This week's biggest payments number comes with an asterisk.
A South African network reported 95% payment growth (rand value up 176%) — but it now blends Bitcoin and stablecoins, so it's not a Bitcoin-only adoption rate. "Crypto payments up" and "Bitcoin adoption up" are no longer the same sentence.
The other theme was reliability. When Spark went down Monday, Blink told its users within the hour and posted an all-clear — no funds at risk. The other wallets on the same Spark SDK stayed silent. Core Lightning's advisory pushed operators offline while a fix is prepared, and BTCPay disabled affected routes to shrink the attack surface.
On the ground: an Onitsha cash-flow playbook that caps Bitcoin at 10% of profit, a rural Kenyan earn–spend–save loop, and a litre of water in Nairobi for 495 sats.
https://www.blink.sv/blog/weekly-brief-2026-35
A South African network reported 95% payment growth (rand value up 176%) — but it now blends Bitcoin and stablecoins, so it's not a Bitcoin-only adoption rate. "Crypto payments up" and "Bitcoin adoption up" are no longer the same sentence.
The other theme was reliability. When Spark went down Monday, Blink told its users within the hour and posted an all-clear — no funds at risk. The other wallets on the same Spark SDK stayed silent. Core Lightning's advisory pushed operators offline while a fix is prepared, and BTCPay disabled affected routes to shrink the attack surface.
On the ground: an Onitsha cash-flow playbook that caps Bitcoin at 10% of profit, a rural Kenyan earn–spend–save loop, and a litre of water in Nairobi for 495 sats.
https://www.blink.sv/blog/weekly-brief-2026-35
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