{ "episodeId": "SLP741", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "will_cole": { "name": "Will Cole", "role": "guest", "tag": "WILL" }, "guest_2": { "name": "Guest 2", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" }, "guest_3": { "name": "Guest 3", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" }, "guest_4": { "name": "Guest 4", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" }, "guest_5": { "name": "Guest 5", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" }, "guest_6": { "name": "Guest 6", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:01", "start": 1.4, "text": "Hey guys, we're here at BTC Prague. I'm here with Scott9000, the instigator of the BitDax and also working on the SH256 Foundation. Yes. Let's, let's hear some updates. I know you recently got SV2 support natively on the BitX. So tell us a little bit about that. Yes." }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "00:20", "start": 20.09, "text": "Yes. So it was pretty cool. I didn't do it, right? This was someone from the community submitted a pull request to the BitX firmware and added SV2 support. And I'm like, \"Well, this is a pretty big change, so we obviously tested it out, but it works great, and we merged it, and, you know, now you have full SV2 support on the BitX, which I You know, it's fantastic for developers, it's fantastic for people who wanna try it out. It doesn't provide a ton of benefits for the home miner, but, you know, SV2 is-" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:50", "start": 50.16, "text": "But I guess it's an interesting idea of having like native firmware support, and hopefully other people start to copy that, and we start to get more SV2, Stratum V2 support, and so there's benefits like you have encryption, so there's, it's harder for hash rate hijacking. Yeah. And you have the benefit of the block template selection as well," }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "01:11", "start": 71.17, "text": "It doesn't provide a ton of benefit for the mine. For a real mine, of course. Because now we're not running, we're not running a node on the BitX, yeah. And we never will be, right? Yeah. It's obviously too small. So you can't really make your own templates on the BitX. I see. But you do get, you do get the encryption, and you do get the binary, protocol, and they have some, like traffic obfuscation in there so that it's not entirely clear, even looking at the encrypted data Something you, you could be a little more" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:43", "start": 102.75, "text": "coverage. Gotcha. Okay. and, also any updates on the SHA-256 Foundation?" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "01:48", "start": 107.54, "text": "Yeah. So we had a, a telehash, our semi-annual fundraiser, that was last month in Texas at the, Energy and Mining Summit. We didn't solve a block, unfortunately. That is obviously the goal. And the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:58", "start": 117.56, "text": "telehash, just for people who don't know, I guess people can point their hash, kind of like a donation thing?" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "02:02", "start": 122.23, "text": "Yeah. It's, it's sort of a novel idea that" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "02:11", "start": 131.19, "text": "Like, call in and pledge your support, and then on TV they would just like accepting calls, you could do donations, but instead of accepting calls, we have people send their hash rate. So it's a whole day long event And people can send their hash rate in, and then we, we solo mine. So if we don't solve a block, we get nothing. We just don't get" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:29", "start": 148.97, "text": "anything, yeah? That's the game. But" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "02:30", "start": 150.39, "text": "if you do solve a block, then all the rewards go to the Fifty Six Foundation." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:35", "start": 154.61, "text": "Cool. And then I guess what are, what are the main things the foundation is looking at and doing, and like, what's the focus there?" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "02:40", "start": 160.5, "text": "The two fifty six Foundation is, you know, laser focused on open source Bitcoin mining development, right? So we are a nonprofit, totally pass through, so all the money we raise goes to funding developers working on open source Bitcoin mining, which is a, in my opinion, tragically underfunded scene. So we have four core projects that we've been working on. We have, Ember One, which is an open source hash board. So think like it's a hundred watts instead of a thousand watts, so it's a small hash board. It uses Bitman chips, but the idea is it's totally open source. You can use it as is, you can make systems with it, but it really also serves as like a reference design, so you can take it and build on it, like maybe you wanna make a hot water heater or whatever. That's, that's kind of idea there. we also have Libra board, which is an open source control board that you could use to control some Ember ones if you want And then we have, the third project is called MuGina. That's my, that I'm very excited about. That's good. That's your baby. Oh, man, MuGina is fire. So it's- It is open source firmware. It's open source firmware for like big miners that run Linux. So that's all your Ant Miners, Whats Miners, Avalon's, and" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:48", "start": 227.92, "text": "is it agnostic to the hardware or how does it work? Like, does it need to be specified for that particular hardware?" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "03:54", "start": 233.91, "text": "It does need to-- So it's a, we, we wanna call it the, we call it the Linux kernel of Bitcoin mining, right? Oh, I think it has that, that core functionality in there, and it's super modular so that you, if you can come up with a driver for the specific ASICs that you're using, you can slot it in there. And we've done that for several of the Bitmain chips And it's just, it's a really cool development platform. But the idea being is that, you know, you take Mujina, you develop a driver for the specific ASIC you're using, and then make a, you package it up, and now it's a full packaged firmware that you can load on that miner." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "04:32", "start": 271.7, "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "04:33", "start": 272.56, "text": "And of course, it's totally open source, so you can change the API if you need anything, you can change the, auto-tuning if you want, you can underclock it, overclock it, like it's very, very flexible. I think that's gonna provide a lot of value to, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:49", "start": 288.57, "text": "Yeah. and so when it comes to, like the main benefit, you see it as self-sovereignty for the miner, or are there other things that people can do, like even, I know some of the different- You know, like brains would do, like, ways to try to optimize, like, you know, things like that. So is that stuff" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "05:08", "start": 307.88, "text": "you would, you guys would look at too? Yeah. So they call that auto-tuning, right? So that's like ways to get the chips to be more efficient or if you're trying to optimize for heat, all those different sorts of things. Yeah. And, you know, we have some of that built-in, but the idea being is this is like, you know, this is just the kernel, so people could build this on top of it" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "05:31", "start": 331.46, "text": "Sources that it's permissionless, so developers who wanna do these things can just jump in and do it. We saw incredibly fast development on the Bidax project being open source, and I think that, Mujina is gonna see the same benefits." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:43", "start": 343.35, "text": "Gotcha. Especially" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "05:44", "start": 344.41, "text": "now that you can like do AI on these things, like it really, really lowers the barrier to entry. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:50", "start": 350.17, "text": "are you finding AI, coding, to be really handy now? tell us a little bit about what that looks like if you're working at the Like firmware and hardware level as opposed to just like straight software, right? Because I imagine most of the, let's say, the training corpus of the AIs like Claude and Codex and whatever, yeah, most of that would be for like software, software, not as much for the firmware, is that right? It actually is amazing at" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "06:15", "start": 374.99, "text": "firmware. Oh," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:16", "start": 375.71, "text": "okay." }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "06:16", "start": 376.11, "text": "A lot of times when you're developing firmware, you have to interface with the hardware, right? So the firmware is the software that controls the hardware, and so- You know, I, I've spent my career doing this, and a lot of times you'll, you'll have to read a data sheet for a part on how to communicate with it. Okay. And it'll be like a thousand page data sheet, right? With AI, man, it just, no problem. Like, I got a question. It's kind of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:37", "start": 396.56, "text": "lowering the" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "06:37", "start": 396.92, "text": "barrier now. More people can do it. Way, oh, way more people can do it. Yeah. Like, you can, you can one shot these things. Obviously, that's not a, not recommended. That Developing, test code to write to make sure that when we talk to a chip, that we're getting the right results back, feeding different things into it, and AI can just bang out those test harnesses just so fast, huge time saver." