OffQen for Nepal
A hybrid online + controlled offline payment architecture for connectivity resilience — explained for the general public, students, technical people, entrepreneurs, investors and government.
A connectivity plan for Nepal's diversity
Nepal is not one market. Some towns have fibre, some have towers, some have neither. OffQen is built on the principle that ownership of value should never depend on a live internet pipe.
Mountains
Basements and alpine villages with no tower range — offline payments keep value moving when there is no signal.
Terai towns
High-traffic corner shops and last-mile delivery that need QR and BLE at near-zero data cost.
Tourism & transit
Airports, bus stands, and mountain passes — tourists pay the same way as locals, even in outages.
Disasters & emergencies
Floods and earthquakes take down towers. OffQen keeps funds flowing when the network fails.
Where Nepal needs it most
Offline-first payments are not a novelty in Nepal — they are a resilience layer.
Rural merchants
Corner shops, e-commerce last-mile delivery, and local vendors accept digital payments whose settlement does not depend on a live network.
Students
Scholarships, stipends, and peer-to-peer tuition payments work during data-exhaustion events.
Technical people
Developer grants, admin payments, and internships pay consistently — even when the ISP has an outage.
Entrepreneurs & investors
Founder payments, mentorship fees, and micro-investments settle through the next outage instead of stalling.
Government stakeholders
Disaster relief, subsidy transfers, and utility payments stay atomic and auditable during nation-scale outages.
Everyone
No one should lose access to their own money because the internet went down.
The 10-stage plan
Progress is tracked against the adapter ledger. Stages released today are active; the rest are not started.
P1 · Protocol & SDK
BLE, NFC, QR, Wi-Fi Direct lanes. Signed STP, ECDSA + SHA-256. Phase not started.
P2 · Offline simulator
Home-page state machine: prepare → verify → commit → sync. Phase not started.
P3 · Device SDK (Android API 26+)
TEE-backed key store, secure enclave, biometric unlock. Phase not started.
P4 · Host-to-host relay
Server reconciliation engine, graph reconstruction, risk scoring, auto-settle. Phase not started.
P5 · Merchant terminal
Offline POS with QR/BLUETOOTH/BLE provisioning and cloud buffer. Phase not started.
P6 · Wallet app (general public)
Onboarding, balance, activity, and offline reserve cap UX. Phase not started.
P7 · Security audit
Third-party review of the chain of custody, hash verification, and key revocation. Phase not started.
P8 · Compliance research (KYC/AML)
Regulatory map for Nepal — required before any live service. Phase not started.
P9 · Pilot (Meridian, Nepal)
Limited rollout with offline reservation; telemetry on sync latency. Phase not started.
P10 · Wider rollout
Full offline-first population, online-offline parity, and price parity with online wallets. Phase not started.
Technologies
A lean, modern stack chosen for a demo concept.
Mobile SDK (Android API 26+)
Kotlin + Jetpack Compose, secure enclave-backed keys, offline-first architecture.
Cloudless core
All signing and verification is local. The cloud is only a reconciliation host.
Server stack
Node.js + Express + SQLite for relay, graph reconstruction, and risk analysis.