In this episode, the discussion revolves around Breez’s innovative SDK and its nodeless implementation, which simplifies the integration of Bitcoin and Lightning into applications. The guests share their experiences from the ‘Time to Build’ challenge, highlighting the ease of use and the potential for new applications in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Brianna discusses her social events platform, Evento, and how it leverages the Breez SDK to facilitate peer-to-peer value exchange. Aljaz shares insights on developing a BTC Pay plugin that enhances payment processing without the need for a full Lightning node. The conversation also touches on user experience design, the role of vibe coding in development, and the growing excitement around Bitcoin and Layer 2 solutions.

Takeaways:

🔸Breez SDK simplifies Bitcoin integration for developers.

🔸Evento aims to create a fair events platform without high fees.

🔸Breez’s node-less implementation reduces complexity for users.

🔸User experience is crucial for onboarding non-Bitcoiners.

🔸Vibe coding allows for rapid development and experimentation.

🔸Brianna emphasizes the importance of user feedback in design.

🔸Aljaz’s BTC Pay plugin streamlines payment processing.

🔸Liquid and Spark offer different trade-offs for developers.

🔸The Bitcoin ecosystem is seeing renewed interest and innovation.

🔸The future of Bitcoin payments looks promising with new tools. 

Timestamps:

(00:00) – Intro

(01:04) – Overview of ‘Time to Build’ challenge

(02:07) – What is Breez Nodeless SDK?

(03:09) – Brianna’s experience of building Evento using Breez SDK

(09:02) – Aljaz’s BTCPay Server plugin

(12:48) – How does Aljaz’s BTCPay plugin help the end user? 

(16:00) – What does implementing the plugin unlock? 

(19:23) – Vibe coding Bitcoin payments with Breez SDK

(21:30) – AI, MCP and documentation

(24:54) – UX and design considerations for Evento

(29:47) – Evento wallet 

(34:07) – Comparing Liquid & Spark implementations

(35:23) – Excitement around Bitcoin and L2 developments

(41:14) – Closing thoughts 

Links: 

• Brianna: https://x.com/briimhd 
• Danny: https://x.com/dannystagg
• Aljaz: https://x.com/aaaljaz  
• Evento: https://x.com/evento_so 
• Breez: https://x.com/breez_tech 
• Aljaz site: https://disobey.dev/ 

Stephan Livera links:

• Follow me on X: @stephanlivera
• Subscribe to the podcast
• Subscribe to Substack

Transcript:

Stephan Livera (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about Breez and their node-less implementation as well as the results of the time to build competition or challenge, let’s say. So I wanted to get you guys on to chat about it. Joining us today, have Danny rejoining us from Breez. We have Brianna from the Evento events platform. And we also have Alias who is a long time.

you know, Bitcoin developer in the space. And so the results came in and ⁓ we’re chatting with some of the winners of the challenge. So Danny, do want to just give us a bit of an overview? you know, now some, you know, regular listeners, probably heard my episode with Roy, that was live in Lugano where we were chatting about this, but Danny, give a quick overview just for people who aren’t familiar with the time to build a challenge.

Danny @ Breez (00:47)
Yeah, fantastic. Thanks for having us on. So, Time to Build was a global developer challenge that we ran in Q4. The long and short of it was to bring Bitcoin to existing open source apps. We got 50 plus developer communities around the world involved and they were awesome in sharing it and having meetups or doing stuff online. And then the submissions came in and…

start of January 2026 we announced our winners of which two we have with us today and yeah it was amazing it was really cool obviously there are several reasons that we’ll go into about why now’s the time and you know obviously time to build is what the challenge is called but yeah that’s what happened and we’re really happy with the outcome and it’s been a ⁓ very busy start to the year.

Stephan Livera (01:33)
Excellent, yeah, so give, you for people who aren’t familiar, if you are a developer now and you’re thinking about how to implement Bitcoin and Lightning into your application without doing kind of a lot of heavy lifting, Danny, just give a quick overview, like what is Breez SDK node list? What is it?

Danny @ Breez (01:50)
Breez SDK is one of the easiest ways to add Bitcoin to any app. And the Breez SDK has two implementations, node-less implementations, one being Spark, which is our latest one, and the original being Liquid. Long and short of it, over the last six or seven years, it’s been historically difficult to build on Lightning. It’s complex. And one of those challenges is now overcome.

thanks to the SDK, we’ve made it, hopefully the guys will vouch for me, and that it’s simple to use, but that’s basically it. We’ve removed the complexity of managing channels, running a node, and basically giving developers out the box one of the simplest ways to add Bitcoin to their app. It can now be done in hours. We’ve actually had some applications go in production in just five days. So that’s basically it.

complexities that were there are now gone.

Stephan Livera (02:41)
Yeah. So Brianna, let’s go to you. So tell us a little bit about what you’re building at Evento and tell us a bit about your experience of building with the Breez SDK.

