Turning Stages into Circular Economies | Bitcoin 2026

So, how many of you have ever zapped someone? Me, too. Okay, a lot of people here. My name is Francisco Mars. And today I'll be telling you a story about Bitcoin musician and my island in the middle of the Atlantic and a night where everything clicked. So, I, together with my friend Pedro, we've built Chain Duel, which is a lightning-powered video game. The goal was very simple. We wanted people to use their sats, to actually use their sats. And um people loved it. We've been all around the world displaying the game to every conference, Brazil, Prague, Nashville, Miami. We were living the dream. And for thousands of hours of work, even though conferences uh paid the flights and sponsors paid the game prizes, we didn't actually have a an income. >> [snorts] >> So, it was just enough to keep us going, but not really enough to make ends meet. But, with going to all these Bitcoin conferences, I met many people in the space that were in even similar or even worse situation, that they were just uh trying to launch their project, following their passion with Bitcoin, trying to build something to to make the adoption grow, but it's really hard to to get uh sometimes to be paid for your work in Bitcoin. And one of these people I met, his name was Roger, Roger 9000. May- maybe not some of you know him. He's a Bitcoin musician. So, already being a musician, it can be very hard because you know, to be paid for it all the of it's very competitive. And being a Bitcoin musician, it's even more specific, more niche. And this guy he makes his own music only about Bitcoin. He makes all the videos. He plays He goes around the world to Bitcoin conferences to perform. And most times he has to spend his own sats that he earned he stacked with all this love to go around the world and spread the message. And this kind of commitment felt surreal, right? You are giving your life to Bitcoin. You give all your money, your dedication to Bitcoin. And we became friends and I tried to help I'm trying to give some advice on how he could improve his situation. But I didn't really have an answer for him because we are all in the same position. We all love Bitcoin. We are all trying to dedicate our lives to this and also find a way to to stack some sats along the way. Of course, it's one of the goals. But um eventually I've attended the Sovereign Engineering cohort. It's in Madeira the It's a island Portuguese island in the middle of the Atlantic, a beautiful paradise place. And I attended the Sovereign Sovereign Engineering program. It's just a bunch of builders. We get together. We love permissionless tech. And we try to come up with cool ideas, cool projects and help each other out to build something. And me and my colleague Pedro, we built this Nostr application called PubKey. It brings lightning and identity together. It's using for donations, for splitting bills, for tips. So we built this app. And then I was organizing the after party of the Adopting Bitcoin conference. And I invited Roger to come play. But there was no budget once again to pay him for his his expenses. And then I thought, okay, we just built this app. It's about identity. It's about payments. Maybe we can adapt it somehow to to help people like Roger that perform and are not being rewarded like fairly rewarded for their work. And um that's when we came up with the idea for Pub Pay Live. So, what is Pub Pay Live? Uh Pub Pay Live, you might see it on the screens on the side of the stage, it's um a simple application with identity, with lightning payments. And in this case, a speaker or an artist, he creates a post on Nostr. So, as many people have here zapped, you know what's Nostr. Nostr is a it's a permissionless distributed network. And it's with that, it allows for creation of identity, of your profile, and a follow list. And it also has zaps, which is a kind of a a signed lightning payment. On Nostr, you have your key, you can sign the the events that you want to post, that you want to make, and you can post that you want to pay someone with lightning. So, when you zap, the network knows it was you. And you make a post on Nostr, you we create a QR code with this post, we display it on the screen next to the stage where the artist is performing or the speaker is giving his keynote. And then people can just scan it and interact. You can send a message and you can be on stage with the speaker. You can provide valuable feedback live if something hits, if you really like what the speaker is saying, or if you hate it and you want to criticize, you can also say what write a comment that is negative, of course. It's all about honesty. And of course, it's all permissionless, it's on Nostr, so there's no middleman, it's a decentralized network, and there's no censorship. So, what does this do to a room? You can see Roger performing in Brazil in this picture. And um as uh the audience stops being just passive, you stop just being here watching, receiving, you can also interact, you can also donate, and you can