Sovereign E-Commerce Payments & Platforms | Bitcoin 2026

Welcome everyone to the panel on Bitcoin e-commerce payments. To set the stage, the past year has been the biggest for Bitcoin payments in the history of Bitcoin. Lightning grew 300%. It's now doing over a billion dollars in monthly volume, 5 million transactions a month. And on the retail side, Square is turning on Bitcoin payments for 4 million merchants. Stripe is integrating Lightning into its machine payments protocol for its 5 million merchants and self-s sovereign tools like BTC Pay server continue to grow, allowing anyone globally to access open-source point of sale solutions. So, we're adding billions of dollars of payments volume, millions of merchants, and we're fortunate enough to have three builders on stage that are help leading that charge. So, why don't we jump in? Um, let's meet the panel. tell us bit a bit about yourself and your business. >> Yes. So, uh I'm Calvidev. Uh I'm working on shops or markets permissionless marketplace for truly free commerce. So, we're basically building uh marketplace infrastructure to allow like e-commerce merchants to be able to like buy and sell things with Bitcoin. Uh we also have different solutions specific specifically focused on local farms and local food. Uh because that's like our the main thing that we think can really benefit from all of this stuff. And yeah, we're just trying to make it as easy as possible for people to be able to tap into the circular economy uh permissionlessly and without having to have like huge technical hurdles to get started. >> Nice. Hey guys, I'm Keith Gardner from Bront. Bront is a prepayment security for transferring Bitcoin and a lot of the focus is one on security, but two on UX for the end user. So before you go to transact Bitcoin, how does that feel? We want to make that feel very good for the user and the next eight, you know, 8 billion users instead of how we feel today when we go to, you know, send Bitcoin, you hope it settles to the right place and all of that. Hey all, I'm Evan Kudus. I'm the founder of Zeus. First and foremost, we're a free and open source Bitcoin and Lightning wallet. Just had a big new release recently. Uh, you start as a newcomer with eCash and you graduate to either self-custody lightning or swap on chain. And we also have white glove services uh for merchants who want to accept payments online, institutions that want to do routing as well as uh general infrastructure bills. >> Great. Welcome. And I'm Bob. I'm the founder of Aiccash. We make uh Bitcoin payment solutions for merchants and AI agents. Um so first topic, why don't we start talking about real merchant stories. Let's let's hear about who's actually building on Bitcoin payment rails. Uh Calva, why don't you go first? Pick a shopster merchant. Uh what are they selling? What does running on Noster and Bitcoin mean for them? >> Yeah, so I think one of the more uh less traditional thing people that are selling on it are like local farms. Uh so like with milk market platform specifically, we're focused on like helping like local dairies be able to sell their products online because there's a lot of regulatory burdens that like stop them from being able to like process payments using traditional processors like Stripe, be able to even like use things like Shopify in order to like list their products and be able to operate. Uh so something that really they benefit from greatly is the fact that one it's obviously cheaper uh to run the services we offer like still provide like Shopify like tools like a suite and uh with that they're able to like set up their site customize everything that they need but the the great thing before that is that they're able to operate on like on Noster. So with Noster they're able to like control all the data structures all like the way that the the website's laid out all their products. So we have no like control over whether or not they are able to sell process payments. is all facilitated over like the Nostra protocol and they're using Bitcoin. Uh we still have like services like Stripe integrated for people who want fiat. But one of our not hopes but one of the things that we like we're betting on is that at some point Stripe is going to want to close that gate and whenever the people who are like transitioning into like the Bitcoin land uh from from fiat realized that like the primary payment processor is shutting them off that transitioning into Bitcoin is as easy as possible and they can already start accepting without needing to set up a wallet or anything. So it's all integrated natively within it. So like yeah, really it's just the the ability to tap into the to the market without need having like to face all the massive hurdles that it takes to get onboard onto fiat land. And like it might not seem like a lot to pay like $30 a month for Shopify, all these things, but there's a and like deal with the terms of service, but with local