Sometime between 14 January 2026 and 09 February 2026, Vora Bitcoin pivoted to AI.
You may recall that Vora billed itself as a "Bitcoin fortress for sovereign individuals" and they had a cold storage solution involving a device users ran locally as well as "tamper monitoring" and "personalized duress triggers" all in the name of the elusive Bitcoin vault.
Vora's pivot seems to have occurred around the time when everyone was crazy for OpenClaws. Jesse Posner, one of Vora's cofounders, did an event at Presidio about running an OpenClaw on 26 Feb and on 11 March the voravault X account posted:
Since then, Vora has been discussed as providing AI services on PBJ and Eric Cason and Posner did an interview on Bitcoin Rails.
Business operators should do whatever makes sense and if Vora is a more successful company as in sovereign AI than in Bitcoin, I wish them all the best.
But it does raise the question of how cold-storage wallet software development becomes sustainable.
I am firmly convinced that all the Bitcoin software wallets are struggling. I guess Blue Wallet and Sparrow are doing okay because I believe they are mostly supported by grants. Lightning wallets (and all the spark/ark/ecash things) may also be doing okay, but I suspect the traditional on-chain, long-term self-custody wallets that have been trying to make a go of things as for-profit businesses are really struggling to find revenue (probably also users).
I wrote about this last year #944967, and if anything the landscape for such wallets has gotten even more dreary.
I benefit from advances in Bitcoin cold storage tools. It feels like we're really starting to see some cool things come around from Taproot: Frost, Taproot addresses, Timelocks, MuSig2. It would be a shame if the rate of this development slowed down, but I don't see how the people doing this work will continue to make money. Is it all going to be charity?
The solution must be FOSS software by volunteers.
This happened a million times in the software industry. Nobody runs new servers on Solaris anymore if they can help it and choose Linux/Kubernetes instead. There were once hundreds of server software stacks but simple apache or nginx killed it. Who wants Napster if they can have torrenting. Who wants Plex when Jellyfin is going to be free forever. In the same vein we will have FOSS wallets maintained by foundations rather than silly little apps by small development studios.
One day. Maybe still many years out but one day.
Volunteer is an interesting model for an ecosystem that seems to believe markets allocate resources best. I suppose there is no reason to think a volunteer is not part of the market, yet I suspect the profit motive is not the same with a volunteer as with a participant who wants to make money from a product.
I guess it works out in the case of Linux. And maybe will be the same of Bitcoin apps.
Tradfi bitcoin holders don't self custody.
There are problems all around us that we could be solving or at least trying to solve and meanwhile everyone is fighting over BIP-110.
Probably most of the bitcoin adoption of the 2025-2026 era is tradfi people buying ETFs and MSTR, but I wonder if the ones who are actually acquiring real bitcoin are still moving towards self-custody. Seems like they might be content to leave it on exchanges. Or there just aren't very many of them.
Hardware wallets at least have the model of "buy this device" but the software guys haven't got that. I wonder how they will make ends meet.
Good for them. How much more complexed does an avg joe need his set up to be beyond HWW seed phrase + backup + passphrase? Maybe multi sig
i get why they'd pivot, but it's hard not to wonder who keeps maintaining all the bitcoin tools if everyone moves on to the next big thing.
https://twiiit.com/bBuilderSF/status/2024641183121895549
There's just no reason for the average person to use Bitcoin, and for those who are in it for the gainz are happy to just hold ETFs or MSTR. Privacy and security was never mainstream relative to convenience. I don't know if this problem is "solvable".
Bitcoin was never mainstream. Only whatever is believed to produce
gainzhas been mainstream. So, you see a lot of flipflopping gain-chasers shift to where thosegainzare narrated/perceived to be at the moment. Currently, that is not Bitcoin. Which is great. Let them all go into AI. And then... idk... Moon bases or something.Meantime, we build out and harden our sovereignty.
All along, the rocket to the moon was for the flipflopping gain-chasers...to get rid of them.
I think that since we shouldn't censor, and bitcoin is for enemies and all that, we depend on people to fuck off of their own accord. So this is exactly how it should be.
indeed, but this is never gonna be the most commercially advantageous option, indeed I'm not even sure when/if it would be commercially self sustaining
Oh you're right, but isn't peer-to-peer open network infrastructure commercially disadvantageous in principle? The one middle-man industry in finance is cut out by design, so now that
NdgUm[1] - we're not even in a true bear market - the attractiveness to all the rent-seekers is diminishing.Money itself isn't a business with Bitcoin; not ultimately. The business is everything else you do; you just get paid in Bitcoin for your products / services that ideally aren't even related to Bitcoin.
Number don't go Up much ↩
Really? Have we really fallen this far? A non-inflationary money is a good reason for the average person.
I agree with you, of course, but I just don't think the average person sees it. And even if they want bitcoin as a savings device, they tend to opt for the more convenient options of ETFs or treasury companies.
Stocks come with risk, they are not simply hard money. Investing != saving.
The question is why tho. Surely everyone understands the concept of being self custodial. It's not that complicated of a concept, or is it?
For the normie brain in the developed world, there’s no urgency to self-custody. At least not before wealth confiscations etc. begin.
Maybe in Argentina they might be more susceptible to the idea.
deleted by author
I don't think it's a hard concept to understand, but most people seem content to have their bank control their money. People are lazy. Unless there is an immediate and compelling reason for them to change their habits, they're not going to.
I don't think very many people at all understand the concept of self custody. So much of western life involves custodies things. Look at email. The entire financial system. How easy is it to take custody of an equity you purchase?
i don't mind companies following the money, but i'd hate to see bitcoin wallet development slow down because of it. the boring infrastructure is what keeps everything else running.
I've never actually built a cold storage product, but, was not too long ago approached by a large law firm that was going to have to deal with a lot of coin as a fiduciary... like... ALOT.
I don't know how many people they talked to or who they eventually went with, they were with a large exchange and there was potential they kept it that way, but the contract would have funded open source product development for basically ever
That's the only kind of dividend I think one should expect from building such things, showing competency and proof-of-work so that you're in the mix for big deals.
The issue with that is you have to have the "if you build it they will come" mentality, not easy to do in terms of resources or mentally.