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:06", "start": 426.22, "text": "Yeah. So it's kind of lowering the barrier, making it better for, like, you know, making it easier for the small guys to kind of compete with the big guys in, in a sense, for at least from the development, sense." }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "07:17", "start": 436.97, "text": "Hundred percent. Yeah. In a huge way. And, I mean, AI has a solid" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "07:24", "start": 443.74, "text": "So if there's any sort of, you know, noise or voltage fluctuations or anything like anomaly that you're seeing, it's really cool to just have AI there as this partner to like talk through these issues and give you suggestions for things to try. Interesting. Yeah. It's like having this really smart programming kind of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:39", "start": 458.53, "text": "idea. Like, sometimes you might be having a voice call with an AI to kind of coach you through what you're doing, that kind of thing. Oh man, I" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "07:45", "start": 464.93, "text": "do it all the time." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:46", "start": 466.17, "text": "Yeah. It's interesting. And then, I guess, back to the SHA-25 What are you looking for going forward?" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "07:55", "start": 474.92, "text": "Well, we have, we have a fourth project, yeah, that's Hydrapool. Oh, yeah. That's a, an open source mining pool, and that we actually ran it at the TeLaHash event. So all the hash rates that was pointed, we had, we had almost" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:06", "start": 485.56, "text": "in, Jungli talking about that because it relates to his, PeterPool v2 thing. Yes," }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "08:10", "start": 490.01, "text": "yes. Jungli is the lead developer behind Hydrapool, and it's, it's," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:18", "start": 497.87, "text": "you know," }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "08:19", "start": 499.01, "text": "there's a lot And he is doing that, okay, yeah. And, you know, we talk about-- Oh, but is he" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:27", "start": 507.46, "text": "separately funded for that?" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "08:29", "start": 508.76, "text": "He's separately funded for that. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:31", "start": 510.66, "text": "Interesting. You know," }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "08:32", "start": 511.64, "text": "I would like to pull it into the fold, but we need to do better, more of this fundraising for two fifty-six. All right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:37", "start": 516.92, "text": "So you gotta get your Teleyhash on, point some hash. Gotta get our Teleyhash on. Also, for" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "08:41", "start": 520.89, "text": "your, millions of listeners, we are a five o one c nonprofit. Yeah. So if" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "08:54", "start": 533.72, "text": "Put it all to development work." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:56", "start": 535.74, "text": "Fantastic. Well, yeah, listeners check it out, links will be in the show notes. Thank you, Scott." }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "09:00", "start": 539.8, "text": "Thank you, Stephan." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:01", "start": 541.14, "text": "Hi guys, we're back at BTC Prague 2026. I'm here with Alex Bragin, he is the CTO of Jan3. They're the company behind Aqua Wallet, so if you, those of you who have used that, they're the company behind that. So, I know you guys have some updates recently, you recently came out with, Lightning address, so just tell, give" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "09:24", "start": 563.66, "text": "These, Lightning addresses, but in fact, we have some other stuff, going on and we will release it, roughly maybe in one month. It will be completely, completely right of Aqua Wallet on, on the other technological stack. It's, it's, it's going to have the same UI, same stuff, but much improved. Under the hood," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:44", "start": 583.89, "text": "it'll be different. Yeah, absolutely" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "09:45", "start": 585.33, "text": "different. It's going to be much quicker, less in size, and it's going to have more integrations already from the, from the ground up. And it's the Next time, I will, I will demo it publicly. It's, oh, wow, we got, we got the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:58", "start": 597.64, "text": "scoop here on SLP, guys. But, yeah, I mean, I, as I understand, I mean, I've, I've, I've played around with Aqua myself. I'm not like a daily user, but I, I use it here and there. I like that you've got, like, you've got, you've got Bitcoin on chain, and then you can do L2, which is really like liquid Bitcoin, and then you" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:24", "start": 623.64, "text": "To liquid, you know, liquid tether, let's say. so, talk to us a little bit about that, the swapping side of it. Are you seeing a lot of use, and interest on the, like, background swapping?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "10:37", "start": 636.58, "text": "In, in fact, in fact, yes, and, I also use it myself. It, it may seem like additional, like, additional things, additional steps, but in, in, in the, in the end, we want to promote liquid technology, and it's really undervalued now, because like, What is, what is on, on hype and things like that, but, but really Liquid is undervalued and, it has so much potential that we want to, to, to make it obvious. But yes, but also these things like these, swap orders, they come with their own benefits too. For example, if you want to, to receive Lightning payment, usually your, your wallet needs to be online. But in our case, you can generate a Lightning invoice and it can be paid even if you, even if you, if you close a wallet." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:24", "start": 683.66, "text": "Right. Because I guess in the background, what's happening is like Boltz dot exchange is kind of showing a lightning, absolutely, and then the payer can like scan that and he can pay it, and then actually in the background, Boltz is swapping, taking the lightning payment and then swapping that into liquid Bitcoin that goes into your Aqua wallet, right? Like that's loosely what's going on?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "11:43", "start": 702.83, "text": "Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. You, you, you get way more correct than like majority of people." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:50", "start": 709.57, "text": "Right. Well, there you go. Okay. So, and then I, I guess that's, For people because now we don't have to think about inbound liquidity. Like obviously if you're an expert, you can do your own lightning, that's a different thing. This is, I, I mean, for the masses, or at least attempting to get the masses. what, what country-- would you say there are countries that you're popular in that Aqua is really doing well in?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "12:12", "start": 731.8, "text": "Yeah, a-actually we, we, I think we promote it mostly in Latin countries, yeah, but it's, it's not, it's absolutely not limited, like, yesterday I was on the Bitcoin Corporate Day, yeah, and- A lot of people I met, they, they showed me Aqua installed on their smartphone, and they told me, \"They use it? Yeah, it is, it's, it's, it's fantastic because like it's, I use it too.\" So it's, it's not really limited to a certain country. But as for like specific, country-specific integrations, like we just need a tender integration which is specific for Kenya, yeah. So it's, there are some, some specific things" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:50", "start": 769.82, "text": "Gotcha. Yeah. And, I, I think, I guess the idea is you're trying to tap into the stablecoin demand, and so, there are users, because there's like, I don't know, four hundred or five hundred million stablecoin users globally, so it's just like a massive market, but right now most of them are using, let's say, Tether on Ethereum or Tether on Tron or something like that, whereas like the liquid Tether volume has been smaller until more recently, right? But, I mean, maybe- It's gonna grow with, with time, can you comment a bit on like tether across different chains and how it's working?