It’s been about a month, and it’s time to share some updates. I’ve been cooking up a few things. Let’s get into them.
Yesterday we launched a campaign to generate support and discussion around integrating bitcoin into Signal. The campaign is live and you can view it here: bitcoinforsignal.org
After seeing the working Signal demos that the Cashu team created, I was really inspired by the integration and thought we could do more to bring eyes on this. I threw out the idea of creating a campaign around this integration with the goal of reaching Signal users and introducing them to Cashu and the privacy properties Cashu offers, and how it’s a perfect fit with Signal’s mission.
I developed and designed the website along with the campaign branding and visuals. The campaign was a collaboration with a variety of fellow Cashu team members. It was a really great collaborative experience where we bounced ideas back and forth around copy, styling, messaging, and launch strategy. It all came together rather quickly, within 1 week. It’s only been 24 hours but the feedback has been really positive so far.
The #BitcoinForSignal hashtag is doing some numbers. People seem excited and are sharing the campaign.
Last month I attended and had the honor of serving as judge for the Bitcoin++ Lightning Edition conference/hackathon. As usual, Bitcoin++ delivered yet another one of the best conferences in bitcoin. Berlin is truly magical. The energy around bitcoin and excitement to build great things is only comparable to something I felt in San Francisco. I always leave feeling inspired. I’ll share some highlights from Lightning++ below:
Rektbot9000 took home the Best Design prize sponsored by the Bitcoin Design Foundation. RektBot9000 is an autonomous degen AI agent trading bitcoin with one goal: survive by trading bitcoin on LN Markets.
The birth of the Bitcoin for Signal campaign was the winning project Nuts Are Pure Signal. Lollerfirst and Zeugmaster teamed up and built a fully functional integration of a Cashu wallet in Signal to replace MobileCoin. It was initially built as part of the Bitcoin++ hackathon. This project ended up taking home first place in the hackathon and sparked the fire behind the Bitcoin For Signal campaign.
I was invited to go on 21 in 21. Had a fun chat with Haley Berkoe at Presidio Bitcoin during bitcoin design week. We talked about design, ecash, and how we can capture that feeling of ‘magic’ in magic internet money.
My PR #1184 was merged last week. I pushed some large changes to the UI of the CDK/LDK node. I’m trying to move away from the rounded soft corner design and more into a sharp angular direction. I think this is inspired by all the sci-fi I’ve been watching lately. I recently re-watched the Matrix Trilogy and Animatrix and I was really inspired by their vision of the future. I’m getting bored of the soft, rounded, relaxed UI and I want to try to make something that looks more like the sci-fi UIs of the movies. I think that motivated my decision behind this PR and UI change.
On the UX side of things, I got rid of the entire “quick actions” layout and went for putting simple buttons on the top right. I also combined Bolt11/Bolt12 into one tabbed window. In the future I think I can consolidate this even further and vibe code some javascript that automatically detects if the user is trying to pay a Bolt11 or Bolt12 invoice so they won’t need to make this choice beforehand. Will explore that next week.
Thats it for now see you all online,
Erik
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