Bitcoin Circular Economies: the Complete World List (2026)

There are roughly 10 places on Earth where you can earn bitcoin on Monday and buy groceries with it on Tuesday, no bank in between.

Not “places that accept bitcoin.” Those are scattered everywhere and nowhere… a steakhouse here, a dentist there.

I mean working local economies, where the money actually loops. This page is the complete verified list as of June 2026, including the one that died, because the failures teach more than the wins.

(Most lists skip the failures. That’s how you end up flying to a “bitcoin town” where three shops last took a payment in 2022.)

What “circular” actually means: the earn test

A town where tourists can buy coffee with bitcoin is an acceptance point, which is nice, but it isn’t circular.

A circular economy is one where bitcoin comes in as income (wages, sales, school stipends) and goes out as local spending. The loop is the whole game.

The test is one question: who in this town gets paid in bitcoin?

Bitcoin Ekasi in Mossel Bay, South Africa passes cleanly. All 21 staff of its parent nonprofit, The Surfer Kids, are paid entirely in bitcoin, and 32 township shops take it. Small numbers, but a real loop.

Why the earn side matters: spend-only adoption decays. A merchant who onboards for tourists and sees two payments a month quietly stops checking the wallet. A worker paid in bitcoin needs somewhere to spend it every week, and that demand keeps merchants live.

And when the loop holds, it can scale further than anyone expects.

The best-known arc is Bitcoin Beach. An anonymous donation arrived in El Zonte in 2019 with one condition: build a local Lightning economy, don’t cash out. The project paid kids for community work, onboarded shops, fishermen, and families… and two years later El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender, citing El Zonte directly.

One 3,000-person surf town to national policy in 2 years. That’s the ceiling when it works.

The world list (2026)

10 active, 1 suspended. Every entry below was web-verified in June 2026, and the status column is honest. Merchant counts decay without constant tending, so treat every number as a snapshot, not a promise.

Latin America

The densest cluster on Earth, and the only region with everyday local usage at scale.

Community	Where	Since	Status
Bitcoin Beach	El Zonte, El Salvador	2019	Active — the original; now education-focused, tourism drives much of the spending
Bitcoin Berlín SV	Berlín, El Salvador	2023	Active — 150–164 merchants, users are overwhelmingly locals
Bitcoin Jungle	Uvita & Dominical, Costa Rica	2021	Active — 200+ merchants, skews expat and tourism businesses
Bitcoin Lake	Panajachel, Lake Atitlán, Guatemala	2022	Active — around 80 businesses, carried by a handful of volunteers
Praia Bitcoin	Jericoacoara, Brazil	2021	Suspended — founder halted operations in late 2025

Worth knowing: Bitcoin Jungle added a Bull Bitcoin partnership that connects its open-source wallet straight to Costa Rica’s SINPE bank rails, and Bitcoin Lake has experimented with mining powered by waste cooking oil. (Nobody said the frontier was glamorous.)

Europe

Older, quieter, and more regulated. Europe holds both the longest-running project on this list and the cautionary tale.

Community	Where	Since	Status
Plan ₿ Lugano	Lugano, Switzerland	2022	Active — 360–400 merchants, taxes payable in crypto, city + Tether funded
Bitcoin Valley Rovereto	Rovereto, Italy	2015	Active — Italy’s longest-running merchant economy; shops hold their bitcoin
Arnhem Bitcoinstad	Arnhem, Netherlands	2014	Diminished — payment processor shut down under MiCA; community continues
F.R.E.E. Madeira	Funchal, Madeira, Portugal	2022	Active — 170+ businesses island-wide, about 62 in Funchal

One sovereignty note on Plan ₿ Lugano: it’s top-down by design. The merchant network is real, but its momentum depends on city hall and Tether’s funding. That’s not grassroots.

Africa

Community	Where	Since	Status
Bitcoin Ekasi	Mossel Bay, South Africa	2021	Active — 21 staff paid fully in bitcoin, 32 accepting shops

Ekasi also runs its own Fedimint federation for users who want a custodial option (someone else holds the keys, but it’s the community, not an exchange). Growth is measured in single shops, not headlines.

