create a Bitcoin wallet for you and presented with the options to send and receive BTC. Registered users can set up a username used as Alias in order not to have to publicly share the phone number for transfers. This way, some sort of anonymity will be kept on the blockchain.

The next step will be to add Payments in order to easily make use of your Bitcoin sats. Once this is complete I think that this will expand to the masses and we might see a new adoption wave. Such technologies that make crypto easier to use and spend will ensure the success of the mass adoption of a true decentralized payments system. We are still experimenting, technologies are growing, and seeing such solutions to the market it shows that we are quite close to a flippening.