be part of the conversation. And um this creates a kind of synergy um that uh it breaks the line between stage and audience. So, for the speaker, other than being rewarded, getting some sats, of course, everybody here, I'm sure, loves to get some sats. It's also usual you uh it's useful feedback that the speaker gets. You can see immediately, "Oh, I got a zap." And uh in that moment, in that precise that you were saying something, and you get the zap, and you think, "Okay, maybe somebody resonated with this." And um from there, it grew. So, Roger really liked it. Everything went perfectly well on the first uh after-party we organized, and he got many zaps, and uh he used it in other conferences, and then other musicians tried it, and then we we also did a partnership with a Human Rights Foundation to donate using Poppay Life to activists that many times, often times, activists don't have any other ways of getting uh donations, since they can be censored, they can be they can close the governments can close their bank accounts. So, using Lightning and Nostr, it's all permissionless, and um it allows for everybody to send, and everybody to receive. And uh we kept using it in Bitcoin conferences. We went to Amsterdam, to Barcelona, to El Salvador, uh to Brazil, and that's I kept seeing the same pattern, that speakers come, they provide value, they they spend years learning their crafts and to share it here with you and you guys absorb it all. And what if there was a way that we can also reward speakers while they talk? 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 bets. Predict where everything is a market. So, that's when we decided we thought, "Okay, let's try to do this for a whole conference." So, we did it for Adopting Bitcoin in El Salvador in November. And for that, we built this kind of integration that we can connect the schedule of the conference to the posts of the speakers. So, but that wasn't the hard part. Now, with AI, with live coding, it's super easy if you have an idea to implement. The hard part is to coordinate everyone, to onboard most speakers on Noster, to make sure they have a lightning address, to make sure they make the post on time, and then to gather all the data information and put it in a way that the program can read. So, this was a lot of work. But, when it worked, it was magical to see the the stage and to see the people interacting and that was like the line, the separation disappeared because the audience was on stage with the speaker and the speakers were finally being rewarded for the work they were doing. And it was awesome to to witness. So, for Adopting Bitcoin, we we were able to get 47 speakers to create their notes and during the conference we got 419 zaps in a total of 325,000 satoshis, which is back then it we were at all-time high, so it was a bit more than than now. And um we didn't just theorize, we didn't just talk about Bitcoin. We are using Bitcoin as money as it should be, not only as a store of value. So uh this stage has Pub Pay live running like I was telling you. Uh it's super easy. You just get your Noster client any Noster client works. If you are not on Noster, you can use Pub Pay publicpayments.me and you can just use the camera to scan the QR code. You decide how much you want to zap and you use your lightning wallet to send the payment and it in this case if you don't have an account it sends an anonymous zap. And um it's it's all on Noster. It's not a walled garden. Everything is open. Everything is permissionless. And um so when speakers uh use Pub Pay live at the conference, it's on Noster forever. You cannot be censored. You cannot be deleted and even months later when people will be watching this at home on YouTube or something, they can still scan the QR code. The post will be online. People can still donate. So it perpetuates even after the conference. And um um It's It has been a really beautiful journey. I'm I want to end this talk with a more uh personal note. I've been building in Bitcoin for many years and what keeps me coming back, it's not the the number go up, it's not the Bitcoin price, it's the people. It's the kind of people that Zap activists. It's the kind of people that uh come all over the world for a after party to perform to a Bitcoin after party to perform for free. It's people that are at 11:00 p.m. troubleshooting why the software is still not working and we want everybody everything working so that in the conference we can all enjoy, use Bitcoin, learn more, be together as a community. And um this is so beautiful that it keeps me coming. And Bitcoin is not just something that we hold. It's something that we use. And it's something that we can earn together. Thank you very much. >> [music] >> Every year this community comes together to celebrate, [music] to debate, to build what comes next. >> [music] >> And every year the stage [music] gets bigger. Sound money center stage. >> [music] >> So, where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? [music] You come home. Nashville, July 2027. [music]