Crypto News
Bitcoin As A Foundation For Community Building

Community is crucial and that never has been clearer to me than it was this last month, as wildfires claimed 10,000 hectares of the area around my home, leaving many people with nothing except the clothes they were wearing when they escaped.
At its peak, our fire was being fought by firefighters from all over Portugal. More than a thousand men, 400 odd fire trucks and 14 planes eventually prevailed. We watched the massive smoke plume and none of us slept much for the four nights it burned, watching an approaching orange glow light up the sky. In its wake, now that the firemen have completed the heroic task of slaying the fire dragon, it’s the force of community which is coming to the fore.
Amongst the local small businesses, there is an almost festive atmosphere. Stories of last minute escapes are shared by those affected, damages are compared. Together, we take reckoning of what has been lost and celebrate the small victories over the fire. A home saved here, a family reunited with their livestock and pets there, a house not touched by the flames even though everything around it has burned.
People have poured in from far and wide to volunteer. Donations of food, clothing and household items are piled high against the back wall of a local restaurant and shared out amongst those who need them. Gender roles seem to be falling naturally into place amongst the volunteers, with the men mostly taking the heavy tasks of clearing scorched earth and charred trees to clear the way for people to start rebuilding and the women cooking for the teams of men and the families who have lost their homes. Now, a month on from the fire, the progress is very visible. Fallen roofs have been shovelled up and cleared, structures checked and cleaned in preparation for placing new beams and rebuilding. The melted pipes of irrigation systems have been pulled out of the ground and taken away. Personal possessions have been sifted through and what can be saved has been secured. We have received excellent information sessions on how to go about managing burned land, what to clear, what to leave, how to prevent land erosion and when and how to start replanting. With the first rain of the autumn coming in strong, the first sign of green is already showing again all over the blackened landscape.
A dear friend of mine, herself a dedicated bitcoiner, put it beautifully in a message to me when I told her how overwhelming it is to see people coming together this way. “This is what people do when they govern themselves,” she wrote, “It’s beautiful.”
Never were truer words spoken. I don’t think I have ever seen a community slip so smoothly into gear before. In countries – such as most European countries – where governments are still functioning to at least some degree (one could argue, over functioning) many people seem to have lost contact with the community. While once churches would have provided the cornerstones for this connection, the majority of people are no longer affiliated to any religious association and if you ask them about their community or “tribe,” most fumble for an answer. They talk about a group loosely composed of co-workers, sports buddies, friends who are not necessarily close by and neighbours with whom they share a mostly coincidental bond of proximity. The fabric of our societies is now an open weave and many individuals simply slip through it into isolation, holding on by only a few threads here and there.
From a historical and sociological perspective, the loss of community is deeply worrying. Humans did not form communities for fun. We didn’t group together because it was more fun to hunt or man the ramparts of the castle with a buddy (although it probably was that too). Throughout human history, no matter what the era or geographical setting, humans have grouped together because together we are and have always been safer, more effective and more capable of influencing our context to our benefit, whether it be fighting a fire, an enemy attack or political overreach. At the risk of sounding like a political slogan, together we really are stronger.
Women traditionally play a crucial role in creating and bonding communities, largely because they are socially and biologically very incentivised to do so – a woman’s first protector for herself and her children is of course her man – but beyond him or in his absence it is her community which is her second line of protection and which she relies upon for safety and help in times of need. It could be convincingly argued that it’s the breakdown of community which is at least partly responsible for the skyrocketing statistics of depression and anxiety amongst women of all ages but especially the younger generations in Northern Europe and the US. Social media appears to replicate a community in hordes of followers, but as a replacement simply doesn’t cut it, providing only dopamine addiction in lieu of genuine connection. From a mental health perspective, loss of community is as disastrous as it is when seen through a historical and sociological lens.
Obviously, it’s not only women who are vulnerable to this catastrophic downturn. Across the genders, statistics for poor mental health including isolation, depression, suicide and addiction make depressing reading and their increasing occurence, in spite of the increasing ease of living for most people in the developed world, even more so. It’s a lack of community which is leaving such a void in people’s lives, above all a lack of a sense that they contribute to a cause larger than their own personal wellbeing. It’s perhaps naïve – but I can’t help feeling that actively founding and stimulating the growth of local communities could have incredibly restorative potential for our collective wellbeing.
