Hey, I must confess i was not there, but Victor and Fanis did a great recap on it in our newsletter (see below). On a personal note, I went to Adopting Bitcoin in El Salvador, and I found it awesome!! To me, it was the perfect conference size: not too big, so you can take the time to meet and talk to people, not too small so you meet a lot of new people, with people from all around the world, with a good balance between technical and business talks. And witnessing Bitcoin adoption first hand there was an unforgettable experience. Plus we got to surf perfect waves in El Zonte, so I guess this was one my best trips ever!

Our tech team went to Bitcoin 2022 in Miami to shake some hands, bump some fists, listen to the most brilliant bitcoiners, and toss some merch.

The two trends were without a doubt Mining and Lightning. With a dedicated stage and a high proportion of the exposition booths, mining definitely seems to be a thing in the US. Mining companies were everywhere, from hosting facilities to Upstream Data and their amazing BlackBox, which allows you to mine Bitcoin at home while avoiding divorce at the same time.

Lightning-wise, this year conference confirms the ever increasing shift of exchanges embracing Lightning, with Robinhood announcing their Lightning integration a month after Kraken officially announced Lightning-enabled withdrawals. On the main stage, Michael Saylor noted that “[he] think[s] every crypto exchange, if they’re going to remain viable and competitive, they need to build Lightning into their exchange”. Well, we couldn’t agree more!

Jack Mallers’ annoucement of Strike integration into a great proportion of Point of Sale softwares outlined how Bitcoin and Lightning can be used as a more efficient payment network, without even the need to touch bitcoin (the currency) for end users. Interestingly, the news was also the starting point of a very needed debate regarding whether the Lightning Network is ready to welcome thousands of new merchants. As Rene Pickhardt highlighted, Lightning might still be too unreliable as of today, which could result in bad user experience for both merchants and customers.

I fear when it comes to reliability that even with optimally reliable payment flows we still may not be able to compete with what @jackmallers calls the "boomer wazzzzup networks"

The topic of reliability was also addressed during the fascinating Mobile Wallets Bitcoin In Every Pocket panel, where CEO of Breez Roy Sheinfeld highlighted how hard it can be to create an easy-to-use Lightning wallet, notably due to Lightning being a liquidity market still in its infancy, both in terms of liquidity volumes and liquidity management tools.

Last but not least, Lightning Labs announced a new Taproot-based protocol they’ve been working on in the past months that will allow for the creation and transfer of assets on Bitcoin and Lightning. TARO - for Taproot Asset Representation Overlay - leverages the new Taproot script tree to commit data to the Bitcoin chain and track the transfers of arbitrary assets, both fungible and collectibles.

🤝 The conference was also a great place to connect and meet in meatspace our ⚡-friends from Lightning Labs, THNDR, Galoy, Voltage an so many others!