• And why the next billion Bitcoin users deserve a wallet built for them
• What is Ijma?
• The Identity Layer: What No Other Wallet Has Built
• Halal by Architecture, Not by Declaration
• The UX Problem Nobody Talks About
• The Technical Foundation
• Why Open Source Matters Here
• What’s Coming
• An Honest Ask

§And why the next billion Bitcoin users deserve a wallet built for them

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

There is a gap in the Bitcoin ecosystem that nobody talks about openly.

Over 1.8 billion Muslims around the world — roughly a quarter of humanity — share a set of financial values that are fundamentally incompatible with the modern banking system: no interest, no deception, no speculation, no exploitation. These are not fringe views. They are the considered conclusions of fourteen centuries of Islamic legal scholarship applied to the question of what honest money looks like.

Bitcoin, when you examine it carefully, is the most aligned monetary technology these values have ever encountered. It charges no interest. It cannot be inflated by decree. It cannot be confiscated by a bank freeze. It has no hidden fees buried in foreign exchange spreads. It is, as many scholars are increasingly recognising, maal — legitimate property — and a medium of exchange that fulfills the Islamic criteria for sound money in ways that fiat currency simply cannot.

And yet, the existing Bitcoin wallet ecosystem largely ignores this community.

The wallets that exist are built for a Western, English-speaking, technically-oriented audience. The Islamic finance angle is either absent, treated as a marketing checkbox, or handled with a “Shariah Mode toggle” that changes nothing meaningful in the underlying architecture. The identity and trust infrastructure that underpin Islamic commerce — verification of counterparty, reputation within a community, credentials without surveillance — is nowhere to be found.

I decided to build something different.

§What is Ijma?

Ijma (Arabic: إجماع) means consensus. In Islamic jurisprudence it refers to the scholarly consensus of the Ummah — the collective wisdom of the community applied to difficult questions. It felt like the right name for a wallet trying to bring consensus to a set of seemingly competing demands: security and usability, sovereignty and accessibility, technical depth and human simplicity.

Ijma Wallet is a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet built as a Progressive Web App. It runs entirely in your browser. No app store. No server holding your keys. No intermediary between you and your money. You download it once, it installs on your home screen like a native app, and it works offline.

It is being built on the full Bitcoin protocol stack:

Layer 1 — Bitcoin. Your savings layer. On-chain Bitcoin addresses derived via BIP84 (Native SegWit) and BIP86 (Taproot). This is where you keep larger amounts for the long term.

Layer 2 — Lightning Network. Your payments layer. Instant, near-free Bitcoin transfers. Works with any Lightning wallet via Nostr Wallet Connect — meaning you can connect Alby, Mutiny, or your own LND node without giving Ijma custody of anything.

Layer 3 — Cashu + Fedimint. Your privacy and community layer. Cashu ecash gives you digital cash with the privacy properties of physical banknotes — the mint cannot see who is transacting with whom. Fedimint allows communities to pool funds in a multi-signature vault controlled by trusted guardians, not a bank.

Layer 4 — Nostr + Identity. This is where Ijma genuinely breaks new ground.

§The Identity Layer: What No Other Wallet Has Built

Most Bitcoin wallets treat identity as an afterthought. You have a seed phrase. You have addresses. That’s it.

Ijma treats identity as infrastructure.

When you create a wallet, a single 24-word seed phrase generates two things simultaneously: your Bitcoin keys (via BIP32/84/86) and your Nostr keypair (via NIP-06). One seed. Two sovereign identities. Neither dependent on any central authority.

From there, the identity system has four components:

Your Nostr Passport. A live identity card fetched from Nostr relays in real time. Your display name, NIP-05 verification status (think of it as a decentralised username verification — you@yourdomain.com confirmed on-chain via DNS), your Lightning address, your active relay list. Everything is public and portable. You own it. No platform can delete it.

Web of Trust. Your social graph on Nostr is your reputation. Ijma computes trust scores for your contacts based on direct follows (50% weight), network follows — how many of your trusted contacts also trust this person (30% weight), and credential endorsements (20% weight). This is not a centralised reputation score from a company. It is a live computation over your own social graph, run locally, updated from public relays.

Verifiable Credentials. This is the most technically ambitious part of the system..

Ijma will implement a full issuer-holder-verifier triangle for cryptographic credentials, built entirely on Nostr events and SHA-256 Merkle trees. Here is what that means in practice:

An issuer (a mosque, a community organisation, an employer, a family member, a trusted contact) can sign a credential attesting to specific facts about a holder: age, membership, nationality, Bitcoin ownership above a threshold, or any custom claim. The credential is signed with the issuer’s Nostr private key. The holder stores the credential privately — encrypted in their local vault.