Brianna (02:52)
Totally. First of all, thank you so much for having me on and I’m really excited to share what we’re doing and I’m also very thankful to Breez for putting this challenge up and giving so many people the opportunity to show their work and their capabilities. So thank you to both of you. So Avento is a social events platform that I started building two years ago with the vision of

Making a platform for everyone to use without exploitation. So most events platforms are super expensive and there’s lots of ads and things that we don’t like. Usually if you’re trying to sell tickets or exchange value over an events platform, there are massive fees. It’s usually only in Fiat or in the case of Luma, they only have ERC20 tokens, which is kind of silly to me.

And I wanted to create something that was made for community organizers and people who host small meetups and conferences and they’re not trying to get robbed by the typical events platform. I also wanted to create a space for people to actually meet and because that’s the whole point of events, right? something, really big part of that was obviously value exchange.

Stephan Livera (04:04)
Yeah, and.

Brianna (04:09)
And I didn’t want to just plug in Stripe like every other platform does. They take massive fees and then we would have to take massive fees and then it kind of defeats the purpose. I wanted to create, you know, a platform where you could exchange peer to peer, right? You could exchange value to a host, thanking them for putting on such a great bit devs meetup. You could exchange value to a guest of your event. Let’s say you’re trying to onboard a bunch of people.

to Bitcoin for example and then you have your whole guest list and you want to send everyone stats and same with comments or photos or any of that that good stuff so then it becomes you know not just an event but a place where value can be exchanged freely. I didn’t want to be an intermediary in that value exchange because I’m a Bitcoiner it’s not really in my you know wheelhouse my ethos and so

You know, when I was trying to think about a way to put Bitcoin into Avento, I wanted to make sure it was non-custodial. That’s a big thing. And very easy to use. And usually those two things don’t go hand in hand, as I think all of us know. But then I talked to Roy at GBS last year and I was talking to him about my conundrum and he was like, ⁓ just use the Breez SDK. It’s super easy. What are you talking about?

it’s going to take you like a week to set it up. And I was like, okay, promise. and it actually, yeah, it took us, you know, a few weekends. I worked on it, with my husband, Andre, and then, ⁓ Avento’s full stack dev, Aliyah, who’s in Nigeria. So all three of us were working on it together. and it took about four weekends. And then after that, we did a massive demo at Btruss Dev Day in Mauritius.

and we onboarded about 80 people to the wallet with zero issues. So like from, you know, day zero to day 31, we were onboarding like 80 people. And then I was already paying my employees on the Avento app. So it was just, it was totally crazy. I couldn’t, you know, I’ve been in the Bitcoin space, worked at a bunch of Bitcoin companies. And so I understand the complexity.

of lightning and how difficult it is to plug it into your product or service and Breez is just out of the box, super easy. So really, really good experience with that.

Stephan Livera (06:32)
Yeah. And I

think it’s worthwhile, obviously everyone here, all of us on this podcast probably have some appreciation for this, but maybe if you’re a listener who’s not as familiar with this, like think about what would have had to happen to make this a thing like a few years ago when Lightning was newer, like four or five years ago when Lightning was kind of newer, you might’ve had to deal with having an LSP or being an LSP. You might’ve had to deal with like inbound liquidity.

you might’ve had to help coach the customer or the user through like setting up a lightning wallet and connecting it in some way. Like I think it’s difficult to sort of explain, but I think nowadays the expectation for customers is that it needs to be slick, it needs to be fast. Like it just has to be an app. That’s like the modern expectation nowadays, isn’t it?

Brianna (07:18)
Yes, and a big thing for us is that I don’t want Avento to look like a Bitcoiner app. I love Bitcoiner apps. I think they’re great. But I want to onboard people who are not Bitcoiners and who are a little bit scared of the whole thing. Most of the people in my life are not Bitcoiners and they’re scared of Bitcoin and they open a new wallet and they’re like, what the heck is this? What’s going on? I’m scared.

So I wanted to create an experience that was really easy from the get-go and that had a lot of explanations throughout the whole process. you know, when you open up an Avento wallet, there’s about a million guides on like, you know, from the smallest things, like what is a SAT to how do I send a payment, right? It’s stuff that we kind of take for granted, but for a normal person, they see like a scan button. They’re like, what do you mean? What do I scan? I don’t understand. So I think that’s a really big part of it too.

And then in the case of Breez, it just works every time. So there’s no like, there’s no fear. did my payment go through? What’s going on? Right? Every time we’ve tested it, it’s been fine. It’s just worked. So I think that also removes a lot of the fear. If you have a product where, you know, the customer, the user gets stuck, right? They’re like, I don’t want to use this again. I lost my money. I don’t know what happened. So.

Walking through the person every step of the way is pretty important too. But yeah, Breez made it easy anyways.

