A note from Blink. The Weekly Brief paused for three weeks after the September 19 attack on Blink's custodial service. Every affected customer was restored in full on September 24, and the post-mortem covers what happened and what we changed. Since then we've opened a public page that follows the stolen coins as they move. Whoever's information leads to a recovery gets 25% of it, and another 25% goes to Bitcoin Beach, Bitcoin Ekasi and Afribit Kibera. The attacker is still active: on October 5 he took 0.75 BTC of Second's own funds from its Ark server, paying in from the same wallet that received the coins stolen from Blink (no Second user funds were affected), so if you run a Lightning node, swap service or exchange, check the page against what you see. If you use a custodial Blink account, turn on two-factor authentication: none of the drained accounts had it, and every account that did kept its money.
This edition covers four weeks. South Africa's second-largest bank opened Bitcoin buying to nearly 9 million clients, but the coins can't leave the bank, while the fight over the country's draft crypto rules moved from the comment period to the wait for a final text. On the ground, shops in Kenya ran a week of Bitcoin discounts, someone paid for fuel in sats at a Cape Town petrol station, and a phone shop in a Dominican mountain village got its first walk-in Bitcoin customer. The rails had a rough month too: Liquid peg-outs stayed frozen, Swiss Bitcoin Pay went offline for six days, and Core Lightning shipped two security releases in two weeks.
An on-ramp, not a payment rail: FNB, South Africa's second-largest bank, opened Bitcoin buying to its nearly 9 million retail clients on October 6. It built the service with the exchange VALR, inside its share-trading accounts, with purchases from R10. The limit is in FNB's own announcement: trading is "ringfenced within the FNB ecosystem" and crypto assets "cannot be transferred in or out," which the bank says reflects "a more conservative approach to compliance and exchange control laws." So FNB clients can own bitcoin, but they can't pay a merchant with it or move it to their own wallet. FNB told Business Day it plans to enable transfers later, without giving a date. Until then this is mass access to Bitcoin as an investment, not as money, and the exchange-control rules it cites are the same regime the industry spent September arguing over (Section 3).
Spotlight: A First Customer Nobody Planned
Arroyo Frío, in Constanza, is a small mountain community in the Dominican Republic, not a city. On October 8, Bitcoin Dominicana (@btcdominicana) said a merchant at Frankely's Cell Phone Store got his first Bitcoin customer: someone who walked in and paid. "No campaign. No coordination. Nobody asking for permission," the group wrote.
It's one payment, with no amount or processor named. But most of what this brief tracks is organized work: meetups, onboarding drives, merchant listings. A customer turning up unprompted in a mountain town is what all of that work is for.
While We Were Away: September 12 – October 2
The stories from the three weeks we missed that still matter.
- Kimbo, Kenya — a week of Bitcoin discounts: Bitcoin Babies (@BtcBabies) said its partner merchants G-Max Supermarket, Bitglam Fashion and Levinas started 10% to 15% off for paying in Bitcoin on September 29, as that week's promotion. No redemption numbers yet. If they come, they'll show whether a discount changes how often people pay in sats.
- Cape Town — fuel paid in sats: Bit Fitness (@BitFitness21M) posted a video of fuel paid for with Bitcoin at an Engen station in Cape Town on September 17. It's one self-reported purchase, not an Engen rollout, but fuel is something people buy every week.
- More everyday spend: two pizzas paid in sats at La Casa Moz in Maputo, Mozambique, and a milk shop in Juja, Kenya, that accepts Bitcoin for fresh milk and maziwa mala. Single reports, no amounts.
- Machines paying in dollars over Lightning: Lightning Enable (@lightningenable) said an AI agent bought API access over Lightning from both a bitcoin and a dollar (USDT) balance, with help from the AMBOSS team. One documented call cost about $0.004 and settled in about a second, with no human approval. It's a single run with no volume figures, but it shows the same rail carrying dollar-priced machine payments.
