Ever since Satoshi Nakamoto dropped the white paper, one of the selling points of bitcoin has been, “You don’t need a bank. All you need is a smartphone.”

But what if you don’t have a smartphone?

This is the case for millions of people in Africa, which is why Kgothatso Ngako, a former software developer for Amazon, created the no-frills app called Machankura.

Kgothatso Ngako is speaker at this year’s Consensus festival, in Austin, Texas, May 29-31.

Or maybe “app” is misleading, as it’s designed to work on simple phones that lack touchscreens or cameras or the bells and whistles of an iPhone. All you need is the ability to text. Using the Lightning Network, Machankura (slang for “money”) lets users send and receive bitcoin, with or without the internet.

This is something most of us take for granted. Consider a bitcoin wallet address: Usually it’s something that looks like “37LaxH5ihB5hZMXs72fofA8qzanipuWTF!” Typing it in manually would ruin your week. If you make a typo – and you’ll make a typo – your bitcoin is lost forever.

Thankfully we can copy and paste this monster using our laptop or smartphone. But without a smartphone? “The user may not have copy-and-paste-functionality,” says Ngako. “But bitcoin has these wonderful things called lightning addresses, which are like an email.” Now, users of Machankura can use bitcoin by just typing in normal-looking numbers and email addresses.

Before heading to Austin for Consensus, Ngako shares how Facebook did something smart that inspired Machankura, how its 15,000 users are spending bitcoin, and why the usage patterns in Africa are, in a sense, surprisingly similar to the patterns in the United States.

Interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Before creating Machankura, you helped spread the word about bitcoin in Africa. How so exactly?

Kgothatso Ngako: I grew up in a township called Mamelodi. So the main barrier at the time was that a lot of the literature that explains Bitcoin is in English, right? But we have all these different African languages. So if somebody is intrigued by Bitcoin and they don’t speak English, how would they get content to learn about it? So we started an organization called Exonumia. Its aim is to translate Bitcoin literature into African languages.

What Bitcoin literature did you use? I’m guessing the white paper?

Yeah, the white paper. A few simple ones. The email Satoshi sent out when Bitcoin version 0.1 released, and Hal Finney’s reply to that. And, of course, the “I Am Hodling” post.