Stephan Livera (08:43)
Excellent.

Let’s go to you, Yaz, let’s hear a little bit about what you did. I know you did a BTC Pay plugin. So give us a bit of an overview. What did you build?

Aljaz (08:52)
Yeah, well, I guess since Briana started with thanks to everyone, I have to thank Danny for all the bullying that he successfully applied. Because I first did a different project that I submitted to the hackathon and then I said, OK, I’m going to do the BTCP as well, because it was actually something that I needed and wanted. It was just a bit more complicated thing to do.

But yeah, I mean, as we’ve mentioned before, and I am sometimes ashamed to admit since I’ve been running Lightning Node since 2018, but I was extremely happy when Node.less came out because it made everything so easy. I’ve recently, like quite a few people were asking me for solutions, like, oh, I want to run my own BTC pay or something for payments. like it gets costly to run your own infrastructure.

if you’re only accepting occasional payment and it’s like burn some inbound liquidity, you have to deal with everything. So it was like, okay, if we could solve that part with Spark, it makes running BTCPay server a much more lightweight operation, both in terms of infrastructure, because the node requirements all of a sudden become very small, especially if you use a trim node or

technically if you’re not really needing on-chain payments. And it’s also simple because you don’t need to deal with any inbound liquidity, LSPs and everything as I mentioned before. So essentially with some bullying, I did manage to scratch my own itch and I think there’s quite a bit, there’s been several people who already pinged me like, I’m gonna deploy this because I have a…

friend that has this exact problem and I want to actually use this since it’s gonna solve all of the explaining. yeah, but now I need to open a channel to you and then you need to rebalance it and everything else. And yes, there’s always the debate of a state chain and Bitcoin part, but that’s one of the thing that I added to the plugin immediately after the hackathon deadline was done was the treasury management. So you can…

set your own exposure, if you will, to the state chain. So, said, okay, anything after 10k sets, just swap to on chain, this address, this xpub, and it works. So it’s a, I think, pragmatic approach to…

Stephan Livera (11:15)
Gotcha, yeah.

Yeah, I think it’s a pragmatic choice. Let’s just take a quick second and make sure everyone’s familiar. For anyone who’s new, BTC Pay is a well-known, it’s an open source payment processor. It’s well-known and loved by the Bitcoin community. It’s a Bitcoin stack, like it’s a web server and it can run a Bitcoin node and it can run a Lightning node and people can run a merchant service using BTC Pay. so you can have it on a node in a box or you can have it on a web.

know, hosted version of it using, let’s say, Luna node or Voltage or some of these other people. then, what Aljaz, what you’ve built is a plug-in for people that allows them to have BTC pay, but without having to run the Lightning node in the background, which maybe you can save them a bit of cost and a bit of effort and make it bit simpler and easier for them to be able to quickly take payments, right? Because what we’re kind of talking about here, especially either for Brianna’s case or in Aljaz’s case, is we want…

people to be able to quickly and easily spin up shops and apps that allow them to take Bitcoin and Lightning payments without having to worry about so much of the complexity. So, yes, do wanna just touch on a bit of that complexity that you are, let’s say, obviating by having your plugin?

Aljaz (12:30)
Yeah, exactly. As you mentioned, with this plugin you remove the need to have your own Lightning node, which BTCPay does set up for you. one thing that I didn’t initially think of, but it turned out it’s also brilliant, is the speed of how fast you can start accepting payments. Because when you set up a new BTCPay node, you have the on-chain sync. And even if you use the fast sync, that takes a while, especially on a bad hardware, slow internet connections.

And then you also need to sing the lightning note, open the channel. it could on a, depending on your infrastructure, it could take days to actually get to a point where you can start accepting payments. If you do the full blown note setup, opening channels, et cetera, versus here, it’s literally in minutes or seconds, because all you need is the API key and install the plugin and you are ready to accept the payments, which I think it’s a significant benefit.

versus trying to explain, we set up everything now, but let’s come back in three days after everything has synced and you will be ready to accept that payment after you’ve paid the 30K for the LSPC channel opening. So I think it removes a lot of friction.

Stephan Livera (13:44)
Right. So

I guess in this case, the user can set up a BTC pay instance, use your plugin, and then instantly take payments over Spark. ⁓ That’s, I mean, that’s what you’re doing. And then in the background, the BTC pay instance can still be doing its Bitcoin on change sync. But in the meantime, you can still be doing Spark payments. Of course, there’s certain trust model, you know, of that. But the idea is over time, it just gets you started. And then over time, you can sweep some of that out into your own cold storage or whatever you

Aljaz (13:53)
Yes.

Stephan Livera (14:13)
want to set up, however you want to get it out.