Which is just one of the reasons that it is so incredibly heartening to see a community here in full strength, drawing together to support and provide for one another, each member contributing what they have to offer. For some it’s money, which is being channelled straight into providing emergency relief or donated to the people whose livelihood was dependent upon their home. For others, it’s muscle and machine power, in chainsawing, clearing and cleaning. A few people have dedicated their time to coordinating the influx of volunteers. For those of us who have no idea how to wield a chainsaw and whose lack of muscle power threatens to make us more of a hindrance than a help on the front line of the clear up, it’s kitchen duty, providing food for those working and those in need. That community is vital on all the levels of Maslow’s pyramid of human needs is clearly exemplified in the wake of our fire.
But how to go about reintroducing the seeds and roots of community in other places, where with the loss of a shared faith and competitive social relations in all aspects of life, it has been so lost, for so long? Can we as individuals and families foster this growth?
As a fellow bitcoiner, I think you know what I would propose. Besides its myriad other aspects, Bitcoin provides a unique foundation for community. We’ve all experienced it if we have attended Bitcoin events; I’d bet my bottom dollar (if either you or I still believed in the value of the dollar) that you had more in common with the person you had a five minute chat with in the queue of the bathroom at the Bitcoin conference than you do with your co-workers, who you have known and worked with for years.
Bitcoin is about shared values and a shared knowledge that the system we are living under just doesn’t work. Its capacity to lay the foundation for community (not to mention the rest of its cornucopia of economic, technical, social and philosophical gifts) is second to none. A community based around Bitcoin is a whole new and unique model which has the potential to fill the void which other failed (fiat) models of community have left.
Those of us who choose to already experience some of this Bitcoin community through Telegram, Twitter and Nostr. Amongst other Bitcoiners, we can, to put it simply, just go ahead and skip the small talk. Mostly, we’re all aware of the role governments, big pharma, mainstream media and the food giants play. Once these issues are no longer a topic of conversation, it’s beautiful to watch what emerges – we’re all pretty much in agreement about what has broadly gone wrong in the past so we tend to focus on the future. These conversations are incredibly valuable. I, for one, love the thought provoking contact and the sense of online community – but there’s the danger that those online communities and the people with whom I socialize and the businesses from whom I buy the goods I need in daily life can feel like two separate worlds. It takes some steps to bring those two worlds together but I do feel that they are very much worth taking. Shared values make for strong bonds and as you build a Bitcoin community around you, you get to experience the luxury of this.
Delivering regular Bitcoin education sessions and watching as businesses around me start to accept Bitcoin is, for me, planting the seeds of a whole extra layer of community. It could be said that we have an obligation – not only to ourselves and our families, but to our communities, to seed and foster the growth of new, Bitcoin based communities. Doing so will bring us huge benefits. Not only will we be able to transact and save in real money amongst ourselves, building parallel economies which are uncensorable and tailor made to fit our own needs (because we are incentivized to orange pill businesses we most want to buy from), we will have access to the social, philosophical and even moral benefits that being part of a true community brings and which most of us have never yet fully experienced.
Can Bitcoin lead us back to a golden age of community, where all of us can experience these benefits? I think the answer is that it probably can. Some of the green shoots of it can already be seen growing out of the ash left by the collapse of fiat models of community. So if I may be so bold as to offer you some advice – go out there to that shop, restaurant or bar you go to often and say those magic words: “Do you accept Bitcoin yet?”
This is a guest post by Holly Young. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
Community is an important part of dealing with problems, as recent wildfires in Portugal demonstrate. Can Bitcoin be a foundation for restoring communities where they have fragmented?
Crypto News
BitVM Just Got A Massive Upgrade

The introduction of BitVM smart contracts has marked a significant milestone in the path for scalability and programmability of Bitcoin. Rooted in the original BitVM protocol, Bitlayer’s Finality Bridge introduces the first version of the protocol live on testnet, which is a good starting point for realizing the promises of the Bitcoin Renaissance or “Season 2”.
