BLINK NOW BILLS DORMANT CUSTODIAL ACCOUNTS $1 A MONTH PER BALANCE — BALANCES UNDER $1 TAKEN WHOLE, EMPTIED ACCOUNTS MAY CLOSE — NON-CUSTODIAL ACCOUNTS PAY NOTHING

Blink, the Lightning wallet, now bills custodial accounts that sit idle. Its post dated October 24, 2026 says the fee is “$1 per month per balance,” with the Bitcoin Balance and the Dollar Balance “charged separately.” It hits accounts with no activity for “twelve consecutive months,” and logging in counts as activity. The first charge ran October 6. The terms changed September 2, in version 2.5, section 9.2.

Read the fine print. A balance under a dollar loses “the whole balance.” Charges stop when the balance hits zero, and then Blink “may close it, with at least 30 days’ notice in the app.” Blink says every fee is “refunded automatically, in full, the moment the account’s owner comes back,” and that closure “does not remove the refund right.” Bitcoin Magazine reported on October 26 that refunds come on a login within 12 months. Blink’s post names no such limit.

Who is dormant is Blink’s call, made on Blink’s ledger. Its first notice batch went wrong: “Roughly one in ten of that batch went in error to accounts that were in fact active.” Blink says it sent a fix the next day and charged none of them. Fair enough. But that is the deal with custody. Your sats are a number in someone else’s database, and they set the rules, the fees and the clock. One line in the post says it all: “This does not apply to non-custodial Blink accounts.”

Bitcoin Magazine, citing an unnamed source, put dormant accounts at about 100,000 holding over $800,000, with the first charge taking about $45,000. It could not verify that, and neither can we. If true, that is about 45 cents an account, which fits a lot of balances under a dollar taken whole. Hold your own keys and there is no one to bill you. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $80,044.