Aljaz (14:16)
Yeah, exactly. Because why I love all the notice implementation is because nobody is using this for their cold storage or putting savings there, but it improves the velocity of money significantly because it enables use cases that you just doesn’t make sense before. Because when the conversation starts, we need to deploy several BTCs of liquidity and set up servers and all of that. It’s already gets very complicated. And yes, there is

ways to get around but it still takes time versus here it’s so fast it makes it enables quite a few use cases that you just there was no econ economics before where you could would make sense to do it and now even before on liquid it was already a huge unlock but now with spark i think it’s ⁓ i’m becoming more bullish on lightning again

Stephan Livera (15:09)
Right. Yeah, because I mean that’s the thing for years it was like lightning is the only L2 and I mean that was true It was true to say that lightning was the only let’s say true Quote-unquote true decentralized L2 and now I think we’re starting to see a bit of reinvigorated interest around liquid Of course spark is a new L2 and arc is a new one These are kind of like the new kids on the block and now we’re sort of seeing a lot of interest in those They offer a different trade-off and they offer it, you know, and sometimes like if you’re thinking like, ⁓ you know

pick the right tool for the job, right? It’s like, this tool makes sense for that job. So can you talk to us a little bit about what you think this enables? Like what are some new apps? What are some functionality that, what are some things that were not previously possible given, let’s say the fees or the hurdles of trying to up, get a Stripe settlement or Stripe account set up?

Aljaz (16:00)
I think it’s, there’s several parts. First of all, you don’t have an inherent infrastructure cost, so everything is cheaper because I’ve spoken with a lot of people over the years or tried to start businesses in this direction. like I would do node hosting, et cetera. But then a lot of people want to accept Bitcoin payments, but they accept them very infrequently. So then,

by default you’re gonna reach for a custodial solution because you’re not gonna be paying 50 bucks on server costs a year or a month plus dealing with liquidity to accept 80 bucks a month in payments or even more. It’s a significant cost. Now it makes a lot of sense. And even if you’re very worried about the state chain part, it’s still a much, much better option than any custodial solution.

Plus, think with Spark, can… Volotov-Satoshi now migrated to enable self-custodial accounts. So I think we can get around a lot of rules that are blocking a lot of utility or basically we can make self-custodial experience the same as custodial for most people or very close to it, which brings us best of both worlds, which was before…

We went to several iterations of lightning on phones and apps and full nodes and LSP. And I guess we were just slowly coming towards, we’re gonna have to be a bit less preachy about it and a bit more pragmatic. And I’ve personally had to go through this phase of, okay, actually primarily just care about Bitcoin payments and I want velocity, I want…

fast payments, want to be able to set it up quickly, don’t care about it. Again, you can manage your exposure to it very well and it just works. And one aspect that we didn’t cover before is because I do run a node, I have all the infrastructure to run this by myself, but I actually prefer using this from security model point of view because I have a…

not huge lightning node, but it’s a meaningful amount of Bitcoin for me. I don’t necessarily want to expose that routing nodes to all the things that I’m developing and potentially wipe coding something together that will then needs to send payments from my lightning node. So I think that’s a very underappreciated part of it because it enables a much faster iteration with much less risk versus setting up an alien bits and then

licking your keys somewhere and shit now I lost everything because of that.

Stephan Livera (18:51)
Right, it allows for very easy experimentation. now, you know, oftentimes in the early part of setting up a business, you’re just trying different ideas and trying to see what sticks. It’s interesting you mentioned the vibe coding thing. Obviously that’s become a big thing now. Danny, I’m curious from your perspective on the Breez side, like how is the Breez team thinking about the whole vibe coding thing in terms of people who want to use Breez SDK? Like, is that something you’re looking at? Is that something that’s…

you know, you’re going to expect more and more people are going to start doing that.

Danny @ Breez (19:21)
100%. I think, so we’ve already seen it through the challenge as well. One of the winners who did one of the integration for Primal openly said they’ve I’ve coded it and has started building different things in the space based off of this. How are we looking at it? mean, so my background, I’m in marketing. I’ve got to think about how do we reach more people, right? And specifically this kind of area is.

where I’m at today. We’re trying to make

First of all, make sure it’s as easy as possible to interact with agents that you can vibe code with it. Second of all, making sure that all of our documentation is friendly enough. Ali Ash is far more acquainted with this world than I am as well. He actually, in fact, last year the context files, which a number of folks use for us, to use the Breez SDK as well. And so, to answer your question is, yes, this is here, this is here, and I think…

There’s different levels. There’s people that Ali Ashu, the guy knows what he’s doing, right? You’re working with an agent and using your knowledge and basically making yourself more productive. And I’m talking on behalf of Ali Ashu, but that’s what I see most developers do. And then you get the other folks, the people like myself, right? I’m literally like finally got an in on this world in which I can start building stuff. So we’re thinking about it like that. How can we make…

both people like me get involved and start building applications because I might have an idea that, you know, becomes the next product. But likewise, developers, they’re working with it because we’re making it easier and easier to integrate. And we know the user experience is fantastic. kind of both things. I think we have a very good developer experience and I think we have a very good user experience. And hopefully, and what we’re seeing is an acceleration of people adopting the SDK.