Unlike earlier BTC bridges that often required reliance on centralized entities or questionable trust assumptions, the Finality Bridge leverages a blend of BitVM smart contracts, fraud proofs, and zero-knowledge proofs. This combination not only enhances security but also significantly reduces the need for trust in third parties. We’re not at the trustless level that Lightning provides, but this is a million times better than current sidechains designs claiming to be Bitcoin Layers 2s (in addition to significantly increasing the design space for Bitcoin applications).
The system operates on a principle where funds are securely locked in addresses governed by a BitVM smart contract, functioning under the premise that at least one participant in the system will act honestly. This setup inherently reduces the trust requirements but has to introduce additional complexities that Bitlayer aims to manage with this version of the bridge.
The Mechanics of Trust
In practical terms, when Bitcoin is locked into the BitVM smart contract through the Finality Bridge, users are issued YBTC – a token that maintains a strict 1:1 peg with Bitcoin. This peg is not just a promise but is enforced by the underlying smart contract logic, ensuring that each YBTC represents a real, locked Bitcoin on the main chain (no fake “restacked” BTC metrics). This mechanism allows users to participate in DeFi activities like lending, borrowing, and yield farming within the Bitlayer ecosystem without compromising on the security and settlement assurances that Bitcoin provides.
While some in the community might find these activities objectionable, this type of architecture allows users to get some guarantees that they previously could not hope to get with traditional sidechain designs, with the added bonus that we do not need to “change” Bitcoin to make it happen (although covenants would make this bridge design completely “trust-minimized, which would effectively make it a “True” Bitcoin Layer 2). For more details about the different levels of risks associated with sidechains designs, take a look at Bitcoin Layers assessment of Bitlayer here.
However, until such advancements come to fruition, the Bitlayer Finality Bridge serves as the best realization of the BitVM 2 paradigm. It’s a testament to what’s possible after the dev “brain drain” from centralized chains back to Bitcoin. Despite all the challenges that BitVM chains will face, I remain exceptionally excited at the prospect of Bitcoin fulfilling its destiny as the Ultimate Settlement Chain for all economic activity.
This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
Guillaume’s articles in particular may discuss topics or companies that are part of his firm’s investment portfolio (UTXO Management). The views expressed are solely his own and do not represent the opinions of his employer or its affiliates. He’s receiving no financial compensation for these Takes. Readers should not consider this content as financial advice or an endorsement of any particular company or investment. Always do your own research before making financial decisions.
The BitLayer Finality Bridge is Delivering On The Promises of BitVM – While still far from a fully trustless system, the progress made over the past year is remarkable
Crypto News
Bitcoin Banks: We Should Build Them Ourselves

Bitcoin banks are going to happen. We already have a few of them. We’re going to have more of them. Existing legacy banks are going to start offering services. New banks are going to be founded around Bitcoin. This is completely unavoidable at this point. Bitcoin doesn’t scale. Even absent that, people value other services that inherently require other parties. Debt being the chief one.
This is an inescapable reality.
Even if we could snap our fingers and roll out every well specified opcode and covenant proposal at once, it would still take a lot of time to begin building out self-custodial layers that could compete with something like credit unions and banks offering bitcoin accounts at scale. That is not a problem that can be trivially solved overnight.
So what can we do? We need to embrace a localist attitude around making interaction with your bitcoin easy. This requires a two pronged approach, one involving technical development and the other involving, I hate to say it, lobbying.
There already exist pieces of software like LNDHub or LNBits that allow people to offer custodial accounts for Lightning. We need a lot more software like this, and we need it to be miles better. It needs to not involve tinkering around on the command line and hooking up independent software, or perusing Github to follow manual installation instructions, or fumbling around trying to fix dependencies mismatches.
It needs to just work.
Click, sync to the network, done. It needs to be something that power users who are still not very tech savvy can run safely, and not lose other people’s money. It needs to support more than basic accounts for Lightning. Ecash offers privacy, which would be something important when it comes to small groups of people who know each other. You don’t want your friend seeing what you spend your money on. It needs to support things like Unchained or Nunchuck style on-chain self custody. People aren’t going to want to hold all their friends and family’s life savings, but holding a recovery key to safeguard them from their own mistakes is another matter.
