Blink Wallet

The Weekly Brief is back after a three-week pause, with four weeks in one edition.

South Africa's FNB opened Bitcoin buying to nearly 9 million clients, but the coins are ringfenced: no transfers in or out, so no paying a merchant and no moving them to your own wallet. Access to Bitcoin as an investment, not as money. The comment period on the country's draft crypto rules closed September 30; the Reserve Bank says they're not final.

On the ground: shops in Kimbo, Kenya ran a week of 10–15% Bitcoin discounts, someone paid for fuel in sats at a Cape Town petrol station, and a phone shop in a Dominican mountain village got its first walk-in Bitcoin customer, with no campaign behind it.

The rails had a rough month: Liquid peg-outs stayed frozen, Swiss Bitcoin Pay went offline for six days, and Core Lightning shipped two security releases in two weeks. If you run CLN, update to 26.06.9.

https://www.blink.sv/blog/weekly-brief-2026-41

Accepting Bitcoin is one thing. Paying your staff in it is another.

Bitcoin Ekasi moved all its assistants' salaries into sats this week — Bitcoin at the start of the local money cycle, not just the checkout. In Santo Domingo, a burger shop paid a bread maker in sats, who used those same sats to send a remittance abroad: one payment doing a sale, a wage and a cross-border transfer with no bank in between.

Reliability stayed part of the story. The Liquid sidechain reported ~$320M drained, then saw most of it returned on-chain a day later, minus a haircut — a reminder that partial recovery isn't the same as being made whole. And BTCPay shipped another security-driven release, trading some convenience for a smaller attack surface.

https://www.blink.sv/blog/weekly-brief-2026-37

Blink brought the BTC Map merchant directory inside the wallet this week — on a shared open standard other wallets are adopting too, so finding where to spend Bitcoin no longer means leaving the app.

In Nairobi, one settlement reported 3.78M sats circulating locally across 11 projects. BTCPay shipped a Core Lightning update but kept external access disabled while it recovers. And a reported crackdown in Afghanistan was a reminder that where Bitcoin gets banned, it's often needed most.

https://www.blink.sv/blog/weekly-brief-2026-36

Three weeks of security pressure have turned into a working blueprint.

A duty-free shop at Oslo Airport now settles Bitcoin sales straight to a non-custodial wallet via BTCPay. BTCPay's founder is putting feature development on hold to shrink the attack surface. ZEUS's post-mortem confirmed custody held through a real breach — no customer funds lost. And a 600-person South African town runs about 45 Bitcoin-accepting businesses.

The stack isn't just surviving — it's converging on the shape it needs: self-hosted, non-custodial, boring in the best way.

https://www.blink.sv/blog/weekly-brief-2026-34

This was the week the security warnings became confirmed damage.

BTCPay confirmed an exploited bug cost real funds. Cuba's non-custodial lnp2pBot shut down indefinitely under sustained attack. A volunteer red team logged 7,958 findings across 501 projects.

And the payment layer kept shipping anyway: Wallet of Satoshi moved to self-custody, Blink added non-custodial BTCPay receiving, and everyday sats purchases widened across Africa.

The lesson holds — self-host, patch fast, hold your own keys.

https://www.blink.sv/blog/weekly-brief-2026-33

AI-assisted attacks forced the swap provider Boltz offline, took Satora down briefly, and had BTCPay shipping an emergency patch for a critical, actively-exploited bug.

The twist: the same AI is now hardening the whole open-source Bitcoin stack. The lesson — self-host, stay patched, build redundancy.

https://www.blink.sv/blog/weekly-brief-2026-32

The Blink Terminal is here: a cash register in a browser. Open a link, take Lightning payments — nothing to install.

BTCPay rebuilds multisig for teams, a Salvadoran town adds tuk-tuk rides in sats, and the hardware-wallet fiasco shows why real open source — not just readable code — wins.

https://www.blink.sv/blog/weekly-brief-2026-31

Accepting Bitcoin just got easier: the new BTCPay plugin turns a Blink Lightning address into a full merchant setup — no node, no API key, your keys.

Lightning Labs ships Wavelength, pooled sats buy a cow, and a town in El Salvador pays for laundry, juice, and coffee in bitcoin — this week's brief.

https://www.blink.sv/blog/weekly-brief-2026-30

$49.3M pushed through open-source BTCPay rails in a year. A Salvadoran school canteen improvising NFC cards so kids can tap to pay in sats. New merchants in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

Bitcoin payments, proving themselves at every scale — this week's brief.

https://www.blink.sv/blog/weekly-brief-2026-29

A payment app demanded a Lightning sender's real name — or your money back. A sharp reminder of why self-custody matters.

This week's brief also covers Bitcoin at the travel counter, a Salvadoran coast with 170+ merchants, and townships running their own payment networks.

https://www.blink.sv/blog/weekly-brief-2026-28

We just shipped the biggest release in Blink's history: non-custodial accounts, live on iOS and Android. Your keys, your bitcoin, same app.

This week's brief also covers tap-to-pay counters, wages paid in sats, and 517 real transactions in one Kenyan economy.

https://www.blink.sv/blog/weekly-brief-2026-27