Tapnob

Tapnob is a Bitcoin-native payments platform built for Nigeria and aimed eventually at all of Africa, letting anyone receive Bitcoin or stablecoin payments from anywhere in the world and have the equivalent value deposited in Nigerian Naira directly into a local bank account within seconds, with no cryptocurrency wallet knowledge required on the receiving end. The platform launched publicly on July 15, 2025, and is operated by Reala Innovative Solutions Limited, a Nigerian fintech incorporated by its founding team. Moving money into Nigeria from abroad has historically meant ten percent or higher remittance fees, multi-day settlement delays, and a fragmented peer-to-peer broker market where individuals haggle over rates and absorb counterparty risk. For freelancers, remote workers, merchants serving international customers, and businesses collecting payments from the diaspora, these friction points erode income and slow commerce. Tapnob was built to remove the broker layer entirely, replacing it with cryptographic settlement that locks in an exchange rate and delivers Naira to a bank account in the same transaction window. The core infrastructure combines the Bitcoin Lightning Network with stablecoin liquidity rails and a local Nigerian payout layer. When a sender initiates a payment in Bitcoin, USDT, or USDC, Tapnob accepts the inbound crypto, converts it at a locked rate, and pushes the Naira equivalent to the recipient registered Nigerian bank account within seconds, with no action required from the recipient after initial setup. The Lightning Network enables this speed by settling payments off-chain in milliseconds through a network of pre-funded payment channels, avoiding the confirmation delays and variable fees of on-chain Bitcoin transactions. Tapnob routes inbound Lightning payments through its own infrastructure, handles the Bitcoin-to-Naira conversion, and triggers a local bank transfer on the Nigerian payment rail. The most distinctive product feature is the Tapnob Address, a Lightning Address formatted like an email such as [email protected] that users can share publicly or embed in invoices and profiles. Once activated and linked to a Nigerian bank account, the address functions as a permanent payment destination: any Bitcoin sender globally can pay it via any Lightning-compatible wallet, and the Naira equivalent arrives in the recipient bank account automatically. The minimum payment size is 4,500 satoshis, and there are no fees charged to the recipient on incoming Lightning transfers, which the company positions against legacy remittance providers who typically charge five to ten percent per transaction. The reusable address format removes the need for recipients to generate new invoices per transaction, a common friction point in basic Lightning usage. Tapnob accepts inbound payments in three assets: Bitcoin via the Lightning Network, USDT, and USDC, all of which settle to Nigerian Naira on the receiving end. Stablecoin support broadens the addressable sender base beyond Lightning wallet users to include anyone holding dollar-pegged assets on the networks Tapnob integrates. Tapnob was founded by three developers from Kaduna, Nigeria. Fishon Amos, CEO, is a self-taught programmer who graduated from the Federal University of Technology, Minna, and previously worked as a backend engineer at Fixrunner and Atoma AI. His earlier project, Landver, was a decentralized land registry experiment. He became serious about Bitcoin after exploring Web3 in 2021. Mubarak Muhammad Aminu, CTO, holds a computer engineering degree from Bayero University, Kano, studied the Bitcoin protocol through the Qala program now Bitcoin Builders and the Afribitcoin Fellowship, contributed to open-source Bitcoin projects including Fedimint and the Cashu CDK, and founded BitDevs Kaduna, a local developer meetup. His earlier career spanned cooperative finance at Asusu Technologies and buy-now-pay-later infrastructure at Cinderbuild. Solomon Emmanuel, Principal Engineer, graduated first-class in Computer Science from Landmark University and specializes in infrastructure and system reliability. The three began building in July 2025 at Bitnob's Abuja office, processed their first transactions by the end of that month, and originally named the product SatsGo before renaming it Tapnob to signal simplicity and accessibility for users who are not already Bitcoin-native. Within weeks of launch, Tapnob had processed over 1,500 transactions totaling approximately fifteen thousand dollars in volume, and by the close of 2025 the company reported millions in total transaction volume with strong user retention. Tapnob has received strategic backing from the Human Rights Foundation Bitcoin Development Fund, which supports tools that advance financial autonomy and economic resilience in emerging markets. The team near-term priorities include doubling monthly transaction volumes and refining the user experience, with a three-year horizon of integrating merchant checkout tooling for hotels, travel agencies, event organizers, and retailers, and a five-year ambition of serving as foundational Bitcoin payment infrastructure for the African continent. Tapnob sits at the intersection of the Bitcoin Lightning Network and Africa mobile-money and banking ecosystem. Its technical stack is Bitcoin-first, and the business problem it solves — cheap, fast cross-border payments settling in local currency — is a challenge that stablecoin projects are also tackling from different angles across multiple networks. For Nigerians earning in digital assets, particularly freelancers and remote workers in the growing African tech economy, Tapnob offers a path to spend the value of their Bitcoin or stablecoin income in local commerce without selling at a discount through informal brokers.