Building Crypto Products in Emerging Markets

Building crypto products in emerging markets changes your priorities very quickly.

In theory, payments are just transactions moving between wallets.

In reality, they’re business-critical moments tied to trust, internet stability, and human behavior.

While working on Blink, I learned that merchants don’t care how elegant your architecture is if they can’t confidently confirm payments.

Engineering as a Trust Decision

So a lot of our engineering decisions became trust decisions: * Reliable transaction states. * Clear feedback. * Fast dashboard updates. * Systems that degrade gracefully under poor connectivity.

The technical challenge wasn’t just blockchain integration.

It was building confidence into the product experience itself.

That’s what makes engineering for real-world users interesting. You stop building for ideal conditions and start building for reality.