Michael Kadlec ∞/21M

Some personal news: after more than five years, I am no longer part of the Blink team. In August 2021, shortly before El Salvador announced bitcoin as legal tender, I joined the small Galoy and Bitcoin Beach Wallet teams as Marketing Director and started working on bitcoin full time. My first assignment was to help organize a bitcoin conference in San Salvador, the first of its kind in the country. The goal was to bring bitcoin knowledge and expertise to El Salvador, and to bring Salvadorans and the international bitcoin community together in the capital in support of adoption. That conference became Adopting Bitcoin @AdoptingBTC. It was an exciting time, with many unknowns. No sovereign nation had ever declared its intent to embrace bitcoin, and for the first time since the blocksize debate, the conversation around bitcoin had turned back to its use as a medium of exchange. Our team was in the middle of it. We had been on the ground since 2020 as one of the country's first bitcoin startups, building the infrastructure that let the Bitcoin Beach community in El Zonte use bitcoin as money with ease, which President Bukele later cited as the proof of concept that inspired the nation's move. It was also a frightening time. Travel and gatherings were restricted around the world and in El Salvador, and abroad, El Salvador was known above all for its homicide rate, among the highest in the world, and for decades of gang violence. Organizing an international conference there asked a lot of trust from everyone who came, and they came anyway. In the years that followed, I led the rebranding of Bitcoin Beach Wallet into Blink and its expansion from a wallet built for one Salvadoran village into a wallet for everyday bitcoin payments, used today in 180 countries. In October 2024, Blink became independent of Galoy, which had incubated it since 2020, and passed to new ownership. I was one of the team members who moved over to Blink to carry the work forward. The ideas that started in El Zonte travelled further than any of us expected. The community custody model, where a multisig holds the funds to make a seamless Lightning experience possible, has been iterated on by many other projects and companies. The idea of a bitcoin circular economy was exported to the world, and communities everywhere have replicated the Bitcoin Beach approach, many of them with Blink as their wallet of choice. I am grateful to have been part of that work. None of it happened alone. Many of the people I worked alongside in those early years have since returned to private lives away from the spotlight, so I will not name them here. You know who you are, and I am grateful for everything we built and every risk we took together. Thank you to the people of El Zonte and the Bitcoin Beach community, who showed the world what bitcoin as money looks like; to the Salvadorans who trusted a small team with their savings and their payments; to the circular economy builders who took the model home to their own communities; and to every Blink user. Blink is no longer a purely custodial Lightning wallet. It now offers the same experience that helped El Zonte adopt bitcoin as money in a self-custodial model, and is in the middle of moving tens of thousands of users off custodial accounts. To the Blink team carrying this forward: I wish you every success. As for what comes next, Adopting Bitcoin continues, and I remain on its board. The conference that began as my first assignment in San Salvador has grown the same way the Bitcoin Beach idea did, carried by local teams into their own communities. After five editions in El Salvador, Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town (@abcptza) holds its fourth edition on 26–27 February 2027, and Adopting Bitcoin Arnhem (@AB_Arnhem), hosted by the longest-running local bitcoin economy, returns for its second edition on 28–29 May 2027. Both are run by local teams and funded mostly through ticket sales, so if you want to support bitcoin as money on the ground, buying a ticket is one of the most direct ways to do it. Beyond that, I am taking a break to spend time with my family, and I will keep building. When I started in 2021 I could not write software myself. With LLMs I now can, and I have been putting that to use on a couple of projects. More on those when the time is right. See you in Cape Town and Arnhem.