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "13:26", "start": 805.73, "text": "Yeah, you, you know, like it's, it's obviously it's, it's very small right now, and I think like majority of volume of teaser, USDT on Liquid is generated by Acowl, actually. Yeah, but the thing is that it has so many advantages, yeah? And for, for example, like the most obvious advantage is that no one could actually block your USDT on Liquid Right. And many people miss that point entirely. And I, I'm, I'm not, I'm not saying that, although I do" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:56", "start": 835.95, "text": "wonder how long that will last. Like if it were to grow, then maybe that could be You know, Tether might have to start having to, because, again, you know, because the government might come after them and say, \"Hey, you got like this, whatever, person, we need to freeze their coin or something.\"" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "14:10", "start": 849.85, "text": "Yeah, but it's, it, it's the same argument with Bitcoin, yeah, but no one freezes Bitcoin, yeah, and, and Liquid is based on the same technology." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:18", "start": 858.36, "text": "Yeah. So" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "14:19", "start": 858.84, "text": "it, it isn't like the clearest, the most clear advantage. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:23", "start": 863.32, "text": "I mean, I, I, I, I'm, I, you know, I, I'm sort of, hoping lots, all the L2s grow, and we want-- obviously, I just want more people to use Bitcoin. That's like the bottom line for me. But, I guess ultimately, Liquid is still a federated, you know, multisig, like that is, and so I guess, yeah, if, if governments were to go after certain" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:48", "start": 888.08, "text": "There, but nevertheless, the point is you have this possibility now to easily use Bitcoin, Liquid, Lightning, and Tether all in one. and, listeners should also be aware there's also an interesting SamRock protocol, so that's kind of, by Sampson, founder of Gen3, and, RockstarDev in BTC Pay, so it's an interesting idea, and I know you guys have that, like, a hookup there into Aqua, so you can, like, the user can just have, like, BTC Pay, but then actually in the background it's" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "15:19", "start": 918.84, "text": "yeah, it's, it's, it's actually quite fascinating technology. It was, first presented maybe, I don't know, at BTCPrague" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:25", "start": 925.1, "text": "last year, actually." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "15:26", "start": 925.92, "text": "Yeah, yeah, last year, more than a half a year ago. But it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's really promising technology, and we, we are adv-advancing it. But for now, we put a lot of resources to make the actual AquaWorld to be as good as possible, because we, we have so many integrations to put into" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "15:48", "start": 947.96, "text": "It's going to be called Acquino, and after that, we will resume work on, on all other projects and to, to push that too." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:56", "start": 955.59, "text": "Interesting. Yeah. Okay. and I forgot what I was gonna go for, but, so, where, where do you see, kind of, the, the next, kind of growth? For, liquid and actually, I guess that's the other one. Are you looking at Simplicity?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "16:17", "start": 977.0, "text": "Oh, you just touched the topic which we could spend hours talking about, yeah, because like Simplicity, despite its, its name, is not so simple to talk about, yeah. I, I, I, I really see huge potential. There are so many opportunities to, to, to build something on Simplicity. And, I'm, well, I'm, I'm, I'm fully in, into it myself, yeah. But not, not to, not to, how to say, like, open this rabbit hole to go into." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:48", "start": 1007.62, "text": "But you're looking at it and you, you would consider adding simplicity based features because you obviously are liquid." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "16:54", "start": 1014.22, "text": "Absolutely. I, I, I, I, I cannot talk about it yet, but we, we, we, we, we are thinking about some, some, some new, new thing with, together with Sampson and Rose Edelberg on, built on simplicity too. So it's, it's, it's going to be amazing." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:12", "start": 1032.04, "text": "Great. And, something else I saw actually kind of recently, I think, were you kind of, are some of your providers running out of volume in the backend? Like, can you explain a bit what happened there? Like, were there, was it because people, too many people were swapping and then you ran, like, they ran out?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "17:26", "start": 1046.29, "text": "Yeah, because you know, like when volatility spikes, it's everyone wants to swap here and there, and since it's happening this way, but the thing is that in the new Aqua version, we are going to provide users selection, a possibility to select the swap provider, like choose the best, the best rate, the best fee, and if, if, if a certain provider runs out of volume, you can just use another one. Gotcha." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:52", "start": 1071.67, "text": "Yeah. So I guess that's kind of where things are going, but it's kind of a nice in- Industry-ish, I mean, liquid's been around for a little while, and some of these providers have been around, like whether it's BOLTs dot exchange or is it Sideswap and some of these other guys, Sideshift," }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "18:05", "start": 1084.58, "text": "Sideswap, Sideshift, I always mix them up because those are the same. Yeah, right. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:09", "start": 1088.72, "text": "yeah, yeah, 'cause, Sideswap is the one with, Scott, right? And he's the-- And then Sideshift is like the kind of more shitcoiny one, but they have shitcoin exchanging" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:26", "start": 1105.91, "text": "Is Bitcoin first, but, you know, I think it's kind of a matter of being pragmatic, right? but" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "18:32", "start": 1112.06, "text": "Liquid Federation itself, like, I mean, Liquid Network itself, they're, they're actually doing a lot now to- To make it better, to, to market it better, to promote it better. So, I also take part in this initiative and I, I, I, I con- contribute myself as much as I can. Yeah. So it's, I have, I have high hopes that, we can bring in liquid into, like a better position." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:59", "start": 1139.28, "text": "Yeah. And as I understand, like there's kind of, you know, there's the liquid for wallets, right? Like Aqua and, different, like as a swap provider aspect, but then there's also like Capital markets kind of side of things, like tokenize, you know, equities and tokenized debt and token other kind of tokenized products and things like that. So I guess that's kind of maybe that's these are some of the directions that Liquid could go down. And I mean, even, if you think about like, the collateralized lending stuff as well, that maybe that's also some, possibility, for people to do like more advanced contracting around like borrowing against LBTC to get Liquid Tether and then ch swapping back out and things like that. Maybe people Build that kind of feature, that, those kind of features." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "19:42", "start": 1182.19, "text": "Yeah, but, but even if you take something very, very much simpler, like for example, why do we need Lightning right now? Yeah? Just to be able to, to pay for a coffee, yeah? For a cup of coffee? You wouldn't wait two minutes for liquid confirmation, you know, like a six? Of course," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:57", "start": 1197.12, "text": "yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "19:57", "start": 1197.42, "text": "Yeah. But this is already addressed because, Liquid just introduced zero confirmation payments, which is great. Yeah. You know, like you could, you could go away from Lightning and just do Liquid payment, and it would just work like, it, it, it, it would just work." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:15", "start": 1214.53, "text": "Yeah, interesting. Yeah, but that's funny because how, how things have kind of gone in the industry about that. So, yeah," }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "20:20", "start": 1219.71, "text": "yeah. I, I'm a big fan of Liquid, if, if it wasn't Torus before. