BTCHEL is the biggest Bitcoin conference in the Nordics.
This year bitcoin is down, and Google searches are down compared to last year. And yet the team is already planning 2027 and 2028 events.
I sat down and talked to Samuli Rautiainen, their CMO, about how they built it.
Before BTCHEL there was no large-scale Bitcoin conference in the Nordics. People working on Bitcoin in the region simply had nowhere to meet each other in person, which is a strange gap for an industry that runs on people knowing each other.
So the team that ultimately became BTCHEL reasonably asked themselves whether they should make one.
The idea came from experience. Remu Karhulahti co-founded the Bitcoin Association and had studied Bitcoin for years, so he came in with a network already there. Luke de Wolf brought deep credibility in the space – a cybersecurity expert who’s consulted for major clients in oil & gas, manufacturing, maritime, and logistics in Finland, Norway, and Canada.
When I asked Samuli why their event went better than comparable ones (e.g., the Bitcoin symposium in Sweden), he gave four reasons:
Timing
A team with real depth and an international network
A strong event producer
Young people running it
I guess the third one is the most boring but it totally makes sense. Knowing Bitcoin and knowing how to run a room of a thousand people are two different skills. You can be an expert in the field but be terrible as a founder. That wasn’t the case here.
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I want to highlight the order they did things in.
Before building anything, they had to find the funds and users. They did both very plainly.
The team went to companies and asked them to sponsor the conference. Commitments came in fairly quickly — Coinmotion, Finland’s biggest crypto exchange, was one of the early ones.
The team put up a landing page and sent it round their network. 400 sign-ups came in over two months.
Only after both of those did they start building the conference properly.
The reason they could afford to work that way was because nobody was getting paid. The whole team worked for equity at the start, and when I asked Samuli what the hardest part was, that’s what he named — asking people to put months into something on a promise.
Even with sponsors committed, the cash timing on events is awkward. You commit to costs early, because venues and production and speakers all need booking well ahead of time. Attendees buy tickets at the last minute. So you spend real money for months against results you can’t yet see. They broke even in year one anyway.
I liked Samuli’s point on how to make an event a success: You don’t really need connections, you just talk to people and see what happens.
While you’d think a bear market and lack of interest in bitcoin would be a bad thing, the BTCHEL team’s read is that downturns are good ops. It’s part of the cycle, so you work through it rather than pausing and waiting for sentiment to come back. The main proof of this is how the team is already planning the 2027 and 2028 conferences.
BTCHEL writes as well — podcasts, newsletters, articles. I asked what three topics are talked about in the community or are worth it from their point of view.
Self-custody and security
In late July and early August 2026, a firmware bug in Coldcard hardware wallets let attackers guess recovery seed phrases, and more than $100 million in bitcoin was taken across thousands of addresses. The bug went back to a firmware release from March 2021 — affected devices skipped the proper hardware random number generation, so the seed phrases they produced could be brute-forced. The special reason this became a big story is because Coldcard was the wallet bitcoin maximalists recommended above all others for cold storage – “the safest option failed”.
What makes it worth writing about rather than just reporting is the fix, which isn’t obvious. Updating the firmware doesn’t help a seed that was already generated badly. If you were affected you need to set up a completely new wallet with a fresh seed and move your funds across; moving the old backup onto a different device carries the same entropy problem with it. There’s also been a wave of phishing attacks aimed at people in the middle of migrating, so links are worth treating carefully. It’s the kind of fast-moving, high-stakes story that shows exactly why timely, trustworthy Bitcoin coverage matters.
Developer split
There are proposals on the table for changes to the Bitcoin code and genuine disagreement about them, alongside a debate about whether AI investment is feeding negative sentiment around Bitcoin.
Bitcoin loans.
More holders don’t want to sell. Samuli’s position is that one of two things has to give. Either governments stop taxing the sale, or borrowing against bitcoin becomes a normal option: You back the loan with your bitcoin and pay interest instead of selling it.
That last theme runs straight into what’s happening at the event. The category with the most companies behind it is custody and safe storage, which makes sense both as a business case and for self-sovereignty, which is about not having to trust a bank with your money. The expo isn’t early-stage companies pitching, and the speakers are on live industry issues rather than fundamentals.
What stuck with me is the way the BTCHEL team proved it would work before building it. They didn’t plan the big launch based on guesses but literally put up a landing page, sent it to their network, and acted based on sign-ups and conviction.
They treated demand as the first experiment, not the last. For anyone building something new, that’s the lesson: Your first job isn’t to build the most brilliant product but to find the cheapest possible feedback that proves someone wants it.
Let me know what you think of this format in the comments! While I found it useful for myself, I am very much interested in what my audience thinks. Drop the people I should reach out for interviews or the topics you’d like to read on!
That’s the data. Now go build something.
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