1. What is the rate of your users who are using the BLE feature?
Since launching in April 2026, BLINK has onboarded close to 180 registered users and processed over 22 million in total transaction volume. Of this, 200 transactions have been completed via our Bluetooth Low Energy payment discovery flow, with the remaining volume coming from direct crypto-to-local-currency settlements.
We want to be transparent about what this means. Averaging across our current user base, BLE transaction completion is high on a per-session basis, users who encounter a BLE-enabled merchant complete the payment successfully at a strong rate. The broader adoption curve is tied directly to merchant density rather than user willingness. BLE is a proximity-based feature that requires both the merchant and the payer to be running BLINK simultaneously in the same physical location. As our merchant base grows, BLE utilization grows with it. It is a network effect metric, not a standalone adoption metric.
Every merchant we onboard is a new BLE-enabled payment terminal. Our current focus is merchant acquisition in dense urban markets where foot traffic is high enough to turn BLE into a daily-use feature. We project BLE to account for 40%+ of transaction volume within 6 months of reaching 500 active merchants in a single market.
2. Can you elaborate on your KYC methods and how they do not defeat the purpose of privacy?
Our current KYC implementation uses phone number, email verification and basic identity checks at onboarding. In our next product update, we are integrating Sumsub a globally recognised identity verification platform used by leading fintech and crypto companies worldwide including Binance, Bybit. Sumsub will handle document verification, liveness checks, BVN matching for Nigerian users, and sanctions screening bringing our KYC infrastructure to full regulatory compliance across our target markets.
Here is the critical design principle that ensures KYC does not defeat the purpose of privacy regardless of which KYC layer is active:
KYC happens at the account level not at the transaction level.
When a user signs up for BLINK, their identity is verified once, at onboarding. That identity data is stored securely off-chain. It is never written to the blockchain. It never touches the Zcash shielded transaction layer.
Once a user is onboarded and verified, their on-chain activity is entirely shielded. The Zcash shielded transaction carries zero identity information no name, no phone number, no KYC data. What moves on-chain is cryptographically private by default.
The distinction is straightforward: our KYC layer tells us who our users are. Zcash’s shielded transactions ensure that nobody else not the public, not blockchain analysts, not competitors, not bad actors can see what those verified users are doing with their money after onboarding.
This is the same model used by every legitimate financial privacy system in the world. Your bank knows who you are, but your neighbour, your employer, and a random stranger with a blockchain explorer should not be able to reconstruct your transaction history. BLINK’s KYC satisfies regulatory obligation. Zcash’s shielded transactions protect user privacy from everyone else.
Zcash’s selective disclosure mechanism reinforces this further. Merchants can generate a verifiable proof of specific transactions for tax authorities or auditors when legally required. Disclosure is selective, intentional, and user-controlled never automatic, never systemic. Compliance is possible without privacy being the casualty.
We believe this model, verified identity off-chain, shielded transactions on-chain is the only sustainable path to compliant privacy in regulated African markets. It does not defeat the purpose of privacy. It makes privacy defensible and regulatory legitimate.
3. For shielded transactions, will users be operating a self-custodial wallet?
Yes, and this is a non-negotiable architectural principle for BLINK.
Every user’s Zcash shielded wallet will be fully self-custodial. BLINK never holds, accesses, or controls user private keys at any point. Keys are generated on the user’s device and stored securely using iOS Secure Enclave and Android Keystore hardware-level security that even BLINK’s own backend servers cannot access or reconstruct.
What BLINK provides is the interface and infrastructure around the wallet, the BLE payment discovery, the settlement engine, the local currency conversion, and the onboarding flow. But the wallet itself, and the keys that control it, belong entirely to the user.
This matters enormously in the context of Zcash’s shielded transactions. A shielded wallet controlled by a custodian is not truly private, the custodian can see everything. A self-custodial shielded wallet where only the user holds the keys means that even BLINK cannot reconstruct a user’s transaction history. That is the privacy guarantee we are committed to delivering and it is architecturally enforced, not just promised in a privacy policy.
Our 180 current users are already operating on a non-custodial architecture across Base, Stellar, and Solana. The Zcash shielded wallet integration extends the same principle with the additional privacy guarantees that only Zcash’s shielded transaction protocol can provide.