The clever part is selective disclosure. When the holder needs to present a credential to a verifier, they choose exactly which claims to reveal. Each claim is hashed with a random salt and placed in a Merkle tree. The Merkle root is published to Nostr relays — but not the claim values. When presenting, the holder provides the value, the salt, and the Merkle proof for each revealed claim. The verifier independently recomputes the hashes and checks them against the published root.

This means: prove you are over 18 without revealing your name. Prove you are a member of an organisation without revealing your address. Prove you hold Bitcoin above a threshold without revealing your balance. All cryptographically verified. No centralised identity provider. No surveillance.

This is digital identity the way Islamic law thinks about testimony — verified, witnessed, community-anchored, but not surveilled by a state or corporation.

§Halal by Architecture, Not by Declaration

Every wallet claims to be “Shariah-compliant” these days. Most mean nothing by it.

Ijma’s halal properties are architectural, not cosmetic. Let me be specific.

No riba (interest). The wallet has no yield products, no staking, no lending interfaces, no “earn on your Bitcoin” features. Zero. This is not a toggle — there is simply no such feature in the codebase.

No gharar (excessive uncertainty and deception). All fee structures are transparent and calculated in real time. Atomic swaps use Hash Time-Locked Contracts — the swap either completes or it refunds, with no trusted third party holding funds at risk. No hidden spreads. No ambiguous outcomes.

No maysir (gambling and speculation). No trading interfaces. No price prediction markets. No leveraged instruments. No derivatives of any kind.

Bitcoin as Maal. The wallet is built on the premise — supported by a growing scholarly consensus — that Bitcoin is legitimate property under Islamic law. It is a finite, scarce, peer-to-peer commodity that satisfies the classical Islamic criteria for a medium of exchange. The wallet treats it accordingly.

§The UX Problem Nobody Talks About

Here is a tension in the Bitcoin space that most builders ignore: the people who most need financial sovereignty are also the people least likely to have a computer science degree.

A farmer in Nigeria who has been burned by currency devaluation. A migrant worker in Malaysia sending remittances home at 8% fees. A small business owner in Bangladesh who cannot get a business bank account. A family in Pakistan whose savings have been wiped out three times by inflation in their lifetimes.

These are the people for whom Bitcoin was made. And the existing wallet ecosystem is almost entirely inaccessible to them.

Ijma addresses this directly.

The primary UX framing is Payments and Savings — not “L1 Bitcoin” and “L2 Lightning.” People understand payments and savings. They do not understand protocol layers.

Contacts, not addresses. You send to Layla, not to bc1qx7y4g…. The wallet resolves Lightning addresses, npubs, and NIP-05 identifiers automatically.

A scratch-card seed phrase reveal — the 24-word backup must be actively scratched off one word at a time on a canvas, preventing accidental screenshots and making the backup feel intentional, even ceremonial.

Contextual hints that appear for first-time users and disappear once dismissed. Human language throughout. No jargon.

Power users can toggle to “Expert Mode” and see everything: protocol layers, raw keys, technical settings, hardware wallet flows. But it’s never the default.

§The Technical Foundation

For those who want to go deeper, here is what is under the hood.

Encryption: AES-256-GCM with PBKDF2 key derivation at 600,000 iterations — the OWASP 2023 minimum. Every piece of sensitive data is encrypted before it touches storage. Your seed phrase, your Nostr private key, your Cashu proofs — all encrypted with a key derived from your PIN. Your PIN itself is never stored; only a SHA-256 hash with a 32-byte random salt.

Key derivation: Standard BIP39/32/84/86 for Bitcoin. NIP-06 for Nostr (derivation path m/44’/1237’/0’/0/0). The cryptographic libraries are from the @noble and @scure families — all formally audited by Cure53 in January 2022.

Hardware wallets: Blockstream Jade, Coinkite Coldcard, Foundation Passport, SeedSigner (open source); Ledger and Trezor (commercial). Connection via WebUSB, WebHID, QR air-gap, and SD card PSBT export.

Atomic swaps: Seven routes across the protocol stack — on-chain to Lightning and back (submarine swaps via Boltz HTLCs, trustless), Lightning to Cashu and back, Cashu cross-mint via Lightning bridge, Lightning to Fedimint and back. All routes either complete or refund. No custody at any point.

PWA: Installs on iOS, Android, and desktop directly from the browser via the home screen prompt. Offline support via Workbox service worker. No app store approval process. No app store censorship risk.

Zero telemetry: No analytics. No crash reporting. No advertising. No tracking pixels. The website has no cookies. This is not a compliance statement — there is simply no such code in the repository.

