4 Founders Building Businesses on Bitcoin

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co-founder and chairman of Twitter and co-founder and CEO of Square speaks on stage during Bitcoin Convention 2021, a cryptocurrency conference held at the Mana Convention Center at Wynwood on June 04, 2021 in Miami, Florida . Dorsey’s company Block is now dedicated to the development of bitcoin, having described bitcoin as the “open standard for the transmission of money around the world”. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)Getty Images

Bitcoin Pizza Day is celebrated on May 22 each year to commemorate the first time bitcoin was used to purchase a physical good or service. On this day in 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoins for two large pizzas worth $41. That same amount of bitcoins would be worth nearly $300 million at the time of this writing.

Bitcoin Pizza Day is a throwback to bitcoin’s early days, when it was still a relatively unknown and experimental currency. It is also a testament to bitcoin’s growth and adoption over the past decade. Today, bitcoin is accepted by millions of merchants around the world.

The contrast between the growth of bitcoin-centric companies and the SEC’s recent pursuit of unregistered crypto securities highlights the ongoing tension between the cryptocurrency industry and regulators. Despite this tension, there are a number of bitcoin-centric companies that are building successful businesses without selling proprietary crypto tokens. This is exactly what the following four founders do.

Fold

Will Reeves is the CEO and co-founder of Fold, a debit card company that rewards customers with bitcoins on their spending. Reeves ran a nonprofit from 2006 to 2012 that helped migrant workers in the Sonoma Valley. He discovered bitcoin when a group from Berkeley came to teach them how to use bitcoin for remittances.

[Bitcoin] is a monetary unit that cannot be downgraded or censored and is accessible to everyone. None of this can be said about fiat currencies or other cryptocurrencies, Reeves told me in our interview, explaining that Folds only focuses on bitcoin.

Since almost all Americans participate in loyalty programs, Reeve said bitcoin as a reward mechanism is one of the best tools for onboarding people. Ply’s goal of getting bitcoin into the hands of as many people as possible seems to be going well. Over half a million people have won with us and we’ve processed over $1 billion on Fold, Reeves told me.

In a recent press release, Fold announced that they are expanding their operations in El Salvador, which will serve as their base for operations in Latin America. The move is part of Fold’s ongoing commitment to making bitcoin as easy and accessible as possible for everyone around the world.

Anvil

Jesse Shrader is co-founder and CEO of Amboss, a managed bitcoin lightning network solution that uses machine learning to optimize transactions and fees. Shrader found bitcoin after working on class action settlements centered on bank overdraft fees. He viewed bitcoin as an alternative to banking policies that were not customer-friendly.

The Lightning Network allows users to send and receive bitcoins peer-to-peer, instantly and at very low fees. After paying extremely high transaction fees when buying Christmas presents in 2017, I realized bitcoin needed a scaling solution and lightning was that solution, Shrader explained. in our interview about his goal for the company.

Shrader described Amboss as a mapping service for the Lightning Network, similar to Waze or other navigation apps. According to data from Amboss, the Lightning Network is more than ten times faster and cheaper than traditional card payment networks. The company goes a step further by identifying the optimal payment channels for merchants and consumers.

They also operate Magma, a marketplace for buying and selling the bitcoin payment channels that power the Lightning Network. Magma allows users to earn bitcoin returns from their savings without ceding custody to a third party. Amboss announced last month that it had completed a seed funding round that raised $4 million.

Orange pill application

Matteo Pellegrini is the founder of Orange Pill App, a members-only social network for bitcoiners that emphasizes in-person connections. He has been involved in tech startups since he was 19 and fell down the proverbial Bitcoin rabbit hole in 2018.

I always thought bitcoin was more than a technology or a financial instrument, [its] an ideological movement, Pellegrini told me in our interview. This framing pushed him to create OPA in order to create a social layer above bitcoin.

OPA is intended to facilitate in-person connections, the exchange of ideas, and collaboration among bitcoiners. When we venture into a new phase of life, from a career change to starting a family, being part of the right community can make all the difference, Pellegrini said of his motivations for the OPA.

OPA allows users to pay for their memberships with bitcoins. As a member myself, I can attest to the power of the OPA. I have hosted several of my interviews through the app, including two of the interviews in this article.

Fountain

Oscar Merry was introduced to bitcoin and understood it from a monetary perspective relatively early, but says he never expected to work in the space. However, after the introduction of the Lightning Bitcoins Network, everything changed for him. Merry merges the Lightning Network with podcasting after being inspired by the Adam Curry and Dave Joness Podcasting 2.0 framework.

Through micropayments enabled by the Lightning Network, Fountain can capture a signal of value about every interaction that happens in the app, Merry told me during our interview. Listeners and creators can now leverage Fountain to earn bitcoin for their time, incentivizing end-user value rather than attention algorithms or advertising models. Because of the Lightning Network, all of this can be done without the need for intermediaries.

We can send the money to the content creator regardless of what platform it’s hosted on and use the value signal to provide better discovery for other users, Merry said of the power of Fountain and the Lightning network. Since bitcoin and lightning are open protocols, developers can take advantage of these networks and build different applications on them. The open source structure allows these applications to interact with each other in a way that was not possible before.

The companies and founders mentioned in this article are just a few examples of the many people working to make bitcoin more accessible and useful. These companies are helping to build a future where bitcoin is seen as a currency for everyday transactions. As the Bitcoin ecosystem continues to grow and evolve, it is likely that we will see even more innovative and exciting applications for this technology. As protocols grow stronger and begin to replace intermediaries and corporations, these founders remain optimistic that the bitcoin story has only just begun.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

I’m a freelance writer exploring the Bitcoin ecosystem. My work has been published by Bitcoin Magazine and Bitcoin News. I am personally invested in bitcoin and am fascinated by the emerging bitcoin economy.

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