Most Bitcoin wallets are built for people who already want one. This one was built for a town that needed to be paid.
Blink's own account is that in 2020 Galoy founder Nicolas Burtey learned about the effort in El Zonte, El Salvador, to run a circular Bitcoin economy, contacted Mike Peterson and the Bitcoin Beach team, and worked with local merchants and residents on the Lightning wallet he was already building. Within months the Bitcoin Beach Wallet launched. It was later renamed Blink. That order matters: the software was shaped by merchants who had to take payment from customers with cheap phones and patchy connections, not by a product spec.
Galoy Inc. was founded in 2020 by Burtey, who is CEO, with Justin Carter as CTO. The
company describes itself now as a technology partner for banks, selling core banking
infrastructure built around a single double-entry ledger holding dollars, euros, bitcoin
and stablecoins, with Bitcoin and Lightning payment processing and a Bitcoin-backed lending
platform called Lana. It states it is ISO 27001:2022 certified. Its stack is developed in
the open at github.com/GaloyMoney, which is the unusual part of the model: the banking
software a bank would normally buy as a black box is readable.
Blink is now a separate ongoing business. Its site carries the copyright of Blink Technologies LLC and states it is made in Próspera. Galoy Inc.'s own place of incorporation is not published on its site, so no jurisdiction is recorded here.
Custody is worth stating precisely, because the app now has two modes. Blink's own FAQ says that in Custodial Mode it holds funds on the user's behalf, backed by multi-signature cold storage, and can help with account recovery. In Non-Custodial Mode, built on the Spark protocol, the user holds the keys and Blink states it cannot access, freeze or recover the funds. Which mode is available depends on the country. The custodial version is the one that made the wallet simple enough for a merchant in El Zonte to adopt in an afternoon, and it is also the version where somebody else can be asked to freeze the account. Both halves of that are the point.