§Why Open Source Matters Here

Ijma is MIT licensed. Every line of code is publicly available at github.com/amisatoshi/ijmawallet.

This matters for several reasons that go beyond the usual open source arguments.

First, trust. In a wallet, you are trusting the software with everything. The only way to verify that trust is to be able to read the code. No audit, no security claim, no reputation should substitute for that. The MIT licence means anyone — a scholar, a regulator, a community leader, a worried parent — can read exactly what the software does.

Second, censorship resistance. An open source wallet cannot be taken down. If ijmawallet.com is removed, the code still exists. If the GitHub repository is removed, the code can be forked. The wallet itself, once installed as a PWA, continues working offline regardless of what happens to the server. This matters enormously for communities in countries where financial sovereignty is legally contested.

Third, community ownership. A wallet for the Ummah should, eventually, be owned by the Ummah. The roadmap includes internationalisation (Arabic RTL, Urdu, Bangla, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia), community-governed Fedimint federations, and a Zakat calculator. These features should be built by the communities that use them.

§What’s Coming

The current version is a pre-release demo. The cryptographic foundations are solid. The features will be added iteratively.

The roadmap toward v1.0.0 includes:

• Breez SDK embedded Lightning node (fully non-custodial, no separate wallet needed), Fedimint WASM client (join and manage community vaults from within the app), social recovery via Shamir’s Secret Sharing over Nostr encrypted DMs (your seed, held in threshold shares by trusted contacts), and a Zakat calculator with live nisab threshold calculation.

• Full internationalisation — Arabic (right-to-left), Urdu, Bangla, Bahasa, with Hausacamd others to follow. BC-UR animated QR codes for hardware wallet air-gap signing.

• Multi-signature coordination (2-of-3 hardware wallets), a professional independent security audit with a public report, and a bug bounty programme.

Further out: a Bitchat-compatible mesh network layer for offline peer-to-peer payments via Bluetooth LE — genuinely important for communities where internet shutdowns are a political tool. The research is done; the implementation waits for the native app wrapper needed to access Bluetooth on iOS.

§An Honest Ask

I want to be direct about what this project needs and what it is asking of you.

This is not a pitch for investment. Ijma is not a startup. There are no tokens. There is no presale. There is no venture capital and there will not be. The business model is software licensing, professional services, and enterprise white-labelling — halal revenue from building genuinely useful things.

What it does need is people.

React developers who understand — or want to learn — Bitcoin, Lightning, Nostr, and Cashu. The codebase is clean React 18 with Vite. No exotic dependencies. No blockchain-specific frameworks.

Bitcoin and Lightning specialists who can review the cryptographic architecture, spot mistakes, and help wire up the Breez SDK embedded node properly.

Nostr developers who want to see what a wallet looks like when Nostr identity is taken seriously as infrastructure rather than a feature.

Islamic finance scholars and thinkers who can engage with the halal architecture seriously — not to approve it as a marketing exercise but to find its genuine limits and help improve it.

UX and product designers who want to solve the genuinely hard problem of making sovereign financial tools accessible to people who have never heard of a private key.

Translators and localisation contributors for Arabic, Urdu, Bangla, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia, Swahili, Hausa, and Somali.

Community builders who can take this to the mosques, the Islamic finance conferences, the Bitcoin meetups, the Nostr communities, and the developer circles where it belongs.

If any of that is you — the door is open. Open an issue. Submit a pull request. Reach out directly. This project is better when more people who care about it have their hands on it.

The Deeper Point There is something important happening at the intersection of Bitcoin and Islamic finance that most people in both communities have not yet noticed.

Bitcoin is not just a speculative asset. It is not just a hedge against inflation. It is a protocol for honest money — one that, for the first time in the modern era, gives individuals and communities the ability to transact without the permission of a bank, a government, or a payment processor.

That is a profound capability. And it aligns, more deeply than any other monetary technology ever has, with the Islamic vision of economic justice: property rights that cannot be arbitrarily seized, value transfer that cannot be taxed through inflation, financial participation that cannot be denied by a gatekeeper.

The digital Hijrah — the transition from extractive, surveillance-based, interest-bearing financial infrastructure to sovereign, private, permissionless alternatives — is not a metaphor. It is a practical project. And it requires practical tools.

Ijma is one of those tools.

It is early. It is imperfect. It is honest about both. But it is real, it is open, and it is getting better.

Come build it with us.

Ijma Wallet 🌐 ijmawallet.com ⭐️ github.com/amisatoshi/ijmawallet ⚡️ amisatoshi@rizful.com 📖 Design document: ijmawallet.com/assets/documents/design-doc.pdf

Sovereign · Private · Halal