2026-01-30 –, Machankura
2025 was the year of Bitcoin merchant adoption. South Africa took center stage with MoneyBadger enabling Bitcoin payments at 600,000+ locations. Square rolled out 0% fee acceptance to 4 million US merchants. The rails are here.
But even Block's team admits the challenge remains: what incentive do people have to change their behavior? Technology isn't the barrier. Cash App pays Lightning from USD, Blink has Stablesats. But changing behavior at scale is hard.
Payment-linked offers solved this for card networks. Cardlytics sees 1 in 2 US card swipes because monetary incentives drive spend to specific payment methods. We're building the Bitcoin-native equivalent, without the banks, the high costs, the 3-7 day settlement or the surveillance.
This talk introduces wallet-linked offers: using Lightning and NWC to deliver instant satsback at merchants. Our approach to turning merchant acceptance into customer preference, the missing piece for Bitcoin's shift from digital gold to everyday money.
Since 2020, we've helped thousands of Bitcoiners save over $1M in free bitcoin, just by shopping online at their favorite merchants. When launching Satsback.com, we understood that Bitcoin would evolve in stages. People would start spending it only once enough of them had it, and only 1% of the world did. So we focused on helping people stack sats through everyday purchases.
But in the last couple of years, we began to understand that Bitcoin's success is not guaranteed. If it is only used as a treasury asset and not money people actually use, it might not fulfill its promise and risks getting captured.
This realization forced us to ask: what would it take to change payment behavior at scale? The card networks figured this out decades ago. Payment-linked offers drive trillions in payment volume annually. The model works.
We're building the Lightning-native equivalent. By integrating with wallets, BTCMap and payment gateways, wallet-linked offers leverage the programmability and instant settlement of Lightning to deliver a remarkable payment experience impossible on fiat rails: customers pay, and sats land back in their wallet before they get their beer. No banks. No waiting weeks. No surveillance.
Research shows grassroots, community-driven initiatives matter more than top-down policy for merchant adoption. We're building the tools that will help turn merchant acceptance into customer preference.
This talk will cover:
- Our journey from online cashback to bitcoin-native wallet-linked offers
- Why Bitcoin's success as money depends on getting the incentives right
- How NWC enables instant, non-custodial reward distribution
- Our approach to launching in Bitcoin-dense communities like Cape Town
Sound money nerd since discovering mises.org ~20 years ago. Former goldbug, bitcoin-only since 2018. Launched Satsback.com in 2020—a tool that helps people stack free sats while shopping online. Basically a bitcoin faucet with extra steps and profit, Lightning-only payouts from day 1. Recently much more interested in bitcoin as freedom money and merchant adoption than treasury reserve companies. Working on something new re: lightning payments.