What is BitOps?

BitOps is an evolving Bitcoin management discipline and culture practice that enables organizations to maximize business value by helping engineering, finance, technology, and business teams to collaborate on data-driven Bitcoin strategies.

At its core, BitOps is a cultural practice. It’s the methods and language teams use to manage their Bitcoin operation, where everyone takes ownership of their responsibilities and results supported by a central best-practices group (the BitOps team). Cross-functional teams in Engineering, Finance, Product, Marketing, Operations, etc. work together to enable faster delivery of Bitcoin services, while at the same time gaining more control and security over their Bitcoin stack.

BitOps is a portmanteau of “Bitcoin development” and “Financial Operations”, stressing the communications and collaboration between business and engineering teams. Other names for the practice might be “Bitcoin Operations”, “Digital Asset Management”, “Blockchain Operations”, “Node Operations”, “Digital Treasury Management”, “Business Bitcoinization”, or “Bitcoin Services”.

Bringing Standards and Accountability to Bitcoin Operations

Regardless of the name, BitOps is the practice of bringing a set of standards, common language, and a culture of accountability to Bitcoin operations, enabling distributed engineering and business teams to make trade-offs between speed, privacy, and security in their bitcoin infrastructure and decision making. If it seems that BitOps is about making a speculative bet, then think again. BitOps is about generating and preserving capital.

Bitcoin is a monetary technology that can drive more revenue, accelerate payment speed, reduce transaction fees, provide more flexibility for treasury operations, or even help eliminate the need for intermediaries to conduct international commerce. BitOps is all about removing blockers: empowering teams to unlock decentralized finance and secure capital for the long term; enable engineering teams to deliver features and apps with better incentives and resilience; and provide language for a cross-functional discussion about where to invest and when. Sometimes a business will decide to turn on Bitcoin payments, sometimes it’ll decide to invest in it as a treasury reserve asset. But now teams know why they’re making those decisions.

At Lucent Labs, we continue to pioneer the BitOps framework and expect more announcements regarding tools and resources we are bringing to market for our customers and the broader community.