“M-Pesa operator Safaricom will not be required to grant access to bitcoin startup BitPesa amid an ongoing legal dispute.” This was the ruling on the 14th of December 2015, by a Kenyan High Court judge. What does this imply for Bitpesa as a company? How does this affect the Bitcoin environment in the sub-region? Is Bitpesa rattled by this development? It has been a series of speculations since the news broke of the joint suit by Lipisha and Bitpesa against Safaricom for the abrupt cut-off from M-Pesa, a platform of Safaricom which served Bitpesa until the 12th of November 2015. …

Yesterday, Safaricom customers were greeted with the news that they should prepare themselves for an M-Pesa service shutdown over the coming weekend, on April 18 and 19. Engineers will be handling a critical part of the two-year project of moving its servers from Germany to Kenya. Since its inception in 2005, the mobile money service has had its servers hosted in the European country. While speaking at a press conference in Nairobi, the company’s financial services general manager, Betty Mwangi, said that having the server system located in Kenya is intended to bring faster and more efficient service delivery. Faster …