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:24", "start": 1224.24, "text": "right, right. Okay. Well, well, well, let's leave it there. Alex, CTO of Gen3, the creators of Aqua. Thanks for joining me, Alex. thank you for" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "20:32", "start": 1232.32, "text": "inviting" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:35", "start": 1234.7, "text": "me to join We have a product at ZapRight. So for those of you who don't know, ZapRight can help people take Bitcoin payments, but in a, in a slick way. So, Will, give us some updates. What," }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "20:49", "start": 1248.94, "text": "what's the latest with ZapRight? Oh yeah, I mean, you know, we're sticking with our original plan, you know, we're helping people accept Bitcoin payments, invoicing, we, we have some newish products in that area where we attack particular verticals like- Yeah. I don't know, events, you know? So if you were here at, BTC Prague for the Freedom Tech Summit, you know, you can buy, you know, tickets, check in, all those things through ZapRight. But the key remains, the, the, the really basic part of it remains the same, which is we help you accept Bitcoin payments, realistic. We put that side by side with fiat payments so that you can accept, you know, euros or Bitcoin, and, we put it into just different business transaction contexts. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:31", "start": 1291.23, "text": "and what I know I noticed, I mean, you guys were even for BTC Prague, right? The attendees, when you got your ticket, I noticed you literally view the ticket and it goes to like a Zapright kind of QR code. So it's kind of like you've integrated the payments aspect also with the event ticket aspect all in a platform, right?" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "21:49", "start": 1308.94, "text": "Yeah, it's really flexible. You know, you, you can use different parts of us. You can use our UI if you want to for, you know, the checkouts, so like that. You can use our API to use less of that. To do like the information intake forms if you have information you need from your customers, or you can build that on your own and only use us for the literal checkout por- portion. We try to be really flexible. The API in particular, it's one of our best products in my opinion, is that you get to kind of pick and choose how you interact with it. Gotcha." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:21", "start": 1341.1, "text": "And so I guess the way I'm understanding it is like you guys are kind of like a connector and that you can sort of- Hookup, obviously different ways of accepting Bitcoin, whether that's, you know, to your Lightning node or to your other, like kinds of" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "22:36", "start": 1355.83, "text": "white wallets, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's one of the key points as well, is that we're not a custodian, we're not a wallet. So in a lot of places, you know, in the fiat world in particular, you have to trust them not just with your payment, but I gotta trust the balance, the fiat or the fiat balance. Yeah, the balance. They're your custodian as well, and then it's very different. We, we try to support as many wallet custody types as possible. We're relatively agnostic. There are custodial options, there are non-custodial options, there's Lightning, there's on-chain, you know, soon enough we'll have things like ARK and, you know, anything you're already comfortable with We want to be able to support. So there's a long list of integrations with different wallets, custody providers, and things like that, so that you don't, you know, you're not putting that on Zapright, hope-hopefully where, where you already are. Yeah. And" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:26", "start": 1406.02, "text": "would you say a lot of your customers are already in the Bitcoin industry per se, or some of them are actually outside the Bitcoin industry, and you're kind of, maybe you're starting with Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin industry people, but you're trying to also reach to the outside world to get" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "23:39", "start": 1419.11, "text": "them" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "23:43", "start": 1422.91, "text": "We're all Bitcoiners on some level, right? but I would say, you know, maybe half of our businesses are actually Bitcoin businesses, right, where they are a vendor or some sort of provider thing or mining, yeah, miners are big, you know, the whole mining stack is a big customer segment of ours, but we also have a lot of lawyers and, and, and dentists and, e-commerce providers and, you know, they're usually, you know, tightly held corporations where an individual or a small group People can make a unilateral decision of, \"Hey, we wanna accept Bitcoin.\" So, you know, if you're a small law office, right? You, you might only get five percent of your payments in Bitcoin, but you're willing to change payment providers just to get that five percent. So that could be for an affinity play with your customer base, or it might just be because you're a merchant and you want Bitcoin, right? And, you know, accepting Bitcoin payments directly from your customers is a great way to stack Bitcoin. it's in a lot of ways cheaper than using FX exchanges and things like that in order to get the Bitcoin. Yeah. So in every case, they're Bitcoiners, right? But they're not always Bitcoin businesses. Businesses, gotcha. Yeah. And then on the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:51", "start": 1491.06, "text": "fee side, like, give, give people an, an idea, what's the rough fees? is it a percent thing? Is it a flat fee per month?" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "24:58", "start": 1498.06, "text": "Like, how do you do that? Yeah. So And you're selling tickets. We have a different fee structure for like events than we do for, say, e-commerce, and sometimes there's no fees, and sometimes there's small fees. What we do have that's across the board is we have a twenty-five dollar a month or three hundred dollar a year, or sorry, twenty-five dollar a month or two hundred and fifty dollar a year subscription, which is really just like your minimum, you know, threshold of being a Zapright customer. So you pay that, right? Any fees that you do incur, so, if you Fees on top of invoices, right? Yeah. But if you are doing an event, right, and you're selling a ticket, we do have a fee on top of the ticket, it's like a set, you know, fixed fee. And but that your, your like monthly payment or your yearly, payment to be a customer at Zapright, that goes towards your fees. So if you paid three hundred dollars for the year, or sorry, I keep on saying that, two hundred and fifty dollars for the year, then you won't start paying fees if you're doing events until We need to make money and things like that, but all of our fee structures will be dramatically lower than what you- And then what you- In terms of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:09", "start": 1569.2, "text": "comparing with like fiat payment rails, you're still coming out way ahead. Yeah, yeah. Now the other kind of- Maybe it's a bit of a meme, maybe it's not reality yet, but agentic payments, right? Sure. So how are you guys thinking about that in terms of, you know, are you looking at that? Is that a thing yet? Not really. Like it's coming, but not yet. Or how do you see that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "26:29", "start": 1588.64, "text": "Well, I like to think it's that right, that, you know, we're very inclusive, you know, that's one of our, you know, core, core things, and, you know, robots' lives matter and that we must-- The cl We've sort of been tiptoeing our way towards this, I think recently we've, made updates to the APIs to make it much easier for, for the LLMs and for, you know, your Hermes or, Claude bot or OpenAI, whatever it is, to navigate checkout experiences. So if you're a merchant, right, and you wanna make sure that you're available to the emerging, you know, industry of, you know, sort of autonomous, agentic payments, then we make it really simple for those agents to navigate, zap right in and Pay. So if your agent has money, if it has a wallet, right, and you are looking at a merchant or a bill or an invoice or whatever it is, buying a ticket, those agents don't have to very clunkily, you know, navigate a human UI in order to buy that thing. We make it really easy for the agents to navigate and make the payment. So as a merchant, we're trying to look out for you and make sure that like all of your customers, whether they're robots or humans, can, can pay for your stuff. And I guess" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:43", "start": 1662.85, "text": "coming People using kind of vibe coding of Bitcoin and Lightning SDKs, like obviously like Phoenix D, absolutely, Breeze SDK, Money Dev Kit, you know, LDK, or maybe there's other, maybe there's others we're even forgetting. I don't know, you guys kind of had a little thing around Phoenix D, so like, can you maybe talk to that side of it, like the people vibe coding on the Bitcoin Lightning integration payment side? Yeah. Is there any" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "28:10", "start": 1690.04, "text": "kind of thing you're doing there? We're always looking at new integrations for those types of things, right? And I don't think we have all of them, you know, covered yet. They're kind of like, they're really like pushed by demand, like when we have new customers come in, they're like, \"Hey, we're using this setup,\" we're like, \"Great, we'll add it,\" right? and, like I said, we're, we're fairly agnostic on, you know, custody solutions or, you know, which, which SDK you're using like that. So, yeah, I mean- Ask for it and you'll usually get it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:37", "start": 1717.22, "text": "Ask and you'll receive. Alright, well, listeners, check it out, ZapRight. we'll put the links in the show notes. This is Will. Thank you, Will. Thanks, Stefan. Hey guys, we're back at BTC Prague 2026. I'm here with my friend Filip Hurnich, of now called Satora. So used to be called, you may have known them as Lendersat, but they're now called Satora. So, give us a quick update. What" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "28:59", "start": 1739.41, "text": "way too much, unfortunately. So we started with lenders that write Bitcoin backed loans, and then last year in October, we built a little PLC which allowed us to swap Bitcoin to stable coins in a non-custodial way, mostly because we learned that our borrowers actually wanted to pay back the loans in Bitcoin, but the lenders want to receive the stable coins. So you would like order swap, yes, in the background for them to do that? Well, we did a, a non-custodial swap, so we did an H2O C based swap. Interesting." