Bitcoin Ekasi runs in the townships of Isinyoka, Asazane and Fairview, known together as JCC Camp, outside Mossel Bay. It is not a separate organisation. Its own site states that it is an extension of The Surfer Kids, a registered South African non-profit founded in 2010 by Hermann Buhr Vivier and Jenya Zhivaleva, and that the project uses that NPO as an established community platform. There is therefore no separate entity to record, which is why the structure reads as unincorporated and no jurisdiction is claimed.
The mechanism is deliberately circular and easy to check. The NPO recruits about 50 children from the surrounding townships and employs surf coaches, lifeguards, teachers and community workers from the same community. All of them are paid 100% of their salaries in bitcoin. In parallel the project onboards township spaza shops to accept bitcoin, so the coaches can spend their wages locally without first converting to rand. The first shops were onboarded in August 2021, which is the month the project dates itself from.
Vivier says he had followed Bitcoin since late 2013, drawn in by the 2013 Cypriot banking crisis and the bailouts, and that a 2019 interview with Michael Peterson of Bitcoin Beach was what turned it into a plan. The El Zonte model is stated openly as the template.
The project has published an education centre in the township and works with partners including Bitcoin Beach, Machankura, Bitrefill and the Human Rights Foundation. It does not publish a merchant count, a payment volume or an independent evaluation, so what can be verified is the structure of the experiment rather than its effect on household incomes.