Bitcoin at TerraKeepers
Money has borders. Value does not.
The Kofán have lived on this stretch of the Putumayo for longer than Colombia has been a country. The financial system has never reached them, and it was never going to. A branch 200 kilometers upriver has never made sense to anyone holding a spreadsheet. So we stopped waiting for it.
The starting point
The problem was never the money
There was funding. There were people ready to work. What sat between them was a system built for cities. A wire arrives at a bank. The crew does not have one, and the nearest branch is a day of travel away.
1.6
Cash machines per 10,000 adults in Putumayo. Bogotá has 7.5.
1 in 3
Adults in neighboring Vaupés with any kind of deposit account.
235
Colombian municipalities with no bank branch at all, most of them rural.
Cash machines per 10,000 adults
This is the last mile that banking does not reach. It is where the Kofán live.
How it works
Bitcoin was the workable answer
We use Bitcoin for one reason. It arrives.
Funds arrive
A donation or a buyer payment lands with TerraKeepers.
Any currency
Sent as Bitcoin
Value moves from us to the field with no correspondent bank in between.
Minutes, cents
Converted at the last mile
Bitcoin becomes Colombian pesos at market rate, at the recipient's end.
About 1%
The crew gets paid
Spent in their own town, in the currency their town uses, with no bank account needed.
Every Friday
What it unlocks
Transparency is the door
A community with no bank account has no financial record the world recognizes. That absence is what keeps people outside the global economy long after the money problem is solved.
A ledger anyone can check
A donor in Zurich can see funds land in the Amazon. Every payment is verifiable.
Paid directly
A buyer anywhere can pay the community, with no correspondent bank taking a cut and a week.
A village becomes a counterparty
Bamboo, cacao, craft, and carbon all have global buyers. Now there is a way to get paid like a participant.
The rail we built to pay wages turns out to be the same rail that carries a community into the market on its own terms.
Education
What stays when we leave
A rail nobody understands is just another dependency.
3
Kofán educators in training
A teacher and two young Kofán women, teaching the My First Bitcoin curriculum in Kofán.
Self-custody
Hold what you earn
The community can hold and move value without anyone standing in the middle.
$67
One month of signal
A Starlink connection carries the classroom.
Dayra learning what a BTC wallet is and how to receive and send satoshis
Honesty
What we claim, and what we do not
What we claim
- Bitcoin is the rail that reaches a village a day past the last branch, this week, at a cost we can publish.
- The Bitcoin leg of the transfer is censorship resistant.
- Every payment sits on a ledger anyone can inspect.
What we do not claim
- That the peso conversion is unstoppable. It happens at a regulated endpoint, and a regulated endpoint can be frozen. We say so plainly.
- That Bitcoin banks a country. Handing people a wallet does not make them included, and at national scale the results have been thin.
Ahead
What comes next
August 2026
Bitcoin treasury activates
Long-term holding, kept separate from the operational Bitcoin that flows straight through to the field. Everything received so far has gone into the work. The reserve starts at zero, on purpose.
Installed
Donated solar on Kofán land
Off-grid power built with partners, already on the ground.
Confirmed, timing expected
Miners follow the solar
A rare arrangement with an Indigenous community in the Colombian Amazon.
Beyond the Putumayo
This is not only Colombia
476M
Indigenous people in the world, roughly.
141
Economies covered by the benchmark global survey.
1.3B
Unbanked adults counted in that survey.
0
Questions in it asking whether any of them are Indigenous.
What we built in El Diviso answers distance. The same rail works anywhere the last mile is long and the community is ready to hold what it earns.
Why Bitcoin, why here
Sovereignty is not sovereignty if someone else can turn it off.
Indigenous communities have been promised land, money, and infrastructure for centuries, and watched all three be revoked. Bitcoin gives the community a form of value it can hold, transfer, and pass to its children without permission.
At a glance
- Our rail
- Salaries and most supplies initiated in Bitcoin
- Our last mile
- Converted to pesos at the recipient's end, around one percent across our own transactions
- In training
- A teacher and two young Kofán women, as Bitcoin educators
- Connectivity
- Starlink, $67 funds a month for the classroom
- Treasury
- Activating August 2026, starting at zero
- Energy
- Donated solar installed, miners confirmed
Build on this rail.
Notes on figures
Colombian coverage and cash machine density: Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia and Banca de las Oportunidades, Reporte de Inclusión Financiera 2024. Indigenous population: International Labour Organization. Global unbanked figure and the absence of Indigenous disaggregation: World Bank Global Findex 2025. Off-ramp cost reflects observed rates on our own recent transactions and moves with market conditions. Treasury policy is being formalized with the Board in August 2026. Miner activation timing is expected, not scheduled.