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:28", "start": 1768.13, "text": "Interesting. Yeah. Okay. And so what's the size you can go up to on that? Because I guess some of these swap providers, maybe if you're doing like a thousand bucks, it's probably okay, but if you go to like a hundred thousand or more, then it gets" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "29:39", "start": 1779.11, "text": "more challenging," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:40", "start": 1779.66, "text": "right?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "29:40", "start": 1780.12, "text": "How do they deal with that? Yes, good question. Like the biggest one we did was a hundred K." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:44", "start": 1783.8, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "29:44", "start": 1784.44, "text": "but it's about our liquidity structure. Yeah, because you need a swap provider on the other side who's giving you that. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Okay, but go Back. So we had it first only in our lender set for our borrowers. Gotcha. I then thought, hey, this is actually useful, we should build it as a separate product, which we called Lender Swap. Yeah. Gotcha Bitcoin to Ethereum Arbitrum Polygon initially, but then started spreading using the CCT bridge and Layer zero, basically any chain, so that you can go from Lightning to USDT on almost any chain or Lightning to USDT on almost any chain, and people are loving it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:46", "start": 1846.44, "text": "Gotcha. So, just so I've got it right then, you still have the lending product, but you're also now doing like Bitcoin to stablecoin swaps, and are you using Ark to this or what's the-- Ark is one layer. So you kind of just like you're a bit agnostic to, and you have all these different layers and ways to do it. So what are the main," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "31:06", "start": 1865.65, "text": "methods you have? So we got ARC, we got Lightning, and we got on-chain. Okay. I would say ninety percent of the number of swaps are coming through Lightning." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:15", "start": 1874.55, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "31:15", "start": 1874.99, "text": "And but ninety percent of the volume of amount of being swapped are on-chain. So on-chain to, So like a Tether swap, let's say a Tether swap or the other way around, are the big, big volumes like-- And then in terms of the Tether chains, like are you doing like Liquid Tether or what Tethers are you doing? Unfortunately, Liquid isn't part of it. Okay. So we only go through Arbitrum, Ethereum and Polygon, and then through USDT zero to all chains that support USDT zero. And that's this," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:42", "start": 1902.01, "text": "this-- I know Tether have this T zero thing, which is like they're-- I think it's mainly Arbitrum" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "31:52", "start": 1911.82, "text": "chains because the, the chain needs to support the Layer 0 protocol, right? Which is not that straightforward to implement. Gotcha." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:00", "start": 1919.94, "text": "Yeah, yeah. Now of course, you know, shitcoins can leave a bad taste in the mouth and all that, but it's kind of more like you're just using them as the rail on which to send the stablecoin. Yes. and people are having, what kind of wallets are they using for this? Like, is it these multi-chain wallets to kind of swap back and forth?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "32:18", "start": 1938.21, "text": "it's completely different, like many people are coming with their MetaMask and Rebuy wallets, or even Tether wallet, I" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:24", "start": 1943.77, "text": "guess you can swap to the Tether wallet. It's gonna have T zero on that, obviously. Yes." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "32:27", "start": 1946.89, "text": "We're actually writing a plugin for WDK. that's the Wallet Development Kit, okay? Yes. Which is powering the Tether wallet and the, Rumble Wallet, right? Which I presume is also built on that, 'cause," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:39", "start": 1959.38, "text": "obviously Rumble and Tether are together. interesting. So, you know, are you guys, you guys are kind of like a BOLTs dot exchange competitor, is that? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So we are also doing," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "32:53", "start": 1973.23, "text": "Bitcoin on different layers. okay, thank you. Sorry about recording. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, thank you. Go on. Yeah. We are doing Bitcoin on different layer swaps. Yeah. And Lightning to Arcade. Oh, that's super" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:07", "start": 1987.04, "text": "cool." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "33:07", "start": 1987.36, "text": "So," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:08", "start": 1987.8, "text": "and as, as I understand, that's to do like Lightning peer-to-peer stuff, right? Exactly. And so, 'cause I know they had that years ago, then they took it away for maybe security reasons and stuff like that, and now I guess they're bringing it back with, yes," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "33:19", "start": 1999.23, "text": "yes. So they do, it's only for the peer-to-peer exchange, yeah. Not for the peer-to-peer loan platform. but the, the USP for the users is Lightning in, create an escrow there Adding art to the buyer. Wow, yeah, so it's kind of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:38", "start": 2018.1, "text": "enabling, more of these uses for peer-to-peer exchange. So it's interesting, and then," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:45", "start": 2025.46, "text": "on the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:49", "start": 2028.52, "text": "So I guess for you guys then, it's more just about like, how do you get more people to kind of integrate? And I guess you, you kind of wanna have wallets that have you built in, right? 'Cause that's kind of the end, that's kind of the end goal, because then the wallets are just using you without, like, all those end users are just using you without really even knowing what's happening in the" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "34:07", "start": 2046.53, "text": "background, right? Yes. And it's the same thing with Ark, right? You don't sell, hey, you wanna build on Arkade? You say, fast escrow, in and fast escrow out. Interesting. And so" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:18", "start": 2058.39, "text": "the escrow part of it, where maybe historically, I mean, it still is done that way, but, people were doing like just Bitcoin multisig escrow, yeah. but obviously that You know, can have transaction fees and, the UX is a bit slower around that, you're waiting for confirmations, whereas in the ARC, an arcade model, you are, speeding that up because you're doing it using their arcade scripting and, I guess it's called pre-confirmation in their, in their paradigm. Yeah. Can you just kind of outline a bit of what, what's happening" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "34:49", "start": 2089.18, "text": "there? All right, a quick ARC primer. Yeah. So the idea of ARC, I actually gave a talk on this on Tuesday at a Freedom Tech Day. Yeah. I call it arcade, not an L2. Yeah. It is just a set of pre-signed transaction. Yeah. The term of L2 is being misused completely. And pre-signed transaction tells you that you can always have unilateral access. Yeah. So that's the important thing. But arcade is a, a batching, tool. It has one on-chain output, and then from this on-chain output, you have a set of n, user outputs. So for every user, there's, not for every user, for a bunch of users, there's one single on-chain transaction, which Makes the whole thing very cheap. And then from this, you get VTXOs, which are only a virtual transaction output. It's" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:34", "start": 2134.09, "text": "an" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "35:34", "start": 2134.27, "text": "off-chain" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:35", "start": 2134.67, "text": "thing, it's again this off-chain scaling idea. And the idea is you can do all these operations off, off-chain in the execution layer. Yeah. And then users can unilaterally exit out when they need to, in the worst case, and yeah, in the, I guess, in the fallback case. And then in the happy path, they're doing their swaps and their loans and things like this in the ARC kind of context, right?