Building Tapnob: Connecting Lightning to Real-World Payments in Africa
summary
Tapnob connects Lightning to Nigerian bank rails and bills providers, running for 11 months and processing 100k+ transaction volume. Engineering focuses are reliable bank payouts via queues, retries (typically 3–4) and idempotency key reuse, a state machine that tracks invoice → payout in progress → success/fail, webhook + pull reconciliation for silent failures, and an operations path for investigations and reversals. The stack handles airtime, electricity tokens and cable payments and demonstrates practical end-to-end settlement with real-world banks.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Tapnob introduction
- 1:03Bitcoin vs fiat payments
- 2:06Lightning to payment rails
- 3:29State machine for payouts
- 8:48Double payments prevention
- 12:59Provider downtime handling
- 15:50Unknown payout states
- 17:14Reconciliation for system-provider disagreements
- 20:41Payment system architecture
- 25:1011 months of lessons
- 26:11Q&A
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