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Bitnob · Consumer fintech

Cross-border settlement in under three seconds

A regulated savings and payments platform across 10+ African markets, settling over Bitcoin Lightning in seconds rather than the days a SWIFT transfer takes — on a double-entry ledger that has never disagreed with itself.

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At a glance

Duration
70 weeks
Team size
7 people
Engagement
New build
Project type
Web application
Industry
Fintech

Standards

  • PCI DSS

The situation

The challenge

Ten-plus African markets meant a patchwork of regulatory frameworks, currency controls, mobile money APIs — M-Pesa, MTN, Airtel — and banking partners, each with its own assumptions. Lightning added channel liquidity, routing failures and real-time balance reconciliation on top.

What we did

We treated the ledger as the product. Everything else — Lightning, mobile money, KYC providers — became something the ledger had to survive.

The calls that mattered

  • Double-entry, immutable, per-currency

    Journal entries that are never mutated, exchange rates captured at execution rather than recalculated later, and a separate ledger account per user per currency. Daily automated reconciliation alerts on any discrepancy over a cent.

  • Lightning channels managed, not hoped for

    Circular rebalancing via Lightning Loop whenever inbound capacity fell below 20%, payment probes before sends to verify a route exists, and HTLC timeout monitoring with automatic force-close. This is the difference between a 97.3% success rate and the ~90% that is normal.

  • Three identity providers, not one

    KYC verification with automatic fallback between providers. In markets where a single provider's coverage is patchy, one integration is an outage waiting for a country to be added.

What changed

monthly transaction volume
$5M+monthly transaction volume
Lightning payment success rate
97.3%Lightning payment success rate
ledger discrepancies
0ledger discrepancies
uptime
99.95%uptime
  • $5M+ — across 10+ countries
  • 97.3% — against a ~90% industry average
  • 0 — over 16 months
  • 99.95% — four hours of downtime in 16 months

$5M+ a month across ten countries, settling in under three seconds where SWIFT takes three to five days, at PCI DSS Level 1 with zero audit findings and zero ledger discrepancies in sixteen months.

Services used

  • Multi-currency double-entry ledger with daily reconciliation
  • Lightning node operations: rebalancing, probing, HTLC monitoring
  • KYC integration across three providers with automatic fallback
  • PCI DSS Level 1 compliance evidence and network segmentation

What we would do differently

Every project has one of these. Publishing it is the point — a case study with no regrets in it is marketing, not evidence.

Financial systems need a different engineering mindset, organised around failure rather than success. Every operation wants an idempotency key, a compensating action and an explicit recovery path for the stuck state. Correctness beats convenience every time in infrastructure people keep their savings in.

Services used

More work

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