What Nimiq Pay actually is
Nimiq Pay is a mobile app published by Nimiq Labs Ltd, listed under Finance, and built around one job: paying someone with crypto from a phone without handing the money to anybody first. Its App Store description opens on instant transactions with NIM and BTC Lightning, and it also advertises mini apps and an interactive map of places that accept crypto.
That is the marketing surface. The part that matters structurally is smaller and easier to state. Nimiq Pay is an interface over a key that sits on your device. It is not an account with Nimiq, there is no server holding a balance for you, and there is nothing in the middle of a payment that could decline it. Everything else on this page follows from that one fact.
Self custodial, on a phone, stated precisely
Nimiq's own Nimiq Pay page describes the app as making self custodial crypto payments fast and easy, which is a claim worth unpacking rather than repeating. Self custodial means the private key that controls your NIM is held by the app, on your hardware, and that signatures are produced there.
The clearest first party statement of the custody model is not on the marketing page at all. It is in the developer documentation for mini apps, which has to be explicit because third party code is involved: a mini app runs in a sandbox with no direct access to private keys, the Nimiq Pay app mediates every wallet operation, keys never leave the wallet, and every sensitive action goes through a native dialog that mini apps cannot bypass. Read that from the other direction and it tells you where the keys are.
What the trade buys you, and what it costs:
- Nobody can freeze it. There is no account with Nimiq to suspend, and no intermediary that clears a payment.
- Nobody can spend it. Not Nimiq, not a validator, not an exchange, not us.
- Nobody can restore it. Losing the phone and the backup means losing the coins. There is no reset flow and no support route that ends differently.
The third one is the whole reason backups exist, and the reason we wrote a separate guide comparing the three of them. Install the app, then make the backup, in that order and on the same day.
How it relates to wallet.nimiq.com and Keyguard
The most common misreading is that Nimiq Pay and the Nimiq Wallet are two products competing for your account. They are not. Nimiq's own Nimiq Pay page tells you to connect your Nimiq Wallet to the app, which is the relationship in a sentence: one account, two windows onto it.
| Piece | Where it runs | What holds the key |
|---|---|---|
| Nimiq Pay | A native app on your phone | The app, on the device |
| Nimiq Wallet | A browser tab at wallet.nimiq.com | Keyguard, on its own isolated origin |
| Keyguard | Inside the browser, separate origin | Itself. It signs and never reveals the key |
| Nimiq Hub | hub.nimiq.com, usually a popup | Nothing. It routes requests to Keyguard |
The browser side draws a formal trust boundary that is worth knowing even if you only ever use the phone. The developer documentation treats the requesting application as untrusted, the Hub as semi trusted, and Keyguard as the only fully trusted component. Nimiq Pay collapses those layers into one app you installed, and keeps the same rule at the edge: the code asking for a signature is never the code that holds the key.
Practically, this is also how a phone signs for sites like this one. Open our stake dialog on a desktop and it goes through the Nimiq Hub; open it on a phone and it goes through Nimiq Pay. The signature happens in the wallet either way and we never see a key. If you have not made an account yet, the walkthrough is how to create a Nimiq wallet.
The asset list is a moving target
This is the part every other article gets wrong, and it gets it wrong by being confident. Nimiq publishes more than one answer to "what does Nimiq Pay support", the answers conflict, and they conflict because they were written at different times and updated at different rates. Here is what each one said when we read it.
| First party source | Date | What it lists |
|---|---|---|
| nimiq.com, Nimiq Pay page | Read 14 September 2026 | NIM and CryptoPayment Link, with BTC Lightning and Bluecode marked "Coming Soon" |
| App Store listing, description | Read 14 September 2026 | "instant transactions with NIM and BTC Lightning", plus mini apps and the acceptance map |
| App Store listing, version history | Read 14 September 2026 | Version 2.8.0: "Nimiq Pay now supports USDT on Polygon!". Version 2.0.3, 11 December 2024: BTC Lightning payments restored after the proof of stake migration |
| nimiq.com, Introducing Nimiq Pay | Published 25 September 2023 | NIM, BTC and USDC |
Three lists, three different stablecoin answers, and a marketing page describing as forthcoming a feature the version history says was restored in December 2024. None of this is a contradiction anyone needs to resolve. It is what a shipping product looks like when its landing page and its store listing are maintained by different hands on different cadences.
So the honest instruction is: do not take an asset list from an article, including this one. Open the store listing for your platform, read the current description and the most recent release notes, and check inside the app itself. The version numbers above will be stale before this paragraph is a season old.
Mini apps: apps that open inside the app
Nimiq Pay does not only send payments. It opens mini apps, which are ordinary web applications loaded inside the app and given a channel to talk to your wallet. The App Store listing sells them as bringing new services and experiences directly into Nimiq Pay, and the interesting detail is the boundary rather than the pitch.
A mini app can ask for your addresses, ask you to sign a message, ask you to send a payment, and on Nimiq ask for the staking operations too. What it cannot do is act. Every one of those requests surfaces as a native dialog drawn by Nimiq Pay, not by the mini app, and the documentation states plainly that mini apps cannot bypass it. The keys stay in the wallet throughout. It is the same separation Keyguard enforces in the browser, rebuilt for a phone.
We build mini apps ourselves, so this is not a neutral observation: our two are NimBooks and Darkfall, both open source and both running inside Nimiq Pay as well as in a browser. The full explanation of the model, the ten wallet methods the SDK actually exposes, and how to judge one before you open it, is in mini apps in Nimiq Pay.
What we are not telling you
Two deliberate absences, both because we could not stand the claim up on 14 September 2026.
- How cross asset payments are actually settled. A widely repeated claim is that Nimiq Pay transfers route through hashed timelock contracts. Nimiq's protocol documentation does define HTLCs as a contract type for conditional transfers and atomic swaps, and the 2023 launch post names OASIS and SuperSimpleSwap for conversions, but no first party source we could find ties Nimiq Pay's own transfers to HTLC routing. So this page does not say it, in either direction.
- Anything about price, yield or whether to hold NIM. Not our subject, and a payments app is not an investment thesis.
Where to go next
If you do not have an account yet, start at how to create a Nimiq wallet, which covers the browser route, the phone route and what Keyguard is doing underneath. Once an account exists, the one job that cannot wait is the backup: recovery words, login file, and backup codes compared.
After that, two directions. Delegating NIM from the same account is covered in how to stake NIM, and the apps that run inside Pay are covered in mini apps in Nimiq Pay.