Blink Finance Mini App provides instant invoice financing for small and medium-sized businesses and freelancers. Users can improve their cash flow by uploading unpaid invoices they’ve issued and instantly receive loans in stablecoins based on those invoices.

It replaces the slow, paperwork-heavy process of traditional invoice financing, which often takes several days and requires multiple rounds of verification from banks and financial institutions, with a fast, on-chain alternative that’s simple, transparent, and accessible directly through a Mini App.

Most of the challenges I encountered were related to Mini App development, specifically to the Base libraries such as onchainkit and their documentation. The things described in the documentation often differ quite a lot from what’s actually in the library, so something you expect to work or even exist often turns out either broken or nonexistent, even though it’s written there. That means you need to go through the npm package manually, check what’s actually exported, what arguments it takes, and what it returns.

Here are a few examples:

In this link, the documentation says:
Use cbwallet://miniapp?url=[YOUR_MINI_APP] to launch your mini app directly from external sources like websites, QR codes, or other applications.

I implemented a check to see if the user is inside the Mini App, and if not, I show two buttons, one to open the app in Base, and another in Farcaster. The Farcaster button works, but when I click on the Base one, nothing happens.

Here’s the snippet of my code that should work but doesn’t:

<Button className="mt-5 w-[250px]" asChild>
  <a href="cbwallet://miniapp?url=https://blinkfinance-mini-app.netlify.app">
    Open in <ModeImage srcLight="/Base_basemark_white.svg" srcDark="/Base_basemark_black.svg" alt="Base Logo" width={40} height={40} priority /> app
  </a>
</Button>

Another example: the useAuthenticate hook found in the @coinbase/onchainkit/minikit package is, according to the documentation, supposed to return a user object and an authenticate function for user authentication.

However, in practice, things are different, useAuthenticate actually only returns a signIn function and nothing else. Like you can see in the screens below.

This hook is quite important according to the docs, as it’s described as the only reliable way to confirm the user’s identity. The documentation specifically says not to rely on the context for that.

Also, local development is quite buggy and difficult, even when using Eruda and ngrok.

There are many more examples like these that I’ve come across, which I’d be happy to share in another format if you’re interested, I just didn’t want this written feedback to get too long.

But these are the three most obvious obstacles I’ve encountered during Mini App development.

https://github.com/develo-pera/blinkfinance-mini-app

https://blinkfinance-mini-app.netlify.app/

Blink Finance combines blockchain technology and stablecoins for instant fund transfers with PEPPOL Network–based e-invoices for automated verification and credit scoring. This hybrid approach enables near-instant loan approvals for customers facing cash flow challenges.

Small and medium-sized businesses and freelancers often wait 3–5 days for banks or traditional institutions to process invoice financing requests. Blink Finance cuts that time down to minutes, removing unnecessary paperwork, manual review steps, and delays providing a faster, transparent, and borderless financing experience.

Our target customers are small and medium-sized business owners and freelancers who issue invoices and often face delayed payments, creating short-term cash flow gaps. These users typically operate in industries such as IT services, logistics, marketing, creative work, and import/export. Sectors with high invoice volumes and long payment cycles.

The idea for Blink Finance came from a real-life experience: a friend asked me a couple of months ago to send him crypto so he could cover urgent expenses while waiting for his invoice financing to be approved. I helped him out, and later did the same a few more times, lending small amounts (up to around 10k).

That experience validated the need for faster access to liquidity and inspired me to research existing invoice financing solutions and explore how blockchain and stablecoins could make the process instant, transparent, and more accessible.

There are several types of competitors on the market, but almost all of them fall into one of two extremes, either too traditional, similar to banks and their slow processes, or too experimental, like InvoiceMate, Huma (which has since pivoted), and Request Network, which use NFT-based invoices that feel overly abstract and intimidating for regular users such as small business owners and freelancers.

Blink Finance takes a different approach. We don’t use blockchain as a marketing gimmick or just to attract investors, we use it because it solves a real problem, enhances the user experience, and genuinely makes our product better compared to competitors, thanks to how it’s integrated rather than being forced in.

We combine this with the use of the PEPPOL network and electronic invoicing systems, which have proven highly effective in practice, so much so that countries like Singapore, Japan, and the UAE have adopted them following the European Union’s lead. PEPPOL prevents fake invoices and allows us to quickly access verified data and perform accurate risk assessments.