Asia

Community	Where	Since	Status
Bitcoin Island Boracay	Boracay, Philippines	2022	Active but shrunk — roughly 50+ merchants, down from a 250+ peak

Boracay’s onboarding ran through Pouch.ph, a single venture-backed startup. The 250-to-50 slide is the clearest data point we have on what happens to merchant counts without constant tending.

Three case studies (one thriving, one struggling, one dead)

Thriving: Bitcoin Berlín SV

Berlín is a 20,000-person coffee town in El Salvador’s mountains. Since 2023, a small team built Bitcoin Berlín SV door-to-door: 150 to 164 merchants now accept bitcoin, roughly a quarter of all businesses in town.

The detail that matters: unlike El Zonte, the users are overwhelmingly Salvadoran locals, not tourists. Thousands of them, buying ordinary things.

Nobody ran a conference circuit or launched a token. The team grew it on shoe leather, in a town that needed cheaper ways to move money. Arguably the strongest evidence yet that everyday bitcoin commerce can work.

Struggling: Arnhem Bitcoinstad

Arnhem started in 2014 and at its peak had signed over 100 merchants (including a Burger King). The Netherlands’ pioneer bitcoin city, a full decade of work.

Then the EU’s MiCA regulation forced its payment processor, BitKassa, out of business. Day-to-day payments ran through that one company, and when it died, live acceptance thinned considerably.

The community, the merchant map, and the regular events continue. But the lesson stings: if your local economy depends on one licensed company’s rails, you don’t own the economy. A regulator does. Self-custodial Lightning setups dodge this failure mode entirely.

Dead (suspended): Praia Bitcoin

Praia Bitcoin in Jericoacoara, Brazil was the scrappy one. Founded in 2021 by Fernando Motolese on a shoestring, it onboarded schools and gave kids NFC payment cards. At its height, 11 to 20 merchants accepted bitcoin.

In late 2025, Motolese suspended operations and closed the community center in protest of Bitcoin Core’s data-storage changes. As of mid-2026 the websites remain up mainly as a historical record.

The project didn’t die from regulation, theft, or apathy. One founder’s conviction built it, and one founder’s protest ended it. Founder dependence is a single point of failure too.

Will it revive? I honestly don’t know. Nobody does… and any list that claims certainty about these projects is selling something.

Visiting without being a bitcoin colonizer

These are real towns, not theme parks. Some etiquette, learned the awkward way by plenty of visitors before you:

Spend where locals spend. The pupuseria, the corner store, the surf school. Not just the expat hotel with the orange sticker.

Don’t lecture merchants about money. The shopkeeper in Berlín has processed more real bitcoin transactions than most podcast hosts. She knows.

Tip in bitcoin. Tips are income, and income is the earn side of the loop. You’re not just spending… you’re seeding circulation.

Expect to pay more in the famous spots. El Zonte’s prices have climbed well above the Salvadoran average with bitcoin tourism. (That’s your demand doing that, by the way.)

Support the institution underneath. Bitcoin Beach runs education programs; Ekasi is built on a youth surf nonprofit. Money or volunteer hours there outlast any single purchase.

How to plug in (or start one)

Easiest entry points: Funchal has a monthly meetup plus the Bitcoin Atlantis conference, and Lugano runs an annual Plan ₿ forum that draws thousands. Show up, ask who needs help.

If you’re thinking about starting one, fellow builders, the 11 projects above are the curriculum. The pattern from the ones that work:

Start with earning, not accepting. Pay someone a real wage in bitcoin: Ekasi started with surf coaches, Bitcoin Beach with kids doing community work. Merchants follow paychecks.

Build on an institution the town already trusts. A nonprofit, a school, a youth program. Not your brand.

Go door-to-door. Berlín reached a quarter of its businesses with a small team and no budget for hype.

Avoid single points of failure — one processor killed Arnhem’s acceptance, one founder’s exit froze Praia.

And count progress in single shops across years, not headlines across weeks. The loop compounds slowly… then policy follows.

Every listing above links to a full profile in this directory, with an honest status field. When one of these stalls, we say so. That’s the whole point of keeping a map.