Bitcoin Magazine

Tampa Bay’s Bitcoin Community Builds Circular Economy Momentum After 1 BTC Windfall

Two years after clinching 1 BTC in a national competition of Bitcoin meetups at Bitcoin 2023, the Tampa Bay Bitcoin Meetup—now formalized as the nonprofit Bitcoin Bay Foundation—has channeled the prize into a thriving local ecosystem. Valued at roughly $25,000 to $30,000 at the time, that bitcoin has appreciated to over $100,000 amid bitcoin’s bull run, bootstrapping workshops, conferences, and community events that onboard businesses to the Bitcoin standard. The group’s president, Thomas Schlemmer, credits the win with supercharging efforts to create a “Bitcoin circular economy” in the Tampa Bay area.

“The Tampa Bay Bitcoin Meetup is the longest active running meetup, at least in the U.S. Some are saying the world. It’s been going on for 14 years,” Schlemmer told Bitcoin Magazine, tracing the meetup’s roots to 2011. What began as monthly social meetups eventually introduced developer-focused BitDevs sessions supporting the growing international movement of high-tech Bitcoin Developer events.

Bitcoin Bay Foundation hosts a dynamic lineup of events tailored to foster education and community in the Tampa Bay Bitcoin scene, with weekly meetups serving as the backbone—often expanding to five per month depending on programming and demand.

These include core recurring formats like beginner-friendly Bitcoin 101 sessions (averaging 20 attendees), social gatherings (around 25 participants for casual networking), and advanced BitDevs developer discussions, usually small groups diving into technical topics. Hands-on workshops rotate monthly or as requested, covering practical skills such as privacy in the digital age, peer-to-peer Bitcoin purchases, de-Googled phones, Bitcoin mining, node setup, and SeedSigner hardware builds. In these workshops, participants can expect interactive, step-by-step guidance from local experts to build confidence in self-custody and privacy tools.

The recent Sound Money Soirée gala drew around 100 people for a black-tie fundraiser, hosted in a historic bank vault, complete with silent auctions of products from all kinds of Bitcoin companies like Start9 and SeedSigner, raising $50,000 in one night, which goes to fund their various educational events. “It’s just kind of an excuse for people to get dressed up… and have fun… and show the local leaders there’s over 100 people here,” Schlemmer said of the gala, which brought in Bitcoin leaders from across the country.

The gala almost did not take place: “Our bank froze our account like a week and a half before,” as banks seem to do when you need them most. “We were actually able to pay the blackjack dealer, the DJ, and the photographer in bitcoin,” Schlemmer recalled, an omen-like reminder of the power of Bitcoin.

Earlier this summer, they also co-hosted the Bitcoin Day Tampa conference with the Bitcoin Day team, which brought in 150 attendees and had a full day of panels on policy, business adoption, and custody with speakers from across the industry, and even state senator Joe Gruters. “It was a regional conference, we filled out the Tampa River Center, which was good. That was about 150 people, and that was our first conference that we’ve ever thrown. So it went well.”

The group also partners with the University of Tampa, where the Bitcoin Club “The Bitcoin club there is the second largest non-Greek club on campus,” according to Schlemmer. They’ve supplied internships, guest lectures, and materials for the school, which now hosts a Bitcoin course. “We’ve been very close with them over the years, providing internships, getting kids placed in jobs, guest lectures, getting them educational materials,” he added.

The Tampa Bay meetups serve as an example of arguably the foundational institution of the industry, the Bitcoin meetup. For aspiring meetup organizers, Schlemmer stresses consistency: “Just consistency, you know, meeting at the same place at the same time or the same frequency, lets people know what to expect.” Building a core team with complementary skills—like accountants—is key, he added; “If you’re going to go the nonprofit route, then you need to make sure you have an accountant.”

However, successfully hosting Bitcoin meetups is far more than just accounting; the gap in knowledge and interests between new attendants and old ones can be a serious challenge. Staying Bitcoin-only wards off altcoin distractions, Schlemmer noted, “we just tell them upfront, ‘hey, we are a Bitcoin-only here.’” When crypto enthusiasts probe alternatives, the group simply points out that they prefer to focus on Bitcoin and that there are other crypto meetups in the area they can visit for those interests.

This post Tampa Bay’s Bitcoin Community Builds Circular Economy Momentum After 1 BTC Windfall first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Bitcoin Magazine

Boltz Exchange Becoming The Leading Bridge Across Bitcoin Layers via “Holy Grail” Technology

Boltz, the bitcoin-only instant swap exchange, is cornering a niche sector of the bitcoin industry and quickly becoming a favorite of advanced bitcoin users. Its fully open source tech stack, which is actually trust-less, unlocks a variety of possibilities for the industry, including a zero-custody risk bridge across Bitcoin layers. 

Boltz exchange was founded in 2019 by Kilian and another pseudonymous co-founder, as a solution to managing liquidity in the Lightning Network for an early Bitcoin Defi project called OpenDex. Realizing quickly how complex lightning liquidity management was, the team ended up pivoting to the maintenance and polishing of Boltz, a liquidity service provider or LSP. Boltz has been self-funded ever since.

