Cash, just digital.

Bitcoin turns 18

On 31 October 2026, Bitcoin turns 18. The whitepaper came out on that day in 2008. In Europe you are of legal age at 18. In the US, Bitcoin has to wait until 2029, when it turns 21. I think that fits. Bitcoin has grown up.

The title of the whitepaper was "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". Electronic cash. Money you can send directly from person to person, without a bank in between. Nuri did not invent this. Bitcoin promised it from day one. We want everyone to finally be able to use it.

There are different kinds of money

Cash in your pocket belongs to you. You can hand it to someone, and nobody asks why. Nobody has to agree. Nobody is watching.

Money in your account belongs to you too. But someone else holds it for you. The bank can ask, freeze, refuse. Most of the time it does not. But it can.

On the internet, for a long time there was only the second kind. Every payment went through a bank or a payment provider. Bitcoin was the first form of real electronic cash. It turned the internet into something like a street, a marketplace. You can pay and get paid, across every border, without asking for permission.

But because most people count in euros and dollars, digital dollars and digital euros were added over the last years. Stablecoins. Bitcoin is global internet money. Euro and dollar are your local currency. You can hold both in your own wallet.

The shift from bank to wallet has begun

According to Crypto.com Research, around 774 million people own crypto today. In the last 12 months, more than 5.7 trillion dollars were sent and paid with Bitcoin and stablecoins. And according to Chainalysis, the value moving directly between private wallets grew by around 300 percent last year. Almost all of it in stablecoins.

I believe that in the next years fewer and fewer people will want to "cash out" their money. They will simply keep it as digital money in their pocket. A wallet, self-custody, control. That is their right. Like the right to free speech. The right to own cash and to pay freely, also across borders. In the past this was the money under the pillow, or the gold in your jewellery. Today it is a wallet.

From the exchange to your own wallet

Most people who own Bitcoin or stablecoins today do not hold them themselves. They sit at Revolut, Coinbase, Kraken, Binance or Crypto.com. On the screen it looks like your money. In reality it is a promise by the exchange to give your money back.

In the Bitcoin world there is an old saying for this. Not your keys, not your coins. If you do not have the keys, you do not have the money. An exchange can freeze your account, get hacked or go bust. That is exactly what happened at FTX. And at the old Nuri with Celsius too, more on that below.

We want people to take this step. From custody to ownership. From a balance at an exchange to money in your own wallet. You do not have to repeat the mistake of the old Nuri.

The problem was always the same. Self-custody was complicated. A seed phrase of 12 or 24 words that you have to write down and hide. Or a separate device. That is why many people stay with the exchange. This is exactly what we want to change.

Next to your bank, not instead of it

Nuri is not meant to replace Revolut. Or Wise, or your bank. Nuri is the digital cash you keep next to your account. It gives you something banks and exchanges cannot give you. Money that really belongs only to you.

If you want, you can add a Visa card, an IBAN or mobile money. That comes from our regulated partners, right now mainly Wirex. With it you can pay rent, withdraw cash at an ATM or send money home. It makes your digital cash more useful. But it is not the core.

We see the classic payment rails as a transition. A bit like a Trojan horse. They make the switch to self-custodied electronic cash easier. Nothing more.

Passkey instead of seed phrase

Apple, Google and Microsoft are replacing the password with the passkey everywhere right now. You sign in with Face ID or your fingerprint, and that is it. No password that can be forgotten, given away or stolen. Apple itself writes that passkeys are a replacement for passwords.

We do the same with the seed phrase. The passkey replaced the password. Now it replaces the seed phrase. At Nuri, your passkey is your key. There are no 24 words that someone can find, take a photo of or talk you out of on the phone.

The most important part is protection against phishing. Many people do not lose their money because someone cracks the technology. They lose it because they type their seed phrase into a fake website. Or because they give it to someone who pretends to be support.

With a passkey that does not work. A passkey is bound to one address, for us that is nuri.com. On a fake website it simply does not work. You also cannot write it down and pass it on, because you never see it. Apple writes that people can never be tricked into using their passkey to sign in to a fraudulent app or website.

And if your phone is gone? Your passkey is safe in your iCloud or with Google. New phone, Face ID, and your wallet is back. The same in the browser, because the web app is the same wallet.

Multisig, as easy as Face ID

Multisig means a payment needs more than one key. Companies and professionals have protected large amounts of Bitcoin this way for years. For normal people it was too complicated so far. Several devices, several backups, a lot of technology.

At Nuri you have multisig from the start, without setting anything up. Normally every payment needs three keys. Your passkey, the key of Nuri and the key of Arkade, which Nuri uses for fast Bitcoin payments. Nuri alone cannot move anything. Arkade alone cannot either.

