Last month’s felt like one long sprint: design during the day, code at night, and a lot of back-and-forth prompting with AI to get some design assets halfway usable. Here’s a quick update on what I’ve been working on, building, and learning over the past month.
A lot of energy has gone into the Bitcoin Design Community’s second Bitcoin Designathon, which runs from May 4 to May 18. The Designathon is like a traditional hackathon, but primarily focused on design. It’s a two-week hackathon for designers: anyone can pitch an idea related to Bitcoin design. We’re welcoming both teams and solo participants.
I’ve been on logistics and design duty. Helping schedule, track down sponsors, and making sure questions and various things in Discord are up to date. I also took the lead on organizing a Design-a-Note contest and workshop (more on that below).
Gandlaf (Brr developer) and Opencash were able to raise a 300k sats prize pool for the ecash Design-a-Note contest. I’m really excited to see what type of designs come out.
We’re also hosting a few workshops to kick off the Designathon this week:
Accessibility workshop — so every project (hopefully) starts with good accessibility habits.
UX research workshop — to help participants learn how to conduct project-specific user research.
Ecash Design-a-Note workshop — which I’m leading. This one should be fun. I’ll walk participants through what to expect from the Design-a-Note contest and how to use Brr to print Cashu notes that look like physical money.
On the branding side Christoph set the brand direction and I helped generate some social assets. I used Figma and Jitter to add a bit of motion to the promotional posts to help catch the eye of scrollers. Check it out:
I also experimented with Midjourney and Kling to create some animated character illustrations. I recorded my own voiceover and used CapCut to generate subtitles. The goal was to end up with something that feels alive instead of a static JPEG.
The Bitcoin Design Community has been collaborating with bitcoin developers on an advocacy campaign around HR 1747 – the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. The bill clarifies that open-source developers who don’t custody user funds are not money transmitters.
We’re calling the campaign “Save Our Wallets” for now. I’m leading the development of the website. The goal of the site is to provide an overview of the bill and a call to action where users can look up their representative by ZIP code and send them a message or place a call in support of HR 1747.
Political fights aren’t always the most glamorous, but this one could really help protect Bitcoin developers in the U.S. We don’t want to see more Samurai Wallet or Tornado Cash situations.
I’ve been working with d4r on a BTCPay Server plugin that lets merchants accept Cashu payments. I’m handling the design side while d4r takes care of the shadowy supercoding.
We’re approaching this in phases:
v1: A clean settings page where a merchant lists the mints they trust. An export option lets users combine all their ecash from a single mint into a new token they can melt using Minibits, Macadamia, or any other Cashu wallet they like.
v2: Auto-melt. The server automatically melts ecash tokens into lightning sats in the background so the merchant never has to think about it. It sounds simple, but it’s not. We need more time to get this right.
We’re keeping the UI minimal on purpose. Extra flair just means extra surface area for bugs.
Funding-wise, Opencash posted a bounty and Rijndael from Taproot Wizards matched it. The pot is live. Make sure to support Opencash to fund more Cashu development like this
Bitcoin’s encryption has roots in Renaissance art.
“UX” is out, visual craft is in, and process takes a backseat to output.
Some beautiful 3D icons by Thomas Cullen.
See ya next time,
Erik
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