foods, there's so much regulatory scrutiny that we're not aware of uh that just like makes it that it's becomes like a a chokeold like the the local producers to not be able to like sell anything at all. They can't even get started. and and most people know might know Nostra as a decentralized communication protocol kind of like an alternative to to Twitter. Um how are your customers using Nostra? How do you use Noster specifically? >> Yeah, the only way that they use it is basically to like host their storefront data and also be able to like message like merchants and customers directly. uh in my opinion like the social media aspect of Nostra is like a experiment that is like we should move on from in terms of just like focusing on trying to build like a Twitter-like client because the only purpose of social media is like have distribution and Noster might not have the network effect to actually like provide that that goal. Uh so I think like using it as a communication protocol as to facilitate like transactions and interactions outside of uh global uh transactions is uh what's actually beneficial for people to use. >> Awesome. Um, Evan, how about you? Same question. Pick a merchant or customer using Zeus. Uh, what's the Bitcoin benefit? >> Oh boy, we have such a wide array of customers. It's really hard to pick a favorite. You know, we have small merchants that are just local to me. They're exchanges that are getting started up that use our services. Uh so if I had to pick a few, I'd say uh Pub Key, the New York and DC bar has been a really cool one because we've helped them managing their node. And on the regulatory side, uh the New York Department of Financial Services has some of the most draconian restrictions in the whole world. So we got to prove that if we can serve a customer and have them enable Bitcoin payments there, we can do it anywhere in the world. This is a place where you can't or at least until recently couldn't use strike in New York. Uh I still don't think you can use Lightning on Cash App. Correct me if I'm wrong. >> Right. So that was like a really cool use case. Um we've got a great e-commerce merchant uh based trading card, Bitcoin trading cards had a great new series and the volume that we processed in Bitcoin was insane. Um so that's a really cool one. And just at a for a personal level, I really like uh Tallow, which is a Philadelphia based chicken joint. >> Uh they're named Tallow because they cook everything in beef tallow and it is delicious. So >> Well, and and compared to like a stripe, the the benefits um obviously uh the cost, it's practically free. Um and what are some other benefits of of running it on Zeus or or themselves? >> It's self-custodial. You hold your own keys at any given moment. Strike can rug you, take all your funds, say, "No, we're not going to process it because of XYZ." If I get into dispute with any of our merchants, they can say, "Evan, just piss off. We have the keys. You can't take our money." End of discussion. >> It seems like it's getting worse and worse, by the way, with with some of the centralized processors. And Keith, how about you? You see you see the threat side, you see what merchants are concerned about, customers are concerned about. Um, how do they use Branta? >> Yeah, it's a good question. And I mean personally um for merchants using brown to I think we have over there's 50 plus now um so a lot of the answers could be selfish like wine pion lane there's chocolate but one of the use cases we've been focused on a lot recently is remittances and so with remittances um obviously bitcoin solves crossber issues and with lightning it's fast and it's cheap and it's final. So that's great. What's not great is the remittance companies um trying to go and distribute the tech to their, you know, people. Um there's a an association with scams in Bitcoin and that's not good. So, at least for us, we're very focused on how can these businesses really show the end user and the consumer that no, this is safe and actually flip um the conversation from there's like a sense of I feel scared. I feel a little bit anxious when I'm sending this Bitcoin for the first time. And flip that to like maybe we can actually insert a little bit of dopamine. So like the reason credit cards are so successful is everything's gamified. There's no buttons, there's no pins and you actually come back with dopamine, right? And so by integrating Bront um the remittance company's end users can actually see the logo of the remittance provider before they pay. So, if you imagine in your wallet right now scanning a QR, it's not very sexy. What is sexy is if you scan a QR code for any Bolt 11 that's fully private and you see the logo of the recipient beforehand, all of a sudden there's an association that's visual. So, there's an image that comes to mind and you can kind of see through who's on the other side. So, if you're abroad sending money home, um we're just seeing much better