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "35:56", "start": 2156.09, "text": "Yeah the whole, the whole has been extremely, really instrumental because it is fast, which on on-chain you have to wait for at least one confirmation." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:06", "start": 2165.52, "text": "So I guess the benefit is also the user experience, right? He gets a very slick kind of quick- Quick loan or a quick, swap experience. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "36:13", "start": 2173.05, "text": "And if you ever have used Tolarol, usually this is like you're online with the seller at the same time, you chat to the person and say, \"Hey, do you have the liquidity ready?\" \"Yes.\" And then you say, \"Okay, I'm sitting in front of my TransferWise Revolut.\" Yeah. He sends the Bitcoin, you're waiting for the confirmation, you're waiting, and usually it's always the moment when you wanna do a transaction that there's no block for the next sixty minutes. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:39", "start": 2199.24, "text": "What Clock watch is never found or something like this, right? Exactly. But so that problem" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "36:44", "start": 2204.15, "text": "is solved, but also it's way cheaper, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:47", "start": 2207.17, "text": "Gotcha. Because you're taking, you're doing less on-chain fees, yes, only, kind of only the settle out at the end if you need to, yeah. All right. Which" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "36:54", "start": 2214.15, "text": "also makes sense now for smaller amount, and then for whole lot, this is actually also really good because whole lot had their own transaction fee, but if you do a ten dollars swap at Tantelo, if you sell ten dollars worth of Bitcoin, they charge one percent Chain, that's not worth for them, right? I see. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:12", "start": 2232.35, "text": "it enables" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "37:13", "start": 2232.95, "text": "a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:13", "start": 2233.03, "text": "whole new level of exactly transactions that weren't not cost effective before or kind of practical before. Okay, interesting. Yeah, yeah. So this is like a whole new, improvement in the UX and the kind of the slick feeling of it, I guess. Yeah. I haven't like seen a demo of it, but I've heard a little bit about it, so yeah, that's really cool to see. any other key points you wanna hit on," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "37:33", "start": 2253.08, "text": "Satora and what you guys are Oh, cool. Arcade launched assets, unfortunately there's no stablecoins yet, but with, the arcade has a concept called Arcade Script, which allows you to have more complex opcodes. Yeah. You can do non-interactive swaps And we are building a trading engine on top of that to make the U get UX really, really nice. So once we have stablecoins on Arcade, you get a really nice trading experience. And in terms of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:04", "start": 2284.24, "text": "Satora, is it that you guys have your own phone app or you have like a web thing or is it kind of more like an API" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "38:11", "start": 2291.03, "text": "thing? How does it work for you guys? Good question. So we try to be more API, B2B focused. We have our own web frontend. we just retired our mobile app. Gotcha. So we're focusing on the web front end and" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:22", "start": 2302.16, "text": "then the API side. And actually, I guess the other kind of meme is agentic payments. Now, some people, now, maybe it's a bit more of a meme than reality for now. Do you wanna explain how you're seeing that, like the agentic payments and AI Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "38:35", "start": 2315.41, "text": "Yeah, yeah, totally. So we actually built a plug-in for, OpenCore and M-P, M-P-C, M-C-P, M-C-P. M-C-P. M-C" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "38:48", "start": 2328.06, "text": "You open Flow and say, hey, do a USDC payment to this or do a light- All right. And then it could even" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:53", "start": 2333.34, "text": "do swaps" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "38:54", "start": 2333.84, "text": "in the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:54", "start": 2333.98, "text": "background for you if you have Bitcoin on chain and send it in, you know, swap" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "38:58", "start": 2338.16, "text": "USDT swap or whatever. And I recently gave it a try to combine it with Bitrefill's agent interface. Oh, cool. And you can on Bitrefill, it gives you the option to checkout in Lightning or USDC, and the agent is smart enough to find out what is better, is it swapping through Satora cheaper and paying USDC, Then you pay them directly. Wow. Yes, it's kind of interesting to see all these ways" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:23", "start": 2363.3, "text": "of automating. Wow, it's, it's fascinating. So I think, I think we'll leave it there, but, listeners check it out. Philip Hornish from Satora. Thanks, Philip. Thank you, Stefan. Hey guys, we're back at BTC Prague 2026. I'm here with, the Heitmager, Chris Seedor from, BitTorrent, and also Seedor. So," }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "39:44", "start": 2384.25, "text": "give us a quick, Private keys and your, not just Bitcoin, but your password manager or passphrases is the, in my opinion, the best way to protect it against fire, water, corrosion, and, yeah, you can bury it and then you can sleep soundly." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:01", "start": 2401.2, "text": "Yeah, gotcha, yeah. And, and then on the, yeah, I guess, like, I guess people familiar with the steel backpacks and over here on the-- Oh my God, it's over here on the Rancher Taker. Oh no!" }, { "speaker": "will_cole", "time": "40:10", "start": 2409.75, "text": "Who is that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "40:11", "start": 2411.15, "text": "This is Jerome Powell dressed as a fat, fat Rancher We are in Bitcoin for quite some time. We know how to protect ourselves cryptographically. We have multisigs, we have time-decaying setups, we have all these things. But what do you do if somebody kicks in your door and threatens you or your family, like that was the reasoning behind insurance? We launched in twenty twenty-one, it took a lot of convincing to get a traditional insurance company to cover Bitcoin, and they insure everything. Yes, you can insure watches, you can insure gold, you can insure fine art, and it took really long to get them to under- Right, Bitcoin. In my opinion, Bitcoin is the perfect asset to ensure because you can do all these things with it and be insured specifically against fire, water, but also like robbery, extortion, the five dollar wrench attack." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:59", "start": 2459.18, "text": "Yeah. And, give people an idea like, what's the market? Is it mainly EU that you," }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "41:04", "start": 2464.06, "text": "serve here or-- So we are a fully licensed broker in twenty-seven European countries. We're rolling it out one by one. We're currently in the German-speaking markets, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and then we're moving into the Scandinavian countries because we've This rise of violent attacks, oh, everyone's talking about it in France and Sweden, like all these, yeah, the Bitcoin price rises and then people realize, hey, Bitcoin is so amazing, like it's also the perfect asset to like beat out of you. And my reasoning was, hey, I can protect it, I can perfectly protect the Bitcoin, but can, can I protect myself? Do I have the ability to have, let's say, a decoy wallet with a considerable amount of Bitcoin that might be sufficient for an attacker to let go of me? And with insurance? We are directly integrated in the Swiss, Harbor and the Bitbox, yeah, we see it in the background. premiums range from point three percent to point four percent. We can insure up to half a million euros per point. That's an annual pay-payable premium or what? Exactly, it's an annual pre-premium, and yeah, we constantly try to develop further products like fi-our, our risk taker, like the first insurer behind us is Liberty Mutual, Liberty Mutual Specialty Markets, so they are from this fine art, from these, yeah, valuables