And if one of them is gone? If Arkade no longer exists, your passkey and Nuri are enough. If Nuri no longer exists either, after a waiting period your passkey alone is enough. So you never depend on us. Your money stays your money, even if we are gone.

For stablecoins the same model is coming very soon.

Others do this too, and they do it well. Muun is a 2-of-2 multisig wallet. One key is on your phone, the second is with Muun, and your Emergency Kit has both. Bitkey works with three keys, one of them on its own hardware device. For us, Bitkey is the strongest reference. We want the same, just with one passkey. No device, no Emergency Kit, on every phone and in every browser.

What we promise

Nuri stores no KYC data. No name, no ID. To create a wallet, you only need a passkey and a username. If you add a card or IBAN, only Wirex verifies you. Never Nuri.

Only you can access your money. Untouchable, even for Nuri. Your passkey creates your wallet, with Face ID or a fingerprint. No password, no seed phrase. Backed up automatically in iCloud or Google.

Your money is yours, even if Nuri disappears. You can export your keys and use them in any other wallet. The recovery tool is public on GitHub and runs offline on your computer, without Nuri, without our servers.

Nuri is open source. The wallet code goes public on GitHub at launch, under the MIT licence. Anyone can check how it works.

Nuri does not ask who you are or where you come from. A browser is enough, wherever you are. There is also Nuri for iPhone and Android.

And we say one thing just as openly. Self-custodied money is not protected like a bank account. You look after it yourself, just like cash. That is the freedom and the responsibility of cash.

The old Nuri and the new Nuri

Many people who google Nuri find articles about an insolvency. That was the old Nuri, a crypto bank from Berlin. It used to be called Bitwala, founded in Berlin in 2014. On 19 May 2021, Bitwala became Nuri. It failed in 2022.

The problem was not the technology. The problem was who holds the money. The euro accounts were held at Solarisbank. Bitcoin and ether were held by Solaris Digital Assets. In the Bitcoin interest account, the Bitcoin was with Celsius. When Celsius shut down in June 2022, owners became creditors. 14,746 customers were affected. Everyone else could withdraw their money until 18 December 2022.

Bitwala exists again today, as a separate company. The old Nuri Vaults are supported by Bitwala, and that is a good thing. We like them.

The Nuri brand and nuri.com moved to new owners in 2025. Today's Nuri is a new company, with a new team and a completely different architecture. We are not a bank. We do not hold your money. That is exactly why the old failure no longer exists.

Our story

We grew up with Bitcoin in Berlin. Since 2012 we have been part of the Berlin Bitcoin and crypto scene. Mining, exchanges, wallets. The early days of Ethereum, smart contracts and DAOs. Lightning, protocols, payments.

We have seen how good this technology is. And we have seen how often it goes wrong when someone else holds the money. Exchanges that go bust. Lenders that stop withdrawals. Banks that close accounts.

An AI once called us "the patient pioneers". I think that fits. We waited a long time until self-custody could really be simple. With passkeys, it is now.

Today we are four people. I am Emin Mahrt, I founded Nuri. We have a few investors, but not many.

Our goal is very simple. Make self-custody so simple that everyone can use it. For people and for AI agents.

How this website came about

We built more than 30 versions of this website. Many headlines, many directions. "Your money, freed." "Freedom Money." "Smart Bitcoin Wallet with Banking." And many more.

Then we looked at others. MiniPay is perfect at sending money from A to B. But it is only about the utility, hardly about values. Muun is the exact opposite. Very clear values, self-custody, but more for people who already know their way around. We want both. As simple as MiniPay. As clear as Muun.

Friends sent us slogans like "Send. Receive. Spend." Well meant. But Revolut can do that too. The question is: why? Why would anyone want Nuri next to their bank? The answer is this text.

Every headline on our website has to stand on its own. My mom has to understand it. An investor has to understand it. And a Bitcoiner too. That is why the website is also our pitch deck. And that is why we compare ourselves openly with others, with Muun, Bitkey, Bitwala, Bringin, wave.space, MiniPay, KAST, RedotPay and Bitrefill. Fair, with sources.

Later we realized that this is not enough. Everyone in the world says simple and secure. That does not describe what we do. A headline has to answer a question. Why Nuri and not Revolut? The answer is that at Nuri you need no account, no email and no ID. And that your money really belongs to you.

We also did not want superlatives. No "the simplest" and no "the most secure" wallet. Everyone says that, and it only makes the others angry. And no wordplay, because the website is translated into many languages. What sounds cool in German might just sound stupid in another language. That is why we would rather write what Nuri does.

In the end Bitkey helped us. No seed phrase. No single point of failure. That is clear and honest. Our headline right now is: Bitcoin multisig, as easy as Face ID.

We keep every version of this website. Also the ones we threw away.