The Breez SDK Empowers Sorted to Empower Everyone

Bitcoin is the world’s only global currency, but global should mean more than just geography. If a technology is only available to those with family offices and concierge accounts, it won’t disrupt very much, even if it’s available in 190+ countries. The depth of bitcoin’s penetration matters just as much, if not more, than its breadth.

Sorted Wallet is on a mission to bring bitcoin to everyone, especially the 300 million people who use feature phones and simple Android devices. Many users prefer these devices because they’re cheaper, but they’re also popular in many markets because they tend to be durable and unappealing to potential thieves. And though statistics are hard to find, it’s a fair guess that many of those with the simplest phones are among the world’s 1.4 billion unbanked adults —  those who arguably need bitcoin most.

As any Uber driver will tell you, if you want to take someone along for the ride, you have to meet them where they are. As the world shifts toward a bitcoin-based economy, where value moves as freely as information, Sorted is making sure no one gets left behind. That’s Sorted Wallet’s goal: democratizing bitcoin-ready hardware with the Breez SDK.

The Sorted team first dove into the feature-phone market after a chat with the dev team behind KaiOS, the leading OS for feature phones. It became obvious that technology was turning into a barrier between the globe’s new money — bitcoin — and the people it is designed to serve. The question was how to overcome it.

When technology is the problem, it’s also often the solution. Lightning changed the economics of bitcoin and added new uses, but running a client node locally was still too demanding for many feature phones. Sorted’s team considered building a custodial bitcoin app but realized that would introduce new, mainly regulatory, obstacles. Besides, you don’t empower people by taking possession of their money.

The Breez SDK — Nodeless was made to order. It offers a very shallow learning curve for developers and effortless onboarding for end-users, and its computational and storage requirements are very light, so it purrs on feature phones and base-model Android devices. Crucially, the users retain control of their keys, which gives them real empowerment and financial freedom. The Breez SDK lets users and developers leapfrog legacy money and move value around the world or across a kiosk counter with the ease of sending a text.

And like a good teammate, the Breez SDK grows and evolves with the needs of our partners. It supports bitcoin as well as USDT. It’s also simple and flexible enough that Sorted Wallet devs can extend it with cool new features that their users need, like the merchant app that they’re developing to help every shopkeeper and market vendor become bitcoiners, and the WhatsApp bot to make cross-border remittances as simple as sending mom a selfie.

Before opting for the nodeless SDK, the Sorted team looked at a range of other alternatives. They considered delegating channel and liquidity management to an LSP, but those issues are now simply expected to be obfuscated from the UX. You don’t get any bonus points for that. Like so many other developer teams, they were looking for the easy and frictionless experience of a custodial app with the autonomy and light regulatory footprint of self-custodied bitcoin.

The Sorted folks started asking around, and the Breez SDK “was highly recommended by some of our trusted connections.” (That’s a good network!)

Following that advice has given Sorted users — actual and potential, all 300 million of them — access to unstoppable, economical bitcoin payments. Wise decisions like that have also helped Sorted secure other votes of confidence, like Tether’s recent investment boost. As a result, people without access to banks and constrained by borders can use bitcoin to move value where they want and how they want using the devices already in their pockets, starting in July.

And it’s not just about how many; it’s also about how. Sorted is increasing the quantity of people with access to bitcoin, but bitcoin also expands the range of ways they can exchange value, and what they can do with their money. Once money can move freely — without borders, delays, or third parties — entirely new use cases become possible.

If you also want to build something with bitcoin that the world has never seen, get in touch.