- Rails under strain: After the September 6 exploit we covered last time, Liquid peg-outs stayed suspended through late September while an external security audit ran, with no restart date. Bull Bitcoin (@BULLBITCOIN_) kept inbound Lightning payments off in its wallet rather than leave users holding L-BTC with no guarantee they can exit back to BTC. Swiss Bitcoin Pay (@SwissBitcoinPay) shut its servers on September 14 after an intrusion and came back on September 20; it says no funds were lost and is treating customer emails, Bitcoin addresses, IBANs and transaction history as compromised. And Core Lightning released 26.06.8 on September 24 with fixes for several vulnerabilities.
1) Everyday Use
This week's spending reports came mostly from community projects paying at shops with Blink Lightning addresses.
- Livingstone, Zambia — three purchases in a day: Bitcoin Victoria Falls (@BitcoinVicFalls) posted groceries at Judy's Grocery, drinks at Camp Kiosk and a shirt from Mr Mwanza, each paid in bitcoin with a Lightning address and a BTC Map listing. Everyday purchases, though none of the posts gives an amount.
- Calabar, Nigeria: Bitcoin Calabar (@BitcoinCalabar) paid for breakfast in sats at a listed merchant.
- Berlín, El Salvador: Bitcoin Berlín SV (@BitcoinBerlinSV) says Pupusería Dilia takes Bitcoin and delivers free to visitors' lodging until 11 PM.
- Kenya — a calf bought with pooled sats: Bitcoin Chama (@Bitcoinchama) said 35 neighbours pooled sats to buy a calf, for milk, income and school fees. It's a savings circle at work rather than a shop sale, and the group is raising more through Geyser.
2) Infrastructure & Reliability
Two security releases and one recovered on-ramp.
- Core Lightning 26.06.9 — update now: Core Lightning (@Core_LN) shipped its second security release in two weeks on October 7, fixing a newly reported bug that can lead to loss of funds on nodes running 26.06.8 or earlier. BTCPay Server (@BtcpayServer) bundled it the same day. If your BTCPay uses Core Lightning, update through Server Settings → Maintenance → Update; if it doesn't, you're not affected.
- BTCPay Server 2.4.5: The October 6 release hardens Lightning and LNURL handling and generates invoices faster. Standard Docker deployments no longer expose the LND and Core Lightning APIs publicly by default (opening them now takes an explicit opt-in), and Tor is opt-in too. It's the second security-focused release in a month, after 2.4.4.
- Bitika back after a week: The Kenyan service for buying sats with M-Pesa and Airtel Money, Bitika (@bitika_KE), restored purchases on October 6 after a payment partner's outage that began September 30. The failure was at the mobile-money partner, which is what sat on-ramps in the region depend on.
- BTC Map in September: BTC Map (@BTC_Map) ended the month with 27,148 merchants, up 234 (+0.9%) on the month and 65.5% on the year. Places verified in the last year fell by 286 to 15,957. The map keeps growing faster than it gets checked, and BTC Map says "re-verifying a few places near you helps more than adding new ones."
3) South Africa: Comments Closed, No Final Rules Yet
The draft crypto rules we've followed since August reached their deadline, and opposition widened.
- The comment window closed on September 30: The draft Crypto Asset Manual from National Treasury and the Reserve Bank would treat crypto moving from a local provider to an offshore one or a self-custody wallet as a cross-border flow. According to the industry, it would also stop businesses using crypto or stablecoins for cross-border payments that are lawful through a bank. By late September the CATASTROPHE coalition reported backing from 203 organisations and 5,677 individuals, and GoTyme Bank, which says it has just over 13 million customers, had joined VALR, Luno, EasyEquities and AltCoinTrader on its site. VALR's CEO said at least R2.2bn of investment is on hold.
- What happens next: The Reserve Bank says the rules are "not final" and "remain subject to refinement." Luno warned this week that, as drafted, they could push businesses offshore and raise costs (via @MoneyBadgerPay). Two things to keep straight: it's still a draft, and it covers crypto broadly, not Bitcoin specifically. FNB's ringfenced launch shows how a bank builds under today's exchange controls; the final text will decide whether anyone can do more.
That's four weeks in one. We're back on the regular Friday schedule from here. See you next week.
