TL;DR:
- Running a Bitcoin Bank with Galoy is the best way for communities to bootstrap Bitcoin economies
- Openoms joins Galoy to scale down deployment to affordable cost for nascent communities
- Galoy matches every donation up to 5M sats to support the project
A Collaborative Project to Make Bitcoin Banking More Accessible
Running a Galoy instance is not a trivial task. It’s also not inexpensive to run for nascent community projects. The Bitcoin Beach Wallet instance costs roughly $20 per day for highly available, resilient architecture.
Fernando Motolese, community leader at Praia Bitcoin (a.k.a. “Bitcoin Beach Brazil”) is working to configure a Galoy instance that can be run locally using a desktop computer in place of the cloud hosting environment typically used to host the open source core banking platform.
Luckily for all of us, we’ve engaged Openoms to support the solutioning and design process for lighter weight instances of Galoy infrastructure. Openoms is best known in the space for his contributions to the Raspiblitz node package and JoinInBox, a terminal interface for Joinmarket.
Hear Fernando and Openoms chat about the project:
The Challenge: Launching a Bitcoin Bank on Cloud Hosted Infrastructure is Expensive
The Galoy core banking platform enables any community, company or government to launch a Bitcoin bank. It is designed for high availability and security, with multiple servers hosted in the cloud. While this setup works for established or funded projects, it’s not something that nascent communities can reasonably afford.
This begs the question: could we offer a version of the platform usable by bootstrapped communities that are at the beginning of their journey?
The Solution: Run Galoy in a Self-Hosted Environment
Community projects would benefit greatly from an open source banking solution that can be run using readily available hardware like desktop computers. This could serve to get the onboarding process rolling by enabling communities to launch their own Bitcoin banks without the expensive overhead that the full cloud-hosted solution requires.
The Plan: Open Development in Partnership with Praia Bitcoin
We’ll be designing this lightweight solution in the open, led by Fernando and Openoms. We’ve created an open Slack channel (#praiabitcoin) if you’d like to follow along and help out. Fernando will also be documenting the full process in a Bitcoin community adoption guide.
Lastly, the project needs funding! Support the development of free and open source software for this specific instance; send sats and share your paid invoice on twitter (tag @GaloyMoney); Galoy will be matching every donation up to a total of 5 million sats.
Ways to stay in touch with open source development on Galoy:
- View and star the GitHub repos
- Join the Galoy Slack
Header photo credit: @BitcoinBeachBR
