Kenya’s cryptocurrency and blockchain news website BitcoinKe.io recently interviewed Pelle Braendgaard, the founder of Kipochi, the first Bitcoin wallet and the first to integrate M-PESA into a crypto product in 2013.
Braendgaard says that Kenya’s Central Bank was open to new ideas especially given that they had allowed M-Pesa to begin operating in Kenya.
However, he notes that it is Safaricom’s parent firm Vodafone that ordered the shut down of his service dubbed Kipochi, a wallet that was designed to allow users to receive and send bitcoins across the world while allowing Kenyans to convert the same to and from an M-Pesa balance.
“I heard that the order to shut us down came from London and not from the Safaricom Office,” says Pelle Braendgaard.