like customer retention and like net new um conversations for customers. Yeah, makes sense. Awesome. And uh now why don't we zoom out a bit from your companies that you're building and your products. Uh why don't we talk about some of the other Bitcoin ecosystem tools that merchants might need? Maybe we start with Evan. Um you're accepting Lightning. What other tools do you need in your e-commerce tool pack? Oh, I mean there's so many great free and open source solutions that anyone can pick up and use free of charge without any restrictive clauses or licenses. Um, I think in terms of e-commerce, uh, I really like BTC page server. I think they're second to none. We use it in our own infrastructure. uh in some cases with some of our merchants, we just set them up with that uh plug in the lightning node and just handle the lightning stuff on Zeus's side, but let BTC pay do all the bookkeeping, the amount uh the invoice generation. It's it's a fantastic tool and we try to contribute back to it where when we can. >> Completely agree. Shout out to Rockstar Dev and the team at PCC best. >> Uh Calvin, how about you? um you have Nster tools, you have Bitcoin tools. What other tools do you need in your uh stack? >> Yeah, I I think probably uh the most the most interesting one that I would say would probably be the ecash like Evan mentioned it for like getting started on like Zeus, but uh having ecash specifically I think is really helpful because one it adds privacy natively. Uh sure. Uh the trade-off is like it's custodial. So, uh you're you don't you don't control the keys, but it's a great way to like onboard a complete novice to Bitcoin that just doesn't understand like how to set up a wallet or handle keys or anything like that. Like you're you're able to just like seamlessly receive Bitcoin. You might not know what to do with it, but at least you have some and like you're able to like transact, especially if you're integrating it with like the native Nostra network or something like that. You're able to very seamlessly just like spend it in the network. So, you can earn uh through Noster and then just spend directly within Noster. So, like you're never touching any legacy rails. I think e-cash is like definitely one of the most important like that needs to be explored a little bit more. >> Yeah, we're actually giving away 6,000 ecash notes at the conference over the next few days. So, everyone out there, come find me. We've got free Bitcoin to give away. Okay, completely agree. ECash is an awesome tool, although it is custodial. Um, so in the world of self- sovereignty, what do you guys think about custodial solutions? Where does a Square fit in, let's say, um, or an ecash fit in? How do you think about pairing self-s sovereignty with custodial solutions? >> Well, for us, um, we like eCash because it's this great onboarding tool and it also has some great functionality that we weren't able to do just being a self-custodial wallet. Like, we weren't able to do gifting. Um, we also had higher cost and able to get lightning channels or to hold your keys self-custodially. And a lot of people don't want to bear those costs to just try out a wallet for the first time. Um, but we've just rolled out our new graduated wallet system. It allows you to start with ecash, build up a balance, but as you hit these different balance thresholds, the wallet sort of yells at you or at least tries to point you towards self- custody and say, "Hey, you have this balance. It's in this ecash mint. It's more like a bank, albeit with way better privacy. Uh maybe you want to upgrade to self-custody lightning or maybe you want to swap out to an onchain address that you control the keys for. Um and the wallet tries not to be opinionated. It just tries to uh give you the information that you need to make an informed decision because what's a lot for one person is peanuts for another. So we're letting the user choose when they want to upgrade if they want to upgrade. Uh, and we think it's an incredibly powerful flow that you can onboard your your grandma with. So, >> yeah, in a similar way, I've heard Square merchants that are using Square to accept Bitcoin and then at a certain point, call it like, you know, 100,000 SATs, a million SATs, they'll withdraw it to their cold storage via Square. So, you get the flexibility. >> Yeah, like they have the option to either keep it in Bitcoin and get it out or convert it to dollars. Um, I think a lot of merchants are are really just want the the US dollars what they're accustomed to, but just having the option in there and I'm sure just being able to see the Bitcoin price appreciate over the years uh more and more are going to take a higher and higher percentage of their payouts um in Bitcoin. So, you know, shout out to to Square for finally turning the switch on and we're we're seeing a lot of merchants across the US and a lot of merchants local to me being onboarded and and it's been fantastic. It's