Self-Custody Must Survive: Part II — Survive for Whom?

In Part I of this series, I argued that self-custody must survive to preserve blockchain’s transparency—the glass bottom that makes the technology worth building. That argument was about architecture. About accountability. About ensuring that trillions of dollars moving onto blockchain rails don’t disappear behind the same opaque walls that enabled every institutional failure of the last three decades.

That argument matters. But it is abstract. It is about systems and structures and the people who already have access to them.

The question I did not answer is the one that actually matters: survive for whom?

Not for the crypto trader in London. Not for the DeFi developer in San Francisco. Not for the fintech founder raising a Series A. The most urgent case for self-custody is in the places where 1.7 billion people have been told—by the architecture of the financial system itself—that they do not qualify to participate.

Excluded by Design

The global financial system requires documents to prove you exist. A passport. A postal address. A utility bill. An employer verification letter. A credit bureau file built over years of formal banking relationships. If you do not have these things, you do not exist financially. You cannot open an account. You cannot access credit. You cannot buy insurance. You cannot prove to anyone, in any jurisdiction, that you are a person who earns, spends, saves, and repays.

This is not an oversight. This is architecture. The compliance infrastructure that governs who gets to participate in the financial system was designed by and for populations with formal addresses, formal employment, and formal banking relationships. The 53-question onboarding form that a service provider uses to assess a new customer was written for someone who has a postal code, a utility account in their name, and a history of credit that a bureau can verify. Everyone who does not fit that template was never part of the blueprint.

One point seven billion people. Not because they lack economic activity. Not because they are unbankable. Not because they have nothing to offer the financial system. Because their economic activity does not look the way the system was designed to recognise.

In Kenya, 86% of adults use mobile money. M-Pesa alone processes hundreds of billions of dollars in annual transaction volume. In Tanzania, Ghana, Uganda, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo—mobile money is not a supplement to the banking system. It is the financial system. Nearly 280 million monthly active mobile money accounts operate across Africa, representing one of the largest concentrations of financial activity on earth.

These are not underserved markets waiting to be banked. These are functioning economies—vibrant, complex, and growing—that have been locked out of credit, insurance, and cross-border financial services because the gatekeeping infrastructure demands things these populations were never given. Not things they failed to earn. Things they were never given.

The Evidence Nobody Reads

Every mobile money transaction generates behavioural evidence. Merchant patterns. Income regularity. Spending consistency. Payer relationships. Repayment behaviour. The frequency of transactions, the concentration of activity around specific locations, the rhythm of money moving in and out—this is the raw material of creditworthiness. It is being generated every single day by hundreds of millions of people.

In the West, creditworthiness is computed from data that already sits in bureau files—payment histories reported by banks, utilities, landlords, credit card companies. The data exists because the infrastructure exists. The infrastructure exists because it was built over decades for populations that were always intended to be included. For mobile money populations, no equivalent bureau exists. No institution is aggregating their payment histories. No score is being computed from their behaviour. The data is there. The infrastructure to read it is not.

A 53-question onboarding form designed for someone with a postal address and a bank statement is not just friction. It is a wall. And on the other side of that wall are populations whose daily transaction behaviour demonstrates exactly the creditworthiness that the form was designed to assess—if anyone cared to look.

Nobody is looking. Not because the technology to read this evidence does not exist. But because the people generating it do not fit the template.

The Uncomfortable Mirror

Here is what I think most people in developed economies do not want to confront.

We are closer to these populations than we are to the billionaires whose financial system we defend.

Most of us are one medical emergency, one redundancy, one economic shock away from the same precarity. We carry debt. We live paycheque to paycheque. We worry about the same things—rent, food, whether our children will have more stability than we do, whether the economy will hold long enough for our plans to work out. The gap between a middle-class family in London and an M-Pesa merchant in Nairobi is smaller than the gap between that same London family and the people running the institutions that hold their money.

Yet we judge. We accept, without much questioning, a narrative that frames the global poor as a problem to be solved rather than as economic participants who have been excluded by the design of a system that does not work particularly well for most of us either. We defend borders that limit their financial identity while our money flows freely across those same borders through the institutions that excluded them. We look up and aspire to a system built for the few, rather than looking across and recognising that the person on the other side of the world is navigating the same economic reality we are—with fewer tools and no safety net.

This is the narrative I refuse to accept: that the financial system works, and the people outside it simply have not qualified. The system does not work for most of us. We have just been given enough access to stop questioning it.

Borders That Serve the Few

A credit score stops at a border. A FICO score computed in the United States means nothing in Kenya. An Experian file built in the United Kingdom does not cross to Tanzania. Financial identity is nationalist by design—constructed on jurisdiction-specific data sharing agreements between institutions that only operate within regulatory silos. The infrastructure was never built to be portable because the people who built it never needed it to be.

Money is global. Capital moves across borders instantly, at scale, without friction—for the institutions that control it. But the financial identity of the person behind that capital is locked to a single jurisdiction. A Kenyan merchant with a decade of consistent mobile money transaction history starts from zero when they cross into Tanzania or Ghana. Their economic behaviour is identical. Their creditworthiness is identical. The system simply refuses to recognise it because the recognition infrastructure stops at a line on a map.

Blockchain does not have jurisdictions. Behavioural evidence recorded on-chain does not know what country the user is in. Transaction patterns that demonstrate creditworthiness produce the same evidence regardless of where the transactions originate. A decade of consistent economic behaviour is a decade of consistent economic behaviour—whether it happened in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Accra, or Kampala.

For the first time in history, the infrastructure exists to make financial identity truly portable. Not portable for banks. Not portable for capital. Portable for people.

The Only Path

For these populations, self-custody is not an ideology. It is not a preference debated at blockchain conferences. It is the only option. There is no bank to custody for them. There is no institution holding their wallet. The mobile money wallet is their financial system, and the behavioural data it generates is the only evidence of their economic life that exists anywhere.

If self-custody dies—if the only path to blockchain-based financial services runs through institutional custodians who require the same documents, the same postal addresses, the same bureau files that these populations have never had—then 1.7 billion people remain exactly where they are. Excluded. Invisible. Generating economic evidence every single day that nobody reads, nobody scores, and nobody accepts as proof that they are creditworthy, insurable, and deserving of the same financial services that the rest of the world takes for granted.

The glass bottom does not just need to survive for transparency and accountability. It needs to survive because it is the only window through which billions of people’s economic activity becomes visible, verifiable, and valuable. Cover that glass, and you do not just lose transparency. You lose them.

This is not charity. This is not corporate social responsibility. This is not a feel-good paragraph at the bottom of an annual report.

This is the recognition that 1.7 billion people are active economic participants in a global economy that refuses to see them. They earn. They spend. They save. They repay. They generate hundreds of billions of dollars in transaction volume through financial infrastructure they built for themselves when the formal system told them they did not qualify. Their behavioural evidence is there. The blockchain rails to read it are there. The mobile money ecosystems that carry their economic lives are there.

The only things standing in the way are the same things that have always stood in the way: borders that serve the few, compliance infrastructure designed to exclude, and a comfortable narrative that tells us the system works—a narrative we accept because we have just enough access to believe it, and not enough proximity to the excluded to question it.

We are closer to them than we are to the people who built these walls. We always have been. The only difference is that we were given a door—and we stopped asking who was left outside.

Self-custody must survive. Not for the privileged few who already have choices. For the billions who have never been given one.

How do we make it happen?