End of year reflection of my year as a Bitcoin and Lightning entrepreneur

Crazy is an understatement for how this year played out. I and my co-founder had a clear goal. We wanted to help Lightning be more widely accessible. And we had a plan. We needed to connect Lightning better to legacy systems so more people could use it. But the odds were against us.

Starting 2021, I was working sunrise to sundown from my bedroom in Oakland, California. I started my mornings early to chat with our partners in Malta and the UK, stretched my morning to coordinate with part of my team in Peru and the United States, and then transitioned to my late-night shift to coordinate with my co-founder, our development team, and our designer who were working out of Bangalore and Chennai in India.

The pandemic seemed relentless, and the thought of bringing all our team to the same place seemed farfetched. But we kept on working, with discipline, commitment, and faith.

Along with the hard work, the milestones started coming. We launched our first live products in January, including the world’s first Lightning-enabled debit card. Later in April, we graduated from YCombinator, the most prestigious startup accelerator in the United States. In May, we closed an investment round from highly reputable investors in Silicon Valley. In November, we moved all our core team to our new and beautiful office in Tallinn, Estonia so we could work in the same place for the first time ever. And today, we go live with the world’s first Lightning-enabled card with ApplePay support.

I will forever be grateful for this amazing year in my life. I hope the next one brings me bigger and better battles so we can contribute to moving our community forward.

Today, as a community, we stand strong and are taking massive steps into taking Bitcoin mainstream.

All you be blessed by whatever you believe in.

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