background and it's It's like the fifth largest specialty insurer in the world covering us and, yeah, we, we try to not just ensure Bitcoiners, but also small, medium-sized companies. And since we are a fully licensed broker, we can also offer private health insurance payable in Bitcoin. So if you have-- if you want to have an offer, we can find different providers. I think what you might come in on the Bitcoin" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:39", "start": 2558.65, "text": "insurance," }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "42:39", "start": 2559.03, "text": "but then also have some other-- We ensure Bitcoin, other aspects. We also ensure Bitcoiners. Right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:44", "start": 2564.21, "text": "Okay. Interesting. And then, So just to, I guess, rewind a little bit, the, the idea, the scenario could be, look, the, the guy's like, \"Hey, gun to the head, pay me some, give me some Bitcoin,\" and you need to kind of have, let's say you have a smaller amount that you're, you know, trying to give that guy just to kind of get him off your back." }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "43:01", "start": 2580.76, "text": "And it doesn't have to be a small amount, but of course, the higher amount that you cover, the more expensive is the premium. Right. With the smallest policy that we sell is ten thousand euros, and it costs thirty euros a year. A hundred thousand euros, you can ensure for three hundred euros a year. So depending on your risk profile, your risk posture, we're currently at BTC Prague on stage is Alina Avranova from Guard. She has like a risk advisory or security advisory team that deals specifically with these kinds of scenarios, and we came to the agreement. Insurance is a key component in your own, yeah, security setup." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:34", "start": 2614.06, "text": "And then, I know the other one sometimes people are thinking of, I mean, maybe it's not nice to think of, but sometimes you have to think of it, is things like KNR, kidnap, insurance and things like that. Is that something you're looking at or that's a future thing? We" }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "43:44", "start": 2624.37, "text": "also offer KNR and the, KNR. Again, we are a fully licensed broker and, yeah, we, we specifically have bit insurance as the Bitcoin insurance company, but we want to serve" }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "44:00", "start": 2640.5, "text": "Unless if we aren't yet in a country that you're in, we might soon be there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:04", "start": 2644.5, "text": "Yeah. and, look, we've got, while we've got you on for a short bit, let's also talk a bit about your view on, Bitcoin culture, because this is, you know, you're, you're big into memes, you're big into kind of trolling, and what makes you say that? so, why, why is the, why is that important for, why are memes" }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "44:24", "start": 2663.91, "text": "and, this kind of trolling important? I don Like Bitcoiners are very good at infighting, and if you look at it, like we are ninety-nine point five percent aligned, we disagree on like small things, and if you take a random person, that person like twenty-five percent aligned, but we argue with each other more. That is healthy to a certain extent. Sometimes, you know, it's a little overbearing, and sometimes people, you know, are actually, you know, hurt by that discourse, and I try to make like fun of it, like it's the great equalizer, and also infotainment works. Like sometimes you can Kernel of truth, and so you convey like a good message. You're, you're sending a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:04", "start": 2704.2, "text": "message." }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "45:05", "start": 2704.76, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:05", "start": 2705.06, "text": "I mean, just like Michael Sailor is, you know, big into using like this kind of AI-generated images and things, and he sees that as a way to kind of get a message out, and I guess it's a similar thing to you, like, put some memes out." }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "45:16", "start": 2716.03, "text": "Yeah. You, you just compared my artisanal, well-thought-out memes with the AI slop of one other than Michael Sailor. Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, you" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:25", "start": 2725.45, "text": "know," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:30", "start": 2730.5, "text": "Kind of the infighting aside, is it just kind of, it's just an efficient method of communication" }, { "speaker": "guest_5", "time": "45:35", "start": 2735.2, "text": "method and it's a very important part of the culture. I always say like, we can tell just by the memes. Like, I, I, I met Rusty, in Vienna recently at a conference, he said like, oh, he can go on Twitter, check the vibe, and he knows what the Bitcoin price is currently doing. Right, based on that. And like we're currently in the bear market, like, and we can only get out of the bear market if there's like So I try to, you know, for your point of view, we need, we need," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:04", "start": 2764.08, "text": "meme support for the price. Yeah, you're providing the meme support, and then hopefully we bounce off that meme support and we launch into the new bull cycle, carrying us to hyperbitcoinization. So why don't everyone check it out? Chris Seedorf from BitTorrent, and also Seedorf at Steel Backups. thanks, Chris. Thanks, Stefan. Thank you. Alright, guys, we're back at BTC Prague 2026. I'm here with Nathan Important project in terms of demonstrating to people medium of exchange and showing people where they can actually spend their Sats, so people check, make sure you check it out if you're not aware, btcmap dot org, I believe. It is, yeah. Yeah, and there's also an app too. So give people an update, what are the latest things on BTC Map?" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "46:47", "start": 2807.43, "text": "So well, the big news, in the last six months or so is, we started adding the Square merchants. So back in, November time, we got the initial influx. I think we got about five thousand merchants within the first couple of months. And I" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:01", "start": 2820.71, "text": "guess just for context, like, what were, what were your numbers before that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "47:04", "start": 2824.11, "text": "So, well, currently we're about twenty-five thousand merchants, when they started onboarding, we were probably about sixteen, seventeen thousand. Oh, gotcha, so it really kind" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:12", "start": 2832.46, "text": "of pumped your numbers up a bit." }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "47:14", "start": 2833.74, "text": "Yeah, if you look on the website, there's a, a stat section and you can see exactly when Square started to, to arrive. Gotcha. Okay. And so then," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:21", "start": 2841.4, "text": "also, what's the difference for you in terms of merchants versus locations? Or are you just counting like, you know what I mean? Like, let's say it's a, whatever, Individual location." }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "47:35", "start": 2854.87, "text": "Yeah, every individual location, by default we take the ATMs out of the data, so you can't see them, but, you know, we're not really an ATM finder, it's there if you need it, but we want people to be using Bitcoin as money and spending it with merchants, so we wanna, elevate, the, the areas that have merchants rather than those that have just ATMs, for example." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:56", "start": 2875.9, "text": "Interesting, yeah. And so what are you finding in terms of, like our local Bitcoiner communities kind of? Driving that adoption or how are you, how are you seeing the adoption happen?" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "48:07", "start": 2887.42, "text": "it varies in, in different parts of the world, so we're getting quite a nice blanket adoption now in the US, given the square footprint." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:15", "start": 2894.81, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "48:16", "start": 2895.97, "text": "and the good thing about the square footprint is they tend to be owner, run businesses, it's not the big chains, by and large, just given the heritage of that product or where it came from. so that's all good, healthy stuff, but it's, it's pretty spread across the US. And then We've seen pockets of, circular economies as well pop up, so Berlin, down in El Salvador is a really great example. I think they've got around two hundred and fifty or so merchants, and they look after and maintain their own data. And the really good thing about Berlin is, the diversity of the merchants is really big, so you, you can live on Bitcoin there because there's bars, there's restaurants, there's barbers, there's, it's amazing, yeah, house rentals, so everything you need to be great." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:00", "start": 2940.4, "text": "And so in a The local Bitcoiners are sort of stewarding that, I, I guess they're trying to help you keep the data updated, right? Because it's-- this is in OpenStreetMaps, it's like an open data thing, so they have to go in or use obviously your website, to try to tag it or say, hey, recently checked that you can pay with Lightning there or whatever. Yeah. And" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "49:19", "start": 2959.33, "text": "then the best communities do that themselves without any kind of work on your part." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:24", "start": 2964.19, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "49:25", "start": 2965.04, "text": "and some are really good and some are not so good, so we still have like a central" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "49:32", "start": 2972.04, "text": "But the ultimate goal is for the BTC zero-zero central team and for it also be fully distributed out. But we're just gonna build that out one by one. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:42", "start": 2981.93, "text": "and so the other cool thing with the square thing, as I understand, is they've set it up on their side where it kind of hooks to, to what you're doing. Can you explain a bit of that? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "49:50", "start": 2990.11, "text": "So it's part of the onboarding. So if you're a new merchant or an existing one, on the onboarding flow, there is a screen that says, \"Do you wanna be Automatically hits our API. We do some additional verification on for data quality, but it's, it's an easy way for people to get on the map. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:11", "start": 3011.01, "text": "the Square merchant can just be on his side, he can like tick, \"I want to take Bitcoin payments,\" yeah, and he can tick, \"I want to be seen on the BTC map,\" and then it will show up, yeah, on the kind of global BTC map." }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "50:21", "start": 3020.89, "text": "Yeah. And now we're using that, so we built that integration as part of the Square project, and now we're rolling that out to" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "50:32", "start": 3031.84, "text": "BTC Pay Server, so if you're a BTC Pay Server operator for like a community, and you've got individual merchants on there, then those merchants can opt in to be on the map, and that will use the same mechanism to kind of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:46", "start": 3045.97, "text": "automatically feed it through instead of like someone manually having to go and like tag it and yeah," }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "50:50", "start": 3050.35, "text": "exactly. And we're, and we're doing a few more of those, so we're now integrated with, I don't know, like ten or fifteen, wallets, and some of those wallet providers have historically had their own, data as well. So Club Orange is a good example, so they've got a paid merchant service, they'll soon be pushing their merchants into BTC Map also, and using that same, And so then it kind of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:14", "start": 3074.05, "text": "works two ways in the sense that the merchant can hit the flag or the option to be count- seen in BTC Map, and then, I guess what you're saying is some of these wallet apps and other apps will show you the map for the-- on the customer side to say, hey, where can I go and spend my Bitcoin? That kind of thing" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "51:32", "start": 3092.08, "text": "embedded now, so it's hard. I mean, I think that those that have tried to maintain data, merchant data, over the years, know how difficult it is, and so the fact we've now got like a cen- I won't, don't wanna say central project, but A project that is trying to fix that specific problem, it means that those guys can figure out how to be the best wallets and we can figure out how to make this like they handle the wallet" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:57", "start": 3117.22, "text": "thing and you handle the map side of it, yeah. So where do you see map stuff going forward? Like, what's, what's next for BTC map?" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "52:04", "start": 3123.86, "text": "So we wanna bring in some more of the, social stuff. So at the moment we have like commenting that you can do, and boosting, so but we wanna make that a bit stronger, bringing in some integrations with Nosta, for example." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:18", "start": 3137.6, "text": "Gotcha. So explain the Nosta connection there. Like, with the BTC Map side?" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "52:22", "start": 3141.6, "text": "Yeah. So we wanna be able to, so most of the merchants on BTC Map, well- I have no idea what Nostra is and, and shouldn't ha- need to know what Nostra is. But a lot of our users, you know, are also on Nostra as well. So it'd be great if we could sign in with Nostra, make comments on merchants, reviews on merchants, and just leveraging the digital portability of your Nostra identity to do that rather than rolling our own, you know, identity system." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:50", "start": 3170.26, "text": "Yeah, you're kind of, piggybacking off the already existing Nostra web of trust and setup and wallet and app Apps that people are using for that. Yeah. Interesting. And I guess maybe here's another question, like, do you, do you see it as like a, an ideological activist thing to kind of be trying to spend your Bitcoin? Yes. That, that's what it is at least today. But do you see that in the future? Like, how will that shift? Obviously, we would like to live in the world where everything is just kind of earning and spending Bitcoin naturally. Yeah. But we're not there yet, so how do you see" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "53:21", "start": 3200.56, "text": "that? So, yeah, it has to be merchant led Because they're educated to a point where their local currency is so bad, they, they just-- i-it's logical for them to ex-want to accept the best form of money. That's gonna take some time, and it will- That will accelerate at different, speeds in different parts of the world depending on what's happening. But we as Bitcoiners, we have to do our part, and, and almost go out of our way to spend Bitcoin, in order to reward those merchants that have made that early choice. So yeah, I do see it as activism. Bitcoin's there as money, it should be used as such. that's not to say, you know, I don't think it's medium of exchange or store of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:07", "start": 3246.99, "text": "value. Yeah, of course, it's a fake That we, you know, let's just get more people to use Bitcoin. I don't care whether you're using it for value, medium of exchange, I just want you to use Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "54:16", "start": 3255.64, "text": "Yeah. And if you, if you don't use it of, of either one of those, it can't be either one of those either. So for me, they're just different, sides of the same coin. So yeah, use it, and also saving it, but yeah, we have to get some around some of these fallacies around, you know, spending Bitcoin" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:39", "start": 3279.15, "text": "The funny thing is, everyone was kind of going after Michael Saylor recently for selling thirty-two Bitcoin, and then they had to sort of come out with this idea of, \"No, buy more Bitcoin than you sell.\" So, you know, it's-- Yeah. And that's consistent if, if you wanna save money, then you're trying to earn more Bitcoin than you spend. What's the big deal, right?" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "54:55", "start": 3295.02, "text": "And the re- the reality is, is if you're spending the fiat anyway, so Lazlo is buying the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:00", "start": 3300.33, "text": "pizza--" }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "55:02", "start": 3302.25, "text": "Right, the ten thousand bitcoins. Yeah. So he's buying Yeah, it's a bit of a fake fight, to be honest. So," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:11", "start": 3311.35, "text": "you know, I think it's more just like, what are the tools that are out there that you are building, and of course, what can people who are interested do if they wanna get involved, they wanna help, and obviously part of that is trying to keep the data updated, and of course- You know, evangelizing, i-i-in the way that we can." }, { "speaker": "guest_6", "time": "55:28", "start": 3328.28, "text": "Yeah, in, in a very practical way, which is just using Bitcoin, and then that merchant maybe spends that Bitcoin with some other merchant or goes to, you know- Building that circularity within the economy, just" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:42", "start": 3342.06, "text": "kind of improving the network effects. I think that's just bottom line, we're trying to improve our network effect to grow, grow the pie, that's how I see it anyway. Yeah. So yeah, listeners, I think we'll finish, we'll leave it there. Listeners, go and check out btcmap dot org and you can, learn more. Thank you, Nathan. Thank you." } ] }