been a great uh Yeah. Keith, what do you think? How do you how do you guys work with uh custodial providers and where does that fit in? >> Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think both have their time and place. Um, at least for like our specific stack send side, we can work anywhere. on the receive side, the it's a better fit for centralized services. Um, yeah, I mean I would also shout out like BTC pay server. That's blown me away over and over how much that infra is used and battle tested. But >> you guys have an integration. >> Yeah, we do. So we have first class support for BTC pay server and actually most of our traffic is through that infra right now. Um, fantastic. Well, that yeah, that's exchange uh expanding and changing over time. >> Yeah, >> great. Um, why don't we close this section out with a prediction that I'd love to get your thoughts on. Um, I think the number of self-s sovereignty tools is actually about to rapidly accelerate. Um, with AI, you can now run, as an example, a small business almost entirely on your own. With an AI agent in Bitcoin, you don't need any designers. You don't need any marketers. You don't need any third party software. You don't need any banks. Is self- sovereignty about to explode? What do you guys think? Or or maybe even the opposite? >> Yeah, I don't I don't have a strong opinion on this to be honest. Not tracking it too closely. More focus on the humans. >> I think AI, despite its shortcomings and limitations, is really a great gift to us all. And I think we're going to see an incredible amount of free and open-source software tools that enable sovereignty and human flourishing being developed at an unprecedented rate. And and I'm seeing it today. Um I'm seeing an incredible amount of new contributions to Zeus. We use it in our workflows to assist us in writing code as well as reviewing it. Um it's just unbelievable the rate that you can ship at the rate at which you can ship at nowadays. >> Yeah. And I think uh there's a bit of a dichotomy. So like at the individual level obviously like increases the amount of sovereignty that we can like operate under and like we're able to like just do so much that we didn't otherwise think we would expect. Then I think like uh for our like our cases as like uh as payments payment handlers and stuff like it's best to just add the tooling in order to make it as easy as possible for people to interact with those systems. But then on the other side there's like the large corporate entities that like anything by open AI is going to become some surveillance state uh like tool. So it's best to avoid that type of stuff and just like experiment with what you can and like the open source models are getting a lot better. So it's just like the iteration is just going quickly even internally within those systems. So yeah, again moving on to that and like just learning the skill set to be able to interact with those systems is very important. >> Yeah, that's a good point. You could use open AI or you could use clawed uh and that's less self- sovereignty, but the open models are catching up so fast that like theoretically in a year you can get that same ability running on your personal home computer running your own Bitcoin node. So that's where I hope we're headed. Um, and so if if we are headed there and self-s sovereignty tools are about to explode and lightning payments are about to 10x, um, what does Bitcoin payments need? What do we need from an enterprise perspective to to be doing 10 billion dollars of lightning volume a month to be doing, you know, 10, 20, 30 million transactions a month? Um, what are the the the additional enterprise tools? Keith, why don't we start with you? Like you're you're talking to big customers. What what do they need to see in the Bitcoin space? Yeah, I mean that's a great question and I think the the key thing we always need to go back to is that Bitcoin settles with finality, right? And that is a hardcore feature and so right now at least in our view um there's not a lot of infrastructure on the pre-settlement like pre-transaction phase of moving Bitcoin. And so if you look at credit cards like chargebacks is an industry now, but that's also post payment, right? And that's such an industry there's there's many companies operating in that space. Now in Bitcoin the analogous is kind of man-inthe-middle. And so if you go to transact and something happens on the front end um you cannot call anybody. Everybody knows this. But as we scale to the next however many users these problems just amplify in magnitude so much that it's going to be a massive burden. So when we look at massive adoption for i gaming or remittances or wherever um you know I think we're going to see much much more more focus on the what happens before you actually broadcast and settle. So that's uh at least that's the space we're like hyper dialed in on. >> Welcome to predict. The world is a market. Everything