Boltz infrastructure supports multiple Bitcoin wallets today, such as BTCPay server via a plugin, Aqua wallet, Bull Bitcoin, and Breez, to name a few that are publicly known. As a result, Boltz is becoming an increasingly popular and respected company and open source project, an infrastructure cornerstone of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network today. 

The Boltz Lightning node is one of the biggest, boasting on its website 759 Channels, 1022 Peers, 84.625 BTC worth of capacity, and 6.60 years since the oldest operating channel was opened, though these metrics are likely out of date. Their Lightning Network support lets advanced lightning node operators ‘balance their channels’ an otherwise complicated process that generally gets obfuscated away from end users of lighting powered Bitcoin wallets. 

Boltz, however, is more than just an LSP; “We want to be the connecting tissue between all the Bitcoin layers.” Kilian told Bitcoin Magazine in an exclusive interview, discussing the vision and progress of the Boltz exchange so far. Initially built to support Bitcoin on-chain to Lightning Network swaps, today it supports Rootstock and the Liquid Network as well, the most popular ways of using bitcoin by far. To date, Botlz has only dealt in BTC, instead of integrating other blockchains or assets, perfecting its craft and locking in its niche.

In 2023, Boltz added support for the powerful and feature-rich Liquid Network, an open-source federated blockchain where federation members hold keys in a large Bitcoin multisig that collateralizes their L-BTC asset in full reserve. Liquid is one of the oldest two Bitcoin projects and was created by Adam Back and Blockstream. Despite having faster block times, a powerful set of programming scripts for smart contracts, and excellent privacy features such as encrypted transaction amounts on chain, Liquid has struggled to get adopted by centralized exchanges, making access to its feature set very difficult. Boltz integration opened a major bridge between on-chain bitcoin and the speed, programmability, and privacy of the Liquid Network, making wallets like Aqua and Bull Bitcoin possible. 

Shy to share internal numbers, Killian told Bitcoin Magazine the integration “was quite the success story — it was taken on pretty well by the market, it just made sense for people.” Looking back on the market at the time, on-chain bitcoin fees were very high and were causing problems across the industry. Kilian noted, “We had a high fee environment. The main chain was hyper-expensive. So Liquid swaps clicked for a lot of people, and that’s how we really moved into this niche of connecting Bitcoin layers. A Bitcoin bridge for different Bitcoin layers, that’s really how this direction for us was fortified.”

In November of 2024, Boltz expanded into Rootstock support, a 2015 era layer two, little known among the English-speaking crowd, though very popular in Latin America, particularly Argentina, where many of its founders are from. Still shy to share internal numbers, Killian told Bitcoin Magazine that the integration with Rootstock has ‘gone well’, likely serving as one of the best ways to turn on-chain bitcoin into rBTC, an essential asset of the Rootstock ecosystem. Rootstock’s claim to fame is bringing to Bitcoin the integration of an Ethereum-compatible “EVM”, the smart contracting language on top of which most of DeFi is built across the crypto ecosystem today.

The most interesting feature of Boltz, however, is its use of Atomic Swaps, an ancient “Holy Grail” of Bitcoin theory that can be traced back to the earliest discussions in the Bitcoin Talk forum. Atomic Swaps make it possible for users to trade against Boltz without having to trust the Boltz team or company not to steal the money, a luxury in finance across history. All centralized exchanges require such trust, as do most instant swap exchanges in the market today. Boltz integration with this sophisticated type of smart contract means that anyone can fundamentally run a local instance of Boltz and be a reliable trade partner of the public, without the need to bootstrap a brand or a reputation. 

But how do Atomic Swaps work? Leveraging the public nature of blockchains, Atomic Swaps function around a shared secret. This secret is used to lock the funds during the trade between two parties. For one party to claim the funds of the other, they must publish this secret to the blockchain, allowing the counterparty to do the same, resulting in the ‘atomic’ execution of the trade. 

This protocol solves a key issue of trust in business. Who sends the money first? Who sends the goods first? Whoever does, takes a certain amount of risk as it allows the counterparty to take the goods and run. Atomic Swaps eliminate that risk entirely. They essentially allow for the creation of a non-custodial crypto exchange. Though the implementation details and user experience vary, as some blockchains do not have the right script or smart contracting tools to support Atomic Swaps, while fiat is — so far — ruled out entirely as bank transfers are almost always reversible, undoing atomicity. 

Looking out into the future of Boltz and the programmability of Bitcoin as money for the digital age, Kilian said, “I think we will see a new breed of layer two projects launching early next year. So, probably stuff that you and I have never heard about, but there are so many projects, so much stuff. So this is a really interesting space to be in. And the difficulty, the quest, will be to separate the good from the bad.”

This post Boltz Exchange Becoming The Leading Bridge Across Bitcoin Layers via “Holy Grail” Technology first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.