In 2013, a teenage boy in Kaduna, Northern Nigeria, received a YouTube link from his older brother. The video attempted to explain Bitcoin from a technical perspective—mining, proof-of-work, decentralization. For most people, it would have been incomprehensible noise. For Abubakar Nur Khalil, it was a spark that would eventually light up the entire African Bitcoin ecosystem.
But understanding would come later. First, there was survival.
Khalil emerged from what he describes as “the shadows of poverty in West Africa,” part of a nation where 40% of the population—83 million Nigerians—lived below the poverty line. In Northern Nigeria, where the tech ecosystem was virtually non-existent and stereotypes about intellectual capacity ran deep, the odds of becoming a globally recognized Bitcoin developer seemed astronomical.
Yet here’s what makes Khalil’s story remarkable: he didn’t wait for permission, infrastructure, or ideal conditions. He taught himself.
The Self-Education of a Bitcoin Core Contributor
Between 2013 and 2018, Khalil consumed everything he could find about Bitcoin—textbooks, articles, videos. By 2018, he started teaching himself to code. Not at a bootcamp. Not with a formal computer science degree. Just a young man in Kaduna with internet access and relentless curiosity.
By age 20, he had created his first pull request to Bitcoin Core. In 2021 alone, he reviewed over 60 pull requests and became the African continent’s leading contributor to Bitcoin Core by number of merged contributions.
To understand what this means: Bitcoin Core is the reference implementation of Bitcoin, the most critical open-source software project in cryptocurrency. Contributing to it requires not just coding ability, but deep understanding of consensus mechanisms, cryptography, and distributed systems. The fact that a self-taught developer from Northern Nigeria became a leading contributor is nothing short of extraordinary.
The moment that crystallized his path came in 2019 when he saw a pull request merged by Tim Akimbo, another Nigerian Bitcoin Core contributor—possibly the first from the continent. “Oh, wow. So that is possible,” Khalil recalled thinking. “I had no idea you could actually contribute on that level.”
That realization—seeing someone who looked like him, from where he was from, doing what seemed impossible—unlocked everything. His first contribution was merged in 2020, and he never looked back.
Recognition Arrives: $50K from the Human Rights Foundation
In May 2021, the Human Rights Foundation awarded Khalil $50,000 in Bitcoin for his work on Bitcoin wallet software. For context, this isn’t just prize money—the HRF specifically supports developers whose work advances human rights and freedom through Bitcoin development.
The recognition validated what Khalil had always believed: Bitcoin isn’t just about number-go-up. In countries like Nigeria, where currency debasement is constant, banking infrastructure is unreliable, and remittances are expensive and slow, Bitcoin offers something revolutionary. It’s freedom money. It’s financial inclusion without permission.
The Call That Beat 7,000 Applicants
In 2021, Jack Dorsey and Jay-Z announced ₿trust—a Bitcoin development endowment funded with 500 BTC to support developers in Africa and India. They opened applications for board positions. Seven thousand people applied.
Khalil’s brother encouraged him to apply. He was hesitant—looking at the Bitcoin OGs being discussed, he thought, “Who the hell am I?” But his brother convinced him: even if he didn’t get it, he’d never wonder “what if.”
Months passed. The vetting process was rigorous. Then came an email: he’d advanced to the next round. More interviews followed. The final call was the one that mattered most—Jack Dorsey himself got on the phone with Khalil.
At 22 years old, Abubakar Nur Khalil became one of the founding board members of ₿trust, alongside Carla Kirk-Cohen, Obi Nwosu, and Ojoma Ochai. Three of the four were Nigerian or of Nigerian descent. Dorsey wasn’t wrong when he tweeted: “The people of Nigeria will lead Bitcoin.”
Building from Within: Recursive Capital and Qala
Board membership wasn’t enough for Khalil. He saw the gap clearly: Africa had Bitcoin users, but not enough Bitcoin builders. So he co-founded Recursive Capital, a Bitcoin-only venture capital fund focused on African startups.
The fund’s thesis is laser-focused: invest only in Bitcoin companies or companies using Bitcoin in their infrastructure, avoiding the “vacillation” and “noise” of the broader crypto space. Portfolio companies like Bitnob—a digital wallet enabling Bitcoin savings, payments, and Lightning Network remittances—exemplify what Khalil believes Bitcoin can do for everyday Africans: provide reliable, fast, affordable financial services.
But Khalil understood that funding alone wouldn’t solve the builder gap. Africa needed Bitcoin developers, and it needed them trained properly. This thinking contributed to the creation of Qala, a program focused on training Bitcoin and Lightning developers across Africa.
Based in Kaduna—far from the Lagos tech ecosystem—Khalil witnessed firsthand how the Northern Nigerian tech scene was fragmented and underfunded. “A lot of people told me about the perception people have about tech and developers in the north and I was surprised,” he said. “A good number of the people that I end up doing good work with come from the north.”
His mission became clear: more capital needs to flow to Northern Nigeria. More importantly, talented developers who exist but remain invisible need to be connected, mentored, and positioned for opportunities.
The Interim CEO Who Proved Himself
In 2024, as Btrust expanded its operations and partnerships, Khalil took on the role of interim CEO while maintaining his board position as a non-voting member. The results spoke volumes.
Under his interim leadership, Btrust increased partnerships with organizations including Bitshala, Vinteum, and 2140, and achieved record grant distribution. Since mid-2024, Btrust issued more than $1.7 million in funding, with over half going directly to developers.