is a market. Every headline moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. Bet on your instinct, your prediction, your edge. Dual bits predict where everything is a market, >> right? Yeah. And and one of the other concerns people have or focuses is on lightning scaling specifically and certain drawbacks uh of lightning and people are working on improving the lightning protocol but there's also a handful of new bitcoin protocols we have cashew which we talked about there's spark arc fettyman liquid uh a handful of others Evan what is your favorite new scaling protocol and and what do you think it enables that lightning doesn't or maybe Lightning will enable all this. We're uh we're pretty all in on eCash right now. Uh we like Cashew because of the simplicity of it. Single mint um like blossoming ecosystem of those mints. Um yeah, we just like how easy it is to onboard. You could hand someone one of these notes that we're handing out at the conference. You scan a QR code, you hit import, boom, you got your first few SATs. I was just waiting online to get my coffee and I was handing it out and had this really nice lady just download the wallet right in front of me and scan it, hit receive and just saw the magic moment. It was it was just awesome. And uh just to have a wallet that will act as like a sherpa and and get her to self custody as her balance grows uh is a nice reassuring thing. So um yeah, all these other protocols coming up. I love the experimentation. Um, I just think that uh there's a lot of marketing tricks people are doing right now and they're not being forthcoming about the trade-offs uh of them. Most of them aren't really self-custodial. >> Yeah, it seems like we're still in the kind of experimental phase with some of the newer protocols. Um I agree we our our wallet is only focused really on Cashew um because of the scalability mainly um so you can send thousands and thousands of ecash tokens for literally no cost um which you can't in something like a lightning. So that's another aspect and then just the embedded privacy. You just get privacy by default. You don't have to think about it. There's no options. It just comes private with payments. >> Right. Right. I that that's one of the the reasons we went with Cashew for this onboarding layer. Like basically all the new ones that you see out there, they have some really big red flags in terms of the privacy or they're run by these mega corps that well you know nothing's going to compare to the privacy that eCash and solutions like Cashew and Fetty provide right now, >> right? Yeah. That's why I like the lightning plus ecash stack. I think it gets you a lot of the way there to the scalability. >> Yeah. And I wanted to add on the scalability point. I think like the most important scalability thing that we need to focus on is not uh technical but just social and like being exposed to to Bitcoin more in general cuz like and and in a context that isn't like as a financial gambling asset because like that's what everyone knows it as. Like that's why Square turning on Bitcoin payments is so powerful cuz people like we like I've gone to like different coffee shops and like restaurants and stuff and just say you can pay in Bitcoin and they like click through and they're like oh what what I didn't even know you could do this and like they're just like neutral. Most people are neutral because they most people don't even know. Like we have like Gen Z people who work for us and like they have no idea what Bitcoin even is which is like so crazy to think, right? They don't know what crypto is. A lot of people aren't involved in a lot all >> the people that do they've been rugged. >> Exactly. Yeah. >> They've been rugged. They've been sent to these casinos. They wanted to get whatever shitcoin of the day that they're trying to sell to get trade fees on. >> Yeah. I think the real like golden goose is shoehorning backwards like you were saying getting the distribution and just shoehorning Bitcoin in there which is why Cash App is such a big deal. There's so many unlocks that come from that. >> Yeah. Put a little exposure on the side like interact with the general application and then like oh there's this Bitcoin thing. Oh there's this Noster thing. There's this other tool. like then you're get exposed to it more, see it on a daily basis and then eventually you learn enough to actually transition over. >> Yeah. And then like just final thought on that is like end of the day the real dream is we all just wake up and instead of the dollar sign in all of our apps, it's the Bitcoin sign. Obviously, we still do need the education and we need to meet with like the proper privacy, but changing user behavior is not what we're trying to go for, >> right? Okay. Awesome. Uh well, last topic for the day. Um, does a little controversial, does Bitcoin need a stable coin? When you talk to merchants, do you get that question? I guess one. And and what do you