25-year-old nightclub owner first to accept Bitcoin payments in Mombasa

Christine Makau, popularly known as Tinas Royal, is the owner of Tina’s Royal Nights, the first business in Mombasa to accept bitcoin and other cryptocurrency as payment.

The 25 year-old business owner has been operating the establishment since November 2021, roughly a year after she was introduced to bitcoin and other decentralized Peer2Peer (P2P) digital currencies by way of a private company based in the United States.

Kenyan businesses’ acceptance of bitcoin and other cryptocurrency as payment is very rare, for there have been few cases documented in Nairobi, namely Tony Mwongera’s Healthland Spa for instance.

Instead of paying for services as a client would at the Nairobi spa, customers use cryptocurrency to pay for drinks, beverages, and meals at Tina’s Royal Nights in Mtwapa, a diverse town in Mombasa.

In fact, Tinas Royal cites the diversity of Mtwapa as a major motivating factor in implementing bitcoin as a method of payment for her business.

Partly due to its location on Kenya’s coast, the bustling town of Mtwapa is a popular destination for tourism and has a sizable foreigner population.

Christine Makau, nightclub proprietor from Mombasa County, embraces Bitcoin payments for her establishement, Tina's Royal Nights Pulse Live Kenya

Flexible method of payment

A flexible method of payment, especially one that is in alignment with modernized technological advancement, would ideally attract a more expansive clientele within the rapid-growing town.

Besides, last October of 2021, software company Chainalysis reported that their firm conducted research that concluded that Kenya ranked on the Global Crypto Adoption Index as the number 1 country in the world with the highest volume of P2P exchange cryptocurrency transactions, following a 300% increase from the previous year.

Naturally, Tina’s Royal Nights is a direct representation of the recent surge of growth of cryptocurrency usage in Kenya.

Tinas Royal compares the functionality of sending and receiving bitcoins to that of using the de facto Safaricom payment processor, M-Pesa, a familiarity she believes could help facilitate a more widespread adoption among Kenyans.

Systemically comparable to sending cash to a mobile or till number, customers can opt to pay for products offered at Tina’s Royal Nights by sending bitcoin to a scanned QR code that is conveniently printed on the menus.

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