Tapnob

TLDR

Tapnob is a Bitcoin-native payments platform built for everyday financial life in Nigeria and Africa. Founded in July 2025 by a three-person team from Kaduna, the platform lets users receive Bitcoin and stablecoins from anyone in the world and settle the equivalent directly into Nigerian Naira bank accounts — instantly, without peer-to-peer trading desks or opaque fees. The core insight is simple: let people hold savings in Bitcoin, spend only what they need in local currency. Within weeks of launch the platform had processed more than 1,500 transactions worth approximately $15,000.

Core Mechanism

Tapnob's settlement engine sits between the Bitcoin Lightning Network and Nigeria's local banking system. When a user activates a Tapnob Address — a Lightning Address formatted like [email protected] — they link a Nigerian bank account once. Any sender worldwide using a Lightning-compatible wallet can then direct Bitcoin to that address. Tapnob's backend absorbs the currency conversion in real time, locks in the exchange rate, and routes the Naira equivalent directly to the user's linked bank account. The user never has to post a trade offer, negotiate a rate, or wait for a counterparty to release funds.

The same mechanism works in reverse for bill payments: users hold Bitcoin or stablecoins in Tapnob and tap only the naira value required for a specific transaction, leaving the rest intact in the original asset. This architecture operationalises the platform's tagline — spend Bitcoin, keep your Bitcoin — by keeping savings denominated in a harder currency while making daily spending frictionless.

Key Features

Tapnob Addresses are the platform's primary user-facing primitive. The Lightning Address standard ([email protected]) is reusable: share it once, receive Bitcoin from any compatible wallet indefinitely, with each inbound payment triggering an automatic fiat payout. Users do not need to generate new invoices or manage expiring payment requests.

Instant crypto-to-naira conversion covers both Bitcoin and stablecoins. The platform accepts USDT and USDC alongside BTC, giving freelancers, remote workers, and small businesses flexibility in how international counterparties pay them while standardising local settlement in Naira.

Bill payments allow users to pay Nigerian utility bills, airtime, and other local services directly from their crypto balances without a separate fiat on-ramp step. Users can also buy Bitcoin through local bank transfer, making the platform bidirectional.

Multi-platform availability: Tapnob launched first as a web application, added Android support, and as of September 2026 is also live on the Apple App Store. The iOS release marked more than a year of operation since the July 2025 web launch.

Supported Assets

• Bitcoin (BTC) — primary settlement asset, received via Lightning Network
• USDT — accepted for conversion and holding
• USDC — accepted for conversion and holding

The platform converts these to Nigerian Naira (NGN) for local bank settlement.

Solana Connection

Tapnob's primary technical rails are Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. Its stablecoin support — specifically USDC and USDT — intersects with the Solana ecosystem, where both stablecoins are natively issued and widely used for low-cost transfers. Payments routed to Tapnob users may originate from Solana wallets. No on-chain Solana programs are registered to the project, and the platform does not deploy smart contracts on Solana.

Team

Tapnob was founded by three engineers based in Kaduna, northern Nigeria.

Fishon Amos (CEO) is a self-taught programmer who graduated from the Federal University of Technology in Minna. He worked at MetaBlock Enterprise from 2018, then took roles at Fixrunner and Atoma AI before entering Web3 in 2021. He previously built Landver, a prototype decentralized land registry.

Mubarak Muhammad Aminu (CTO) holds a computer engineering degree from Bayero University in Kano. He worked as lead engineer at Cinderbuild and as an engineer at Asusu Technologies. He received Bitcoin education through the Qala and Afribitcoin Fellowship programmes, founded BitDevs Kaduna (a Bitcoin developer meetup) in late 2024, and has contributed to open-source projects including Fedimint and the Cashu CDK.

Solomon Emmanuel (Principal Engineer) earned a first-class Computer Science degree from Landmark University in Kwara State. He focuses on infrastructure, deployment, and system scalability.

The team built the first version of Tapnob at Bitnob's Abuja office in July 2025, with compliance documents filed within two weeks and live transactions flowing by end of that month.

Backing and Recognition

The Human Rights Foundation's Bitcoin Development Fund selected Tapnob as one of 26 grantees in a global funding round. The HRF grant is earmarked for expanding Tapnob's reach across the African continent and developing educational resources to help individuals use Bitcoin more freely. The HRF cited Tapnob's approach — allowing users to buy Bitcoin through local bank transfers and convert only the amount needed to local currency for daily expenses — as directly addressing the combination of high remittance fees and currency instability that affects users in high-inflation markets.

Security and Audits

No third-party smart contract audits have been publicly announced, consistent with Tapnob's architecture: the platform does not deploy on-chain programs and its technical risk surface lies in custodial key management, Lightning channel management, and local banking integrations rather than EVM or Solana program logic. The platform operates under Nigerian financial compliance filings, completed within two weeks of the initial build.

Context: The Problem Being Solved

Cross-border payments to Nigeria have historically been punishing for small recipients. Peer-to-peer trading desks — the dominant alternative for converting Bitcoin or stablecoins to Naira — carry spread risk, counterparty risk, and friction that makes them impractical for routine use by freelancers and remote workers. Traditional remittance corridors impose high percentage fees and multi-day delays. Tapnob's automated settlement engine collapses this to a single user action: share a Lightning Address, receive Naira.

The 12-month roadmap targets doubled monthly transaction volumes and refined UX. A three-year plan adds merchant checkout integration and further geographic expansion across Africa. The five-year vision is to establish Tapnob as the foundational Bitcoin-native financial layer for the continent.