Stephan Livera (21:05)
Yeah, and you touched on something

there around the context file now alias maybe you’re better to touch on this but my understanding here is this is like that MCP it’s a good model context protocol is it and it’s sort of like a way for them to maybe you can explain it better for us like what exactly is that and how is that like are you building it so that other let’s say vibe coding or coding tools nowadays like whether whether it’s Claude or cursor or whatever so that they can more easily let’s say grab

the documentation on Breez SDK and know what to fill where.

Aljaz (21:38)
Yeah, exactly. mean, the context files were, let’s say, now already outdated way of doing these things because when I’ve done it, I’ve done it for like also liquid SDK, like a LVK and stuff for a couple of projects just to make it easier. So it’s essentially like a condensed documentation with examples of this is how you send the payment. This is how you receive a payment. So like a short instruction manual for an LLM because at

A couple years, two years ago, a year ago, it was still a bit more tricky. cloud code will go to Breez SDK repo, figure out what it needs to do. The context windows are bigger, so you can be less mindful of it. it’s, the tools have become more smarter, so it’s, you can be more sloppy, but a year ago, tools were less mature than now. So the more you could help, the more you could…

point it towards, so not the 10 pages of documentation, this is a short file with examples, this is how you use the SDK, this is the best way to do it. Also now the guys at Brise have actually included examples in all the programming languages in the repo, so LLMs are now very happy with development. With Brise SDK it has made things very easier.

Stephan Livera (22:59)
Yeah,

it’s kind of like what we’re hearing in the old days. I mean, it’s still relevant today, but people talk about like SEO and now it’s sort of like, not just about getting discovered by humans, it’s about getting discovered by AI tooling, right? It’s like, you’ve got to have your documentation good so that the AI tools can pick it up and you might get hopefully discovered or, you know, used in that way.

Danny @ Breez (23:20)
I wanted to just jump in on that. That’s become a, I can’t tell you how that’s become like front of mind and accelerated in the last two months as well. Like that very like, whatever you want to call it, agentic marketing, whatever. And it makes everyone sound very like blur jargon, like foundational.

that’s what you need to do right now. And so even folks like myself, no one’s gonna, you’re gonna get, you know, ten apenny expert come up and say that they know what they’re talking about. But I think to the point of how this landscape has even changed in the last year or last six months, you’re now, we’re now playing catch up because the tools are getting better and better and better. So we’re actually having to now adapt how we even present the documentation, like how specifically, you know, do we want this received?

Am I doing it the right way? Working with developers in our team as well to make sure that it does this so that not just to like amplify this, but to make sure that builders get exactly what they need to build. Cause it’s getting to that inflection point, I guess where AI tools and building of just, I mean, it’s here, we’re in it. We’re living in the.

Stephan Livera (24:24)
Yeah, really, yeah, it

sounds like it feels very real, right, the productivity from it. Let’s go back to you, Brianna. I wanna hear a bit from you. I know your focus is probably more on the product design, UX, UI, so give us a bit of your experience on that, on what it was like building Breez SDK into Evento from the UX, UI perspective.

Brianna (24:46)
For sure. So I actually did a lot of pair coding with Andre at home on the weekends. we, know, he would, he has like a million agents running at once by the way. It’s crazy. But you know, we would, you know, be running one thing and then, okay, let’s test it. And the…

The whole time I was just thinking, again, how would an average person understand this, right? So there was a moment where we were trying to figure out how to communicate like submarine swaps. And I remember seeing what Andre had built and the language was super confusing just for like an average person, obviously. But for him, he was like.

Yeah, this is pretty simple. Just click on swap. You you choose the price that you want to pay. I’m like, that’s, that’s just too much. That’s too complicated for, for any normal person, non-technical person. Right. And so then we worked through like the language, right? Like, do people even care how this is done? Right. Cause he had a whole explanation of what was happening behind the scenes. I’m like, if I saw that, I would be worried.

Stephan Livera (25:34)
saying even that was too complicated yeah

For a normal person, yeah.

Brianna (25:54)
that like, am I swapping my money for something else? Am I going to get my money? What’s happening? Why is this red? You know, is this a bad thing? And so like, let’s just not explain what’s happening at all, first of all. It’s too complicated. And then just, you know, group it into like, you know, slow, medium, fast, and give them a price, and give them as few options as possible just to like, I want my money now, or I don’t care if it takes another hour, right? So.

That’s just an example of a situation we had to deal with.

Stephan Livera (26:26)
Gotcha. And so to be clear, what we’re talking about here is

a submarine swap. Which direction are we talking about? The user is paying on chain and then taking it in lightning or it’s the other way around. They’re paying lightning and they’re receiving something on chain.

