03 / Case Study
PesaToken
Financial infrastructure connecting familiar payment experiences with on-chain systems.
Problem
Moving value across chains and asset types usually means stitching together wallets, RPCs, custody rules and a UI that still feels like a payment, not a block explorer. The engineering problem is ledger correctness and transaction flow, not a token story.
Context
PesaToken is wallet and payment infrastructure I founded and engineered. It supports multiple blockchain networks and asset types, with a product surface aimed at people who already understand phone-number payments more than seed phrases.
What I Owned
- wallet infrastructure and account setup flows
- transaction construction, broadcasting and status handling
- blockchain integrations across several networks
- backend services around balances, transfers and escrow-style payment flows
- the payment interfaces people actually use
Architecture
The useful split is wallet / ledger, chain adapters and a product API. Chain-specific details sit behind adapters so the application can treat a transfer as a transfer. Tatum sits in the integration layer for multi-chain wallet and transaction operations, with TypeScript services in front and a React client on top.
Technical Decisions
I chose networks people can actually pay with at low cost — including Base, Ethereum and Celo — rather than supporting every chain as a badge. Phone-number and email onboarding was a product constraint that shaped auth and wallet provisioning, not a marketing afterthought.
Hard Problems
Custody and ledger state have to stay consistent when a chain is slow, a transfer is pending, or an escrow has two parties. The hard work is idempotent transaction handling, status reconciliation and keeping the UI honest about what has actually settled.
Trade-Offs
Using an infrastructure provider for multi-chain wallet operations reduced the amount of chain-specific code I had to own. The cost is dependency on that provider's API shape and operational limits. I accepted that in order to ship a working payment surface across several networks.
Result / Current Status
The wallet and payment product is live at pesatoken.org. Related public work includes multi-chain wallet tracking in ChainAfric. I am not listing user, volume or revenue figures here.
Stack
TypeScript · React · Node.js · Base · Ethereum · Celo · Tatum