We need the software that will actually scale this type of user interaction beyond a bunch of activist nerds online.
We also need a regulatory carve out. There needs to be a clear acknowledgement that running this type of software for friends and family with trivial amounts of money, say thousands of dollars, and without charging anything for it, is an unregulated activity. Helping friends and family interact with Bitcoin safely and easily, and for free, does not make you a bank. The idea of a few thousand dollars needing to comply with the regulations banks managing billions of dollars do is frankly absurd.
This is the path forward given the current constraints of Bitcoin, and the reality of growing and accelerating adoption, that leads us away from a system that eventually becomes completely captured and neutered by legacy financial institutions.
Instead of depending on them to deal with the current scaling limitations of Bitcoin, we depend on each other.
This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
Bitcoiners shouldn’t sit around and wait for fiat banks and financial companies to offer services built on Bitcoin, we should do it ourselves.
Crypto News
Galoy Launches Bitcoin-Backed Loan Software, Sets Groundwork For Open-Source Banking

Founder: Nicolas Burtey
Date Founded: September 2019
Location of Headquarters: United States
Number of Employees: 11
Website: https://www.galoy.io/
Public or Private? Private
Last week, Galoy launched Lana, software that enables banks to accept bitcoin as collateral for loans.
Lana helps community and challenger banks (the banks with which Galoy is looking to work) to offer bitcoin-backed loans to various types of customers.
“Some banks might want to use it to sell to retail, and some might want to use it to sell commercial customers or high-net-worth individuals,” Burtey told Bitcoin Magazine.
In offering such loans to a wide array of customers, Burtey believes that the high cost of borrowing currently associated with such products will come down.
“Today’s interest rates are 12% to 15% if you want to get a loan using your bitcoin as collateral,” said Burtey.
“The rates are high because there are so few financial institutions offering this type of product. We see an opportunity now that the regulations are allowing banks to do things with bitcoin,” he added.
“We think a lot of banks will want to enter this market.”
If Burtey is correct in his prediction that banks are keen to offer bitcoin-backed loans, this will not only lower rates for such loans, but it will also introduce open-source Bitcoin software into the world of banking, which could initiate a new trend in the industry.
But more on that in just a minute. First, some background on Galoy.
Galoy’s History: From Blink Wallet To Lana
Founded in September 2019, Galoy had intentions to enable banks to use bitcoin from the start, but it had to hold off on doing so due to an unfriendly regulatory environment.
So, instead, it focused its efforts on creating and supporting Blink wallet (which was originally called the Bitcoin Beach wallet and which Galoy recently sold), a custodial Bitcoin and Lightning wallet predominantly used at first in El Salvador and then in Bitcoin circular economies globally.
“Galoy’s mission was to onboard banks to Bitcoin five years ago,” said Burtey.
“But the regulatory environment was so bad during the last five years that we decided to create Blink. The reason we are now focusing on our original mission is because with the end of Choke Point 2.0 and the repeal of SAB 121, we think now is the perfect time to help banks adopt Bitcoin.”
Burtey spoke about his work in creating and growing Blink fondly and shared that he had to stop working on the project only because it would be too difficult to continue managing it while also aiming to serve a new type of clientele.
“Blink is a B2C (Business-To-Customer) play, and it’s hard as an early-stage startup to focus on too many things,” explained Burtey.
“Galoy is a B2B (Business-To-Business)-driven business, and we want to work with banks and financial institutions,” he added.
“It’s good to be focused on just one thing.”
And, as mentioned, that one thing will now be Lana.
How Lana Works
Lana is software that Galoy helps banks integrate and manage for a subscription fee. With this software, banks can issue bitcoin-backed loans under the terms they create.
“We’re not the ones deciding how much interest will be charged or anything like that,” explained Burtey.
“We give banks the platform to do this, and then they can figure out their cost of capital, the duration of the loan, the liquidation price for the bitcoin in the loan and the rate at which they want to lend,” he added.