Brianna (26:35)
The user is

receiving on chain, the user is receiving on chain and then they’re paying to receive their payment, right? So that’s kind of like a complicated concept. ⁓

Stephan Livera (26:46)
So it’s like kind of like they’ve got

funds in there and they want to swap out. It’s like swapping out. Yeah

Brianna (26:52)
Yeah, so it’s it’s it’s a little complicated that was an example Another another thing that we were thinking about is obviously backups Because that’s quite complicated for someone and just making sure that they do back up their wallet Right because in this situation if you log into another instance of a vento your wallet isn’t just gonna magically appear there You have to like, you know, you have to re-sign in if you will

Stephan Livera (26:53)
Okay, yeah.

Brianna (27:19)
⁓ And so that’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. And obviously we don’t wanna have to force people to back up through the signup process of creating the wallet because then I think that just creates friction, right? ⁓ I don’t know what this is. This is kind of scary. You want them to just create the wallet, there it is, and then figure out how to back it up later. So.

Stephan Livera (27:33)
More friction, yeah.

Brianna (27:42)
The onboarding there is very important explaining what it is in a very simple way. like, you know, keep this very safe. You don’t, we’re not going to tell you like, don’t put it in your notes app or whatever, because everyone will or in their contacts or whatever. It’s just keep it safe. And if you need to log into your wallet again, just use this. So keeping that language very easy to understand, because most people will see that and they’ll get very confused. This is also after me testing the wallet.

with my friends who know nothing about Bitcoin, right? And I think that’s a really important thing to do if you’re trying to build a product for, a Bitcoin product for an average person is have them try it and their negative feedback is the best feedback that you can get so that you can solve that problem immediately, right? Like what are they most scared of when interacting with Bitcoin? And then like, let’s really think hard on how we can solve that problem for them.

Because like, you know, in the beginning the internet was hard to use for everyone, right? It scary place and like everything was new about it. ⁓ I think the same goes for Bitcoin. It’s just figuring out like how does that average person think about something like this and how can we make it as familiar as possible for them? Right? Like signing into their bank account or accessing their Venmo or whatever it is. It shouldn’t be scary. So…

Stephan Livera (29:02)
Yeah. And so

in terms of the wallets and like the flow for again, for a normal user, not for like a Bitcoin app per se, is it going to look like, you know, they would set up in this case, they’re setting up evento the app, they’re installing that and then it has an inbuilt wallet and then that’s the wallet that they will receive payments to or make payments out of. And it’s using like either the spark version or the liquid version.

Brianna (29:27)
Yeah, the Spark version. So basically the idea is, so right now it’s in beta. We’re actually planning on releasing it out of beta in the next week. And an iOS app is coming very soon, which is very exciting. And by the way, it’s very easy to just switch everything over to the iOS app so there are no problems. But basically someone signs up for an Avento account and it’s an option to set up your wallet, right? We’re not forcing anyone to set up their wallet.

as soon as they create an Avento account. We’re going to nudge them in various ways. But another great way to encourage someone to set up a wallet that we’re going to implement is let’s say I want to send you Bitcoin. see that you’re on the guest list, right? You don’t have a wallet. It says like, you don’t have a wallet. I can’t send you any Bitcoin. So I’m going to have a button that says like, hey, notify this person. You’re trying to send the money, set up their wallet.

And so hopefully, you know, like if you’re doing meetups, right, you can just click that on every single guest and have them set up their first Bitcoin wallet so that you can easily send them sats. So that’s one way we’re gonna try to nudge folks to set up their wallets. This is something that worked pretty well at Dev Day in Mauritius, right? We had people, know, RSVPing to the guest list for our event and we said, hey, we wanna send all of the guests.

Sats. So set up your wallet and we’ll send you 21 sats or whatever. So we’re gonna figure out all these little ways to nudge people to create Bitcoin wallets and then throughout that process make sure that they understand everything that they’re doing, right? Not just opening up a wallet and then like I don’t know what any of this is. So holding their hand through it ⁓ and then yeah.

Stephan Livera (31:04)
Yeah. I’m curious how you see this as

a UI UX person also, because now look, for many of us in Bitcoin, we do actually have multiple, many wallets, right? I’ll have like Wallet for Satoshi and Phoenix and all these different wallets. Are you seeing it like in the case with Avento, then it’s just gonna be like, it’s another Bitcoin lightning wallet. And now to be fair, you can just move things around between these different wallets. Are you seeing that? Like that’s just, people are just naturally just gonna

do that and it’s like kind of the equivalent of everyone having like four or five different Bitcoin apps because many of them will have lightning integrated in some way.

Brianna (31:34)
Well, I hope so.