Btrust expanded its footprint across Africa, Latin America, and India, staying true to its mission of supporting open-source Bitcoin development in the Global South.
The organization’s board launched a formal CEO search in July 2024, fielding applications from around the world. After what the announcement described as “a long, thoughtful, and rigorous selection process,” the answer was obvious: the right person had been leading all along.
The CEO Who Will Shape Bitcoin’s Global South Future
On November 3, 2025, Btrust made it official: Abubakar Nur Khalil was appointed as the organization’s full-time CEO, stepping down from his board position to report directly to the directors in a three-year term, renewable once.
Board member Obi Nwosu stated that Khalil is “well-positioned to guide Btrust through its next phase as it builds out long-term programs and developer support infrastructure,” with continuity being a major focus as the organization transitions from early-stage growth to broader execution.
What This Means for Africa and the Global Crypto Ecosystem
Khalil’s appointment as CEO of Btrust is more than a career milestone—it’s a signal of where Bitcoin’s future is being built.
For Africa, it validates what many have suspected but few have backed with capital: the continent isn’t just a market for crypto adoption. It’s a hotbed of developer talent, innovative thinking, and practical Bitcoin applications born from real-world necessity. When your currency loses value weekly, when sending money home costs 20% in fees, when banking infrastructure excludes half the population—Bitcoin isn’t speculative. It’s survival technology.
Khalil embodies this reality. He isn’t building Bitcoin applications as an intellectual exercise. He’s building them because he knows firsthand what financial exclusion feels like, what it means to navigate power outages and unreliable internet while trying to participate in the global economy. That lived experience makes the solutions sharper, more resilient, and more relevant to the two billion people globally who remain unbanked or underbanked.
For the Bitcoin ecosystem specifically, Khalil’s leadership ensures that development remains genuinely decentralized—not just in protocol but in human geography. The risk with any open-source project is that it becomes dominated by developers from wealthy countries with abundant resources and specific perspectives. Btrust, under Khalil, counterbalances that by funding developers in Africa, Latin America, and India to contribute to Bitcoin Core, Lightning Network, and adjacent infrastructure.
This isn’t charity. It’s strategic. Bitcoin’s value proposition as censorship-resistant, permissionless money only holds if the developers building and maintaining it represent diverse contexts, threat models, and use cases. A Bitcoin ecosystem built exclusively by Silicon Valley developers will have blind spots. Khalil’s work ensures those blind spots get addressed.
For the broader African tech ecosystem, Khalil’s story demolishes excuses. Northern Nigeria doesn’t have the infrastructure of Lagos, Nairobi, or Cape Town. It doesn’t have accelerators on every corner or venture capitalists fighting to write checks. What it has—what Khalil proves it has—is raw talent that, given internet access and determination, can compete with anyone in the world.
His success creates a blueprint: self-education is possible, contributing to global open-source projects is possible, building world-class companies from unlikely places is possible. More importantly, his commitment to remaining based in Kaduna, to investing in Northern Nigerian developers, to pushing capital toward overlooked ecosystems—that sends a message that success doesn’t require abandoning home. It requires building better infrastructure at home.
For crypto and blockchain more broadly, Khalil represents the “Bitcoin-only” thesis in action. While much of the crypto world chased ICOs, NFTs, DeFi yields, and whatever narrative drove the current cycle, Khalil and Recursive Capital stayed focused on Bitcoin. Not out of tribalism, but out of clarity about what actually solves problems for real users in difficult environments.
That focus is paying off. While many crypto projects from the 2020-2021 boom have collapsed or pivoted, Bitcoin infrastructure continues growing—Lightning Network adoption, Bitcoin-backed lending, remittance solutions, merchant payment processors. The companies Khalil invests in through Recursive Capital aren’t chasing trends. They’re building boring, essential infrastructure that actually works.
The Road Ahead
At 26 years old (he was 22 when he joined the Btrust board in 2021), Khalil now leads an organization with significant resources and global reach. His three-year term, with the possibility of renewal, gives him runway to execute on long-term visions: more developer training programs, more grants to Bitcoin Core contributors, more strategic partnerships across the Global South.
The challenges are real. Bitcoin development faces funding sustainability questions—how do you fund public goods in a decentralized system? Regulatory uncertainty across African countries remains a constant threat, with governments swinging between embrace and crackdown. Brain drain continues as talented developers get poached by better-funded international companies.
But if anyone is positioned to navigate these challenges, it’s someone who learned to code with unreliable electricity, who contributed to Bitcoin Core without formal education, who built a venture capital firm in a region everyone overlooks, who beat 7,000 applicants to join the board of a fund created by Jack Dorsey and Jay-Z.
The story of Abubakar Nur Khalil isn’t just inspiring—it’s instructive. It shows what’s possible when talent meets technology meets determination. It proves that the future of Bitcoin, and perhaps the future of technology more broadly, won’t be built exclusively in Silicon Valley or Shanghai. It’s being built in Kaduna, in Lagos, in Nairobi, in cities and towns that most Western investors have never heard of.
And increasingly, it’s being led by people who understand viscerally why this technology matters, because they’ve lived in the world it promises to change.
Khalil once said, “By supporting developers from the Global South, we are strengthening Bitcoin’s resilience to ensure it remains a robust global financial tool.” That’s not just a mission statement. That’s his life’s work. And now, with Btrust’s resources and platform behind him, that work is entering its most impactful phase yet.
The kid from Kaduna who taught himself to code is now shaping the future of money for billions of people. If that’s not a story worth telling, nothing is.
