About PoWBoT

A Telegram bot that checks and rewards proof of Bitcoin payments at merchants across Africa.

What it does

Proof of Work (PoW) here means a real Bitcoin payment at a local merchant, filmed and posted on X or Nostr: evidence of Bitcoin adoption on the ground in Africa. PoWBoT checks each post, counts it and pays everyone involved in sats.

The bot serves the CBAF – a network of 40 grassroots Bitcoin projects across Africa, and growing. New to PoWBoT? Start with how to join in the guidelines.

How it works

  1. A project submits a link to an X or Nostr post showing a Bitcoin payment at a local merchant
  2. The bot automatically verifies the post meets basic criteria
  3. A human reviewer watches the video and approves or rejects
  4. If approved, the bot sends sats via Lightning to the merchant, the project, and the reviewer
  5. The post is liked and reposted on Nostr to amplify the signal

Origin story

The Telegram bot was built by someone with no programming experience.

It started in December 2025 with a simple message to Grok: “Help me write a basic Telegram bot.”

Over the following weeks, the project evolved from a bare-minimum welcome message into a full-featured Proof of Work verification system – first with Grok, then continued with Claude.

The point

You don’t need to be a programmer to build useful things. With open source software, AI assistance, and persistence, anyone can create real working software that adds value.

Since December 2025 the bot has approved over 4,600 posts from nearly 30 projects, at more than 300 merchants across Africa.

Built with

  • Python + python-telegram-bot
  • SQLite (payment ledger)
  • Blink API (Lightning payments)
  • Nostr SDK (likes, reposts)
  • Google Sheets API (member registration)
  • BTCMap API (merchant identity)
  • Twitter Syndication API (X posts)
  • GitHub Pages (dashboard hosting)
  • FastAPI (project profiles and sign-in)
  • A Hetzner server with Caddy (the bot, the API and live data)

The dashboard’s source is open on GitHub.

Contact and updates

If you are a project representative and need to update your information, you can sign in and submit change requests via the link found at the bottom of your project profile page. To report inaccuracies, please contact the administrators.