“We’re giving you software, and helping you run and automate that software.”
Something else that Galoy doesn’t do for banks is custody the bitcoin provided as collateral for the loans they issue. Each of the banks with whom the company works is responsible for selecting their own custodian.
“You can go to BitGo or Fireblocks or each loan can have its own multisig,” said Burtey. “We’re agnostic on custody.”
With that said, Lana helps banks monitor the bitcoin in custody so that banks can be aware of whether or not collateral is nearing liquidation levels.
“A key piece of this product is risk management,” said Burtey.
“Bitcoin is volatile, and the bank will need a tool to show that it’s taking calculated risk. So, we’ll provide banks with a dashboard to monitor this risk,” he added.
Who Will Use Lana?
Galoy is targeting community banks and other smaller financial institutions with this new product mostly because they think these smaller players will benefit most from it — and because the big banks likely won’t need such a product.
“We don’t think JP Morgan will really want to work with us,” said Burtey. “They’re probably building something like this themselves, whereas a smaller bank, a credit union or small company probably isn’t.”
Burtey also understands that smaller lenders’ incorporating Lana as opposed to building something comparable themselves can save these financial institutions a significant amount of time and effort.
“Our goal is to say, ‘Look, you can develop this internally, and it will take you six months, a year or longer depending on how much you know about Bitcoin,’” said Burtey. “‘Or we have a lending product as a service for you, and you can launch it much more quickly.’”
And as Burtey and his team onboard their first round of smaller banks, they’ll not only be making history in enabling more banks to accept bitcoin as collateral for loans, but they’ll potentially be altering the trajectory of banking in general by introducing open-source software to it.
Open-Source Bitcoin Banking
Burtey’s long-term vision for Galoy is to do much more than just help banks issue bitcoin-backed loans. He’s looking to introduce open-source software into banking as more banks begin to embrace Bitcoin.
However, it’s important to note that Lana isn’t open-source just yet. It’s fair-source software, and, under such a license, code becomes open-source after two years.
“It’s a delayed open-source system, but it’s all available on GitHub,” said Burtey. “You can go and try it, test it, and play with it on your own.
Under the fair-source license, no company other than Galoy can sell the product to a bank right now, allowing Galoy to profit while still building with auditable code.
“We sell the deployment, and we help banks to plug in to their custodian,” explained Burtey. “We’re building in the open — but we also want to generate revenue.”
Beyond helping banks implement Lana, Burtey’s wants to develop open-source “core banking software,” as he’s looking to disrupt the “core ledger” oligopoly.
“The core ledger is where banks store the account data, customer information and transaction details,” said Burtey. “It’s the source of truth for banks.”
And only three companies — FIS, Fiserv and Jack Henry — have the core ledger market cornered.
“These are all like hundred billion dollar companies that you’ve probably never heard about because all they do is focus on selling software to banks,” said Burtey.
“Our long-term goal is to disrupt this industry by making something that is open source,” said Burtey. “Today, there is no company that does core banking with the idea of open source, and so we’re working towards this.”
Burtey envisions a world in which open-source software can make it much easier for someone to start a Bitcoin bank. (For those who wince at the words “Bitcoin” and “bank” being used in tandem, might I remind you that it was the legendary Hal Finney himself who wrote that bitcoin-backed banks would serve as a scaling solution.)
“To start a bank today is a very expensive and complicated process,” said Burtey. “You have to pay $100,000 plus just to purchase the core ledger technology.”
Burtey then referenced his own experience in starting Blink wallet, essentially a bitcoin bank run on open-source code, before continuing.
“I just went to El Salvador and started what was effectively my own bank because I wanted to,” said Burtey.
“We need to reinvent how core banking software is being made in the world of Bitcoin, and I think this is where open-source becomes relevant,” he added.
“This is really why I think the world of banking and Bitcoin will be very different from the world of banking with fiat, and I think we’re one of the companies at the forefront of this.”
Galoy founder and CEO Nicolas Burtey wants to help more borrowers use bitcoin as collateral for loans while introducing open-source software into the traditional banking stack.
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