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Galoy Newsletter #7: Adopting Bitcoin 2022, #notabitcoinevent, another country adopts Bitcoin, and Lightning Network news

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Adopting Bitcoin 2022: Coming back to El Salvador

If you missed Adopting Bitcoin 2021, here’s your (second) chance to visit the first country where Bitcoin is legal tender, to attend high signal workshops and panels, and to buy pupusas over Lightning at Bitcoin Beach. If you made it last year, surely you need no convincing to come again. Tickets are on sale, the call for participation is open, and sponsorship opportunities are available. Visit adoptingbitcoin.org/2022 for details.

Probably nothing: Delegates from 44 countries visit El Salvador for financial inclusion meetings

Member countries of the AFI met last week in El Salvador to talk about financial inclusion. The event brought together more than 100 central bankers and finance representatives to discuss policy issues and share tools for a more inclusive financial system. This year, they are also in El Salvador to learn about “El Salvador’s recently launched national financial inclusion strategy which has digitization and access to finance to small businesses as a priority.” 

Monday, Galoy founder Nicolas Burtey, and Hope House/Bitcoin Beach OG Roman (Chimbera) Martinez were invited to share how adopting Bitcoin can benefit countries and communities. After their presentation, attendees lined up down the hall to download Bitcoin Beach Wallet to their phones and receive some sats. Then on Thursday, they had the opportunity to experience financial inclusion first hand by permissionlessly spending their sats at merchants in Bitcoin Beach El Zonte. Despite a lot of chatter on the interwebs, we would like to reiterate that this was #NotABitcoinEvent! 

Bitcoiners head to Central African Republic to support adoption effort

On April 27th, the Central African Republic became the 2nd country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. Shortly after, a delegation of French-speaking Bitcoiners around Sebastien Gouspillou was formed that will make a trip to the capital Bangui. Nicolas and Noor from the Galoy team will be joining the delegation to learn about the country’s plans and to share learnings from building Bitcoin banking infrastructure in El Salvador. 

Bitcoinmtaani launches to bring Bitcoin content to Africans  

A new educational platform has launched to bring original Bitcoin content to people of East Africa. Guantai Kathurima (@masterguantai) has launched the program which will feature a podcast, product reviews, articles and more across multiple African languages. 

New documentary: Bond to Unbind 

Since Bitcoin Law, a lot has been written and reported about El Salvador, and for good reason. The country is not only a pioneer in Bitcoin adoption, but also an excellent showroom to experience Bitcoin. Now, the documentary “Bond to Unbind” by Satoshi Pollen was released, filmed in the fall of 2021, and is a very good snapshot that portrays the situation on the ground and a new generation of Salvadorans: community organizers, farmers, doctors, journalists, artists, politicians and lawyers, and how they perceive the recent socio-economic changes on a daily basis. 

Lightning Network news and developments 

CashApp now supports scanning zero-amount Lightning invoices ⚡ 

Making Lightning wallets interoperable is an important and difficult task (we covered the issue with Johns Beharry on episode 12 of Adopting Bitcoin: A convo with Galoy). This week, Cash App announced support for zero-amount Lightning invoices, which allows the payer to set the desired payment amount. We’ve seen this use case play out in Bitcoin Beach, where allowing the customer to enter the final bill amount can save merchants valuable time. 

“Make Nodes Easy” – Arvin on Ibex podcast

Galoy engineer @VindaRD joined team Ibex to share his journey as a Bitcoiner in Trinidad & Tobago, discuss how he got involved in building out the Bitcoin Beach Wallet and talk about how Lightning is driving hyperbitcoinization.

FTX will, in fact, integrate Lightning

After receiving a day full of shitposts in his feed for saying Bitcoin won’t be used for payments (completely ignoring Lightning), FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said he’d “ping devs” to work on integrating Lightning into FTX. Lightning shaming works, folks. 

Two new resources for open source contributors 

In stark contrast to the traditional financial system, the Bitcoin Standard is being built on open source protocols and standards. This month, two new resources were published to help guide contributors on their journey and fill the pipeline of open source devs and designers. 

In his Guide for Open Source Grant Seekers, Adam Jonas shares considerations for grants, from fiat/BTC payment, to pseudonymity, to association with grantors. 

Spiral also released its Framework for Sustainable Open-Source Bitcoin Development which outlines the four-phase process for successful projects. ICYMI, Conor Okus gave a great rundown of this on the Open Source Stage at Bitcoin 2022.

CoinCorner announces the Bolt Card

Now you can pay at retail by tapping a physical NFC card to pull from your Lightning wallet. In addition to this debit card functionality, the Bolt Card can be used as a sats gift card – the recipient can sweep funds from the card into their wallet.

Lightning being the open network that it is, of course it’s also possible to set this up non-custodially with LNBits and a little bit of hacking as described by Calle.

David Marcus launches LightSpark to build on Lightning

Three months ago Marcus published a tweet calling Bitcoin “the one asset and L1 still around in 20+ years with increased compounding relevance over time.” Now, the former Paypal president and Meta payments lead announced a new company focused on Lightning, with investments from a16z and Paradigm. Watch this space – few details have emerged on the business thus far but it’s good to see Marcus and his investors shifting attention from crypto to Lightning.

Optimally reliable payment flows 

Independent researchers Rene Pickhardt and Stefan Richter have been working on improving payment reliability in the Lightning Network. Last year, they presented an approach that increases the size of payments that can be reliably delivered by several orders of magnitude compared to the current state of the art. Now, the first independent verification of their experiments was done by Carsten Otto. If nodes, wallets and Lightning Service Providers adopt this method, the Lightning Network should see less probing, higher amounts and faster payments.

Robosats

Looking for a private way to exchange sats for fiat? In our April newsletter we had suggested the new service Robosats to do just that. Now openoms tested selling and buying with Bitcoin Beach Wallet successfully:

View the discussion and learn more on GitHub.

Adopting Bitcoin: A convo with Galoy Podcast Season 2

We recently wrapped up Season 1 of the weekly Twitter Space where we interview thoughtful leaders and builders on the topic of Bitcoin and Lightning Adoption. Last week, Season 2 kicked off in a new Youtube live format and a packed panel in the first episode with the Adopting Bitcoin advisors Giacomo Zucco, Jeff Gallas, Moritz Wietersheim, Rodrigo Gomez, Vlad Costea, Alexandre Bussutil and special guest Chimbera. Tune in!

Join the team! 

Ready to build on Lightning? Join our growing, global team of Bitcoiners who are working to make it easy for communities, companies and governments around the world to use Bitcoin as money. View openings on Bitcoiner Jobs.

See you next month!

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