Accepting Bitcoin is one thing. Paying your staff in it is another.

This week Bitcoin Ekasi, the township project in Mossel Bay, moved all of its assistants' salaries into sats — its thrift store prices and resident stipends were already denominated that way. The project is upfront that the surrounding economy still runs on rand, so this is a partial move. But paying wages in Bitcoin puts it at the start of the local money cycle, not just the checkout. The next day, community members spent those sats on clothes at the thrift store through Blink.

The same pattern showed up elsewhere. In Santo Domingo, a burger shop paid a bread maker in sats, who used those same sats to send a remittance to family abroad — one unit of money doing three jobs: a sale, a wage, and a cross-border transfer, with no bank in between. In Nairobi's Kibera settlement, a shop that accepts Bitcoin across its store, water point and public washroom received a small recoverable grant to expand inventory and water storage.

Reliability stayed part of the story. The Liquid sidechain reported roughly $320 million withdrawn in an exploit, then saw most of it returned on-chain about a day later, leaving users with most of their funds back minus a haircut — a reminder that partial recovery is not the same as being made whole. And BTCPay Server shipped another security-driven release, trading some checkout convenience for a smaller attack surface.

The endpoints that last will be the ones that keep earning trust.

Full brief: https://www.blink.sv/blog/weekly-brief-2026-37