think? And if it does, how do we do it? >> I don't know, dude. Like, we live I think we all live in the United States, right? >> I live in >> Why do we need a stable coin? Like, fucking credit cards are amazing for getting dollars, right? Like, Bitcoin provides something completely different to merchants, a completely different financial system. Helps them escape inflation and that's something that most small business owners can relate to, especially over the last, you know, several years. >> Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's stable coins everywhere already. I don't think >> I mean, listen, there's there's definitely different places in the world where stable coins can act as a lifeline, especially when they have fiat currencies locally that melt at a much quicker rate than the US dollar does. But in the United States, Bitcoin, stable coins, nah. >> Yeah. And like stable coins are downstream of the US government, right? Bitcoin is, you could say, upstream. I think what we really need is a a UX that far surpasses anything analogous in fiat. And when we get that, game over anyways, right? >> Yeah. And I think the the biggest downside of stable coins is that basically you're making the trade-off of like, oh yeah, let me just make it easier to get sanctioned and have my money confiscated than it already is. So it's like, why even interact with them in the first place, >> right? Yeah. I think Try though, they're going to say, "Hey, instead of these credit card processing fees, we can slash them." Um, >> Stripe is doing the opposite, though. They're charging one and a half% to use stable coin rails, which is absolutely ridiculous. >> Yeah. to charge idiots to say to their boards like look we're accepting stable coins now. >> Yeah. And at least like with Bitcoin like as the base monetary layer like stay focused on the mission. Zero distractions like Bitcoin is money period. Keep it that way. >> Yeah. I think it they can be helpful in emerging markets where you do have I don't know tight liquidity issues or cash flow issues or you have no access to US dollars and you want the stability. But the US feels like an amazing place where Bitcoin can almost like leaprog stable coins. Like we don't even need stable coins here. We have the dollars. Just teach people about Bitcoin and move right to the Bitcoin standard. Um so that's one of the things we're focused on as well is how do you combine fiat and Bitcoin specifically in the US and give an amazing experience. I think Square does a great job. You can accept cash dollars with Bitcoin payments and they convert it automatically and same for sending. Um, so something like that feels like where we're where we're headed, at least in in the US specifically. >> Yeah, they just need a little more competition, you know. Let's get another payment processor, too. Accepting Bitcoin as well. >> Toast Clover, we're looking at you. Let's uh let's do it. Call us up, guys. >> Some bigger guys on there. >> Great guys. Well, final final question. What is your favorite Bitcoin merchant? >> Tell the audience what should we go buy? Pitch more than one. All right. Who wants to go first? >> I can go. I uh my favorite Bitcoin moisture is great ghee. He makes the best like cooking cooking oil uh that there is. Uh lab third party lab tested and everything. He's awesome. He makes some of the best stuff. Soap miner as well. Uh he makes like great tallow soaps also available online and everything. Only Bitcoin. Uh and then I'll show my my own little product. We sell our own goat milk caramel traditional Mexican thing. Also third party lab tested. If you're into Pete, Ray Pete, any of that health stuff, come come check us out at the booth. We have one in the open source area. >> Yeah, I won't repeat those two. Those are really good. There's also um Orange Horizon is suntan lotion. There's obviously Peony Lane wine out of Colorado. There's Cacao now from somewhere in Central America, Bitcoin Beans. So, there's really like a lot of niche, high quality uh merchants now, peer-to-peer, too. >> Yeah, I found a couple new ones on Nostra. this guy Kid Warp who's he's got this vanilla extract I got that was delicious. Um, tallow from Tallow in Philadelphia. Um, they'll meld to your door. And I I got this uh sports powder sport drink. You could buy it with Bitcoin. Absolutely delicious. Kicks the crap out of Gatorade and it's just unbelievable. And I'm going to shout out Pinkal Coffee. um who is a Bay Area coffee shop, Epicuran Trader, which is a San Francisco co uh uh store that accepts Bitcoin. Um and Mariposa Bakery, which is a gluten-free free bakery in the ferry building in San Francisco. Check them out if you're an SF. Thank you guys. Cheers all. Thank you. >> Cheers. >> Thank you. Every year, this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year, the stage gets bigger. Sound money, center stage. So, where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville, July 2027.