I mean, here’s what I see, at least for the future of Avento, right? I want to, we’re working on creating peer-to-peer ticketing and that’s its own complexity in and of itself. But we want to make sure that, you know, from the beginning, we wanted to make sure that the host has a Bitcoin wallet, right? Not everyone will. And so we also wanted to make sure that we can verify that payment that’s happening.

It’s very tricky because you can’t do that without having access to the wallet, but we’re working on a protocol actually to solve that problem. And I think, yeah, we have a PR that’s in the works right now with Breez to make that happen. But ideally, I want it to be kind of the wallet for your events, right? If you’re a host, for you to collect income through Avento and, you know,

For us, we also have a bunch of different little options. You can spend Bitcoin inside of Avento through BitRefill. You don’t even have to leave the app or anything. So that’s another thing, right? I receive Bitcoin for my event, but how do I spend it? How do I actually use this money? So that’s a big thing. Options to earn. So we’re putting a bunch of other Bitcoin companies that allow you to earn Bitcoin through mobile gaming or whatever it is, like CBD.

or lolly or fold, right? This sort of stuff. It’s like, want to send value to people, but I don’t know how to get Bitcoin myself. And then, yeah, so I want it to be this kind of like whole ecosystem within Avento where it’s like, I have a wallet where I can tip my favorite hosts and my favorite people that I meet at events, or I can even pay for tickets or receive money as a host for tickets. So that’s how I see it.

⁓ It is a beautiful wallet as well. So if you don’t even use Avento for events, but you like the wallet like that’s also an option It’s a great wallet. Like I literally I use it every single day I pay everyone I need to pay with it and it just it’s great. It’s it’s ⁓ It’s less it’s less big coinery. So if you want to onboard like a you know, a fresh person I recommend it

Stephan Livera (33:28)
You just have it as a wallet, right? Yeah.

Cool. Danny, let’s just touch on the liquid versus spark aspects of it. Like if somebody’s looking at this and thinking, how do I decide between going for the liquid version or the spark version?

Danny @ Breez (34:00)
So I mean both are great solutions. I think the thing is with Spark today, I think there are no minimum limits. It’s instant or effectively instant and obviously there’s things like unilateral exit to Bitcoin. What Litcoin offers, you’ve got access to USDT which some folks want for stable coins and that’s basically that. What we’re seeing is generally people

want an instant that experience are leaning towards Spark. Cause that’s what you want today. And I think something that kind of Brianna was talking about there is, it’s about the experience. And I think you said it earlier, like we’re competing with experience. Now there are trade-offs. Of course there are trade-offs. That’s where we’re at. But those trade-offs now are for that experience. And so that’s kind of where we’re at. So Roy has done some great pieces for folks who want to go a bit more in detail recently to do with

Spark and Liquid, but I think one of the things we’re seeing is a flood of interest in the Spark implementation, which is great.

Stephan Livera (35:01)
Yeah, it’s interesting to see. Curious, any general comments you guys have on what’s going on with L2s and just generally with Bitcoin? Are you just seeing that is… ⁓ It seems like there’s been a lot of excitement amongst Bitcoin builders, least developers, builder circles. It seems to me, from what I’m hearing, there’s a lot of excitement around these.

Danny @ Breez (35:21)
I can talk and I’m sure Alyos can go from the kind of developers point of view, but what we’re seeing right now is lightning is the common language. It’s connecting all of these different L2s that come with different trade-offs, right? So right now you’ve got Spark, you’ve got Liquid, you’ve got Arc.

All of these various things are coming and they offer different things now Bitcoin is very passionate about certain things and that’s absolutely fine But what I would say is more to the pragmatic responses that you’re building Not just for Bitcoiners anymore. We’re playing on the on the main stage and if we’re playing on the main stage There are expectations that folks have with what a product should and shouldn’t look like for when they want to move value And what Bitcoin can do

is far exceed the potential of stable coins and other cryptocurrencies in what it offers. And so we have a unique opportunity to bring this to everyone. And I think sometimes maybe the rhetoric or maybe the commentary that goes with it or those trade-offs and the pragmatism is lost in maybe a more passionate debate about what Bitcoin is or isn’t. So that’s kind of what I’m seeing today is just a huge excitement, though, for those that are pragmatic. And to be on the whole, most people are really pragmatic. So I’ll let Ali Ej

turn around and say about the developer side of it though.

Aljaz (36:36)
Yeah, no, definitely. I think that a good level of pragmatism has benefited us all a bit. Just from observing what’s happening around and talking with other node operators, I also have been seeing in recent months that things have been picking up in terms of just volumes going around. It feels like after many years, there’s like seeing somewhat

natural payment flows that you would imagine. It’s not just huge rebalances or NOSTER Zaps going around. Like you see a real value of like 50 bucks being sent or like you would look at a credit card statement, what you spend on daily basis. So I am cautiously optimistic that we’re moving into the direction that we’ve been all hoping for since 2019. to the point of what we discussing before, I do think that…

All the new tooling and all the new side joints, L2s are quite a big unlock just because it’s… it just gives you so much options of what to do, how to move, choose your threat model, choose your risk profile. And I’m… I’m quite bullish and I have maybe had slightly different opinions a while back or at least I think that things have stagnated a bit in terms of…

people’s excitement to build things and I think in the last year things have taken up quite well and we’re moving into the right direction. And obviously all these tools as we’ve touched before on the LLMs, you can create so many more things so much quicker. The first thing that I built on Spark was an MCP to do payments so I could test my things that I create with LLMs faster.

for example, so I think we’re getting into a loop that will speed up the process. And I’m definitely working on a lot of other ways to, I want to make everyone a payment provider basically. Make it as easy as possible to deploy APIs because BTCPay is great, but it’s still a huge chunk of software. There’s many ways that you can just maybe want to accept occasional payments or.

do it in a super lightweight way. And to the point that you’ve mentioned before, yeah, everyone has 10 wallets and that was always the problem. I opened my phone, now I’m gonna discover 20k sets in a wallet that I forgot that I have. It happens all the time with the way of Spark SDK where everything is essentially just a seed phrase or a private key, then you can use the same.

basically the same account in multiple wallets. So even with the example of, let’s say you’re a merchant and you don’t have strong tax obligations with your BTCP Bitcoin flow, you just use the same seed in a daily wallet that you use. So whatever your payment web store gets in, you can spend directly. You don’t need to move the money around. we’ve just unlocked something that was not necessarily possible before, neither in fiat or Bitcoin space.

So I think we are finally coming to a stage where we’re going to see huge benefits of just instantly moving money around. Oh, I received a payment on my business account. I’m going to swap parts to my spending wallet. I’m going to send something to a Dnoster account that I support. We’re raising the velocity of which we can send money around and enable everyone to just do crazy shit that you couldn’t do before. I’m very bullish on Bitcoin payments in this year.

Stephan Livera (40:12)
That’s fantastic. And I think we are, it’s interesting because people aren’t necessarily sharing it online or they’re not, know, you don’t necessarily see it from the outside. So an outsider doesn’t necessarily see that, actually lightning volumes are picking up over time because some of it’s hidden. Some of it is not publicly disclosed or it’s like they’re looking at the public, the channel amount, which actually that has started to rise too. But the actual, you’re not seeing is that the actual turnover of that, unless you are an operator of a lightning node that’s in the flow.

So you might not see that if you’re an outsider. But that’s definitely what I’m hearing from other people in and around lightning also, that we are seeing more volumes on lightning now. So that’s really interesting to see. So I think, we’ve covered kind of the key points. just ⁓ before we wrap up, everyone just tell us where people can find you and find your work online. Brianna, do you wanna go first?

Brianna (41:03)
Yeah, of course. So you can try Avento out at Avento.so. Right now, the wallet is in beta, but check next week and it’s going to be out of beta. But Avento.so, you can use everything totally normally. ⁓ It’s completely free to use for everyone. So if you like it, let me know. And if you want to host an event, I would love that. Also let me know if you need anything. We’ll build whatever

want and on Twitter I am BRIIMHD so you can you can follow me there and then the Avento account is Avento underscore SO.

Stephan Livera (41:42)
Adios.

Aljaz (41:44)
Well, I’m not going to recite any end pubs, but the easiest way to find all my context is just visit disobey.dev and there’s all the projects and context and everything else needed.

Stephan Livera (41:55)
Excellent. And Danny, people who want to find you will find out more about Breez.

Danny @ Breez (42:00)
Breez.technology forward slash SDK. You can go on there. You can see all our partners You can see both implementations go to the documentation You can get all the latest updates from us at Breez underscore tech and I just wanted to add one final note I wanted to say a big thank you to everyone that helped to part in yourself because you you’ve helped us amplify this as well like the challenge was and I genuinely mean this sincerely awesome and What was even more cool is that you’re really seeing folks

start to see beyond building just for Bitcoiners too, is how can we bring this in the hands of as many people as possible. And I think with that kind of mentality and the kind of where we’re going, I think this year ahead is going to be absolutely, I was going to curse, but it’s going to be epic. So I don’t need to curse. It’s fantastic. So have a good.

Stephan Livera (42:47)
Yeah, I think this is a great

opportunity now. ⁓ It’s sort of, you know, people seem to be a bit disappointed about the price, but I think they’re wrong. I think, you know, get out there, listeners, make sure you share this with people who are interested. Maybe they’re somebody who is a developer, but they haven’t built Bitcoin into their app. Share this episode with them so they can learn a bit about the experience. And of course, all the links will be in the show notes. That’s it from us guys. Thank you, and we’ll see you in the next one.