Turning Stages into Circular Economies

So, how many of you have ever zapped someone? Me too. Okay, a lot of people here. My name is Francis Mars, and today I'll be telling you a story about Bitcoin, a musician, an island in the middle of the Atlantic, and a night where everything clicked.

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Together with my friend Pedro, we built ChainDuel, which is a Lightning-powered video game. The goal was very simple: we wanted people to actually use their sats, and people loved it. We've been all around the world displaying the game at conferences: Brazil, Prague, Nashville, Miami. We were living the dream.

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And after thousands of hours of work, even though conferences paid the flights and sponsors paid the game prizes, we didn't actually have an income. It was just enough to keep us going, but not really enough to make ends meet.

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By going to all these Bitcoin conferences, I met many people in the space who were in a similar, or even worse, situation. They were just trying to launch their project, follow their passion with Bitcoin, and build something to make adoption grow. But it is really hard sometimes to get paid for your work in Bitcoin.

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One of these people I met was Roger, Roger 9000. Maybe some of you know him. He is a Bitcoin musician. Already, being a musician can be very hard because getting paid for it is very competitive. Being a Bitcoin musician is even more specific, more niche.

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This guy makes his own music only about Bitcoin. He makes all the videos, he plays, and he goes around the world to Bitcoin conferences to perform. Most times, he has to spend his own sats that he earned, that he stacked with all this love, to go around the world and spread the message.

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This kind of commitment felt surreal, right? You are giving your life to Bitcoin. You give all your money and your dedication to Bitcoin. We became friends, and I tried to help and give some advice on how he could improve his situation, but I didn't really have an answer for him because we were all in the same position. We all love Bitcoin, we are all trying to dedicate our lives to this, and also find a way to stack some sats along the way. Of course, it is one of the goals.

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Eventually, I attended the Sovereign Engineering cohort. It is in Madeira, a Portuguese island in the middle of the Atlantic, a beautiful paradise place. I attended the Sovereign Engineering program. It is just a bunch of builders getting together. We love permissionless tech, and we try to come up with cool ideas, cool projects, and help each other build something.

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Me and my colleague Pedro built this Nostr application called Pubpay. It brings Lightning and identity together. It is used for donations, for splitting bills, for tips. Then I was organizing the after party of the Adopting Bitcoin conference, and I invited Roger to come play. But once again, there was no budget to pay him for his expenses.

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Then I thought, okay, we just built this app. It is about identity, it is about payments. Maybe we can adapt it somehow to help people like Roger, who perform and are not being fairly rewarded for their work. That is when we came up with the idea for Pubpay Live.

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So what is Pubpay Live? You might see it on the screens on the side of the stage. It is a simple application with identity and Lightning payments. In this case, a speaker or an artist creates a post on Nostr.

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How many people here zap? You know what Nostr is? Nostr is a permissionless, distributed network. It allows for the creation of identity, your profile, and a follow list. It also has zaps, which are a kind of signed Lightning payment.

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On Nostr, you have your key. You can sign the events that you want to post, and you can post that you want to pay someone with Lightning. So when you zap, the network knows it was you. You create a post on Nostr, you create a code with this post, and we display it on the screen next to the stage where the artist is performing or the speaker is giving a keynote.

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Then people can just scan it and interact. You can send a message and you can be on stage with the speaker. You can provide valuable feedback live if something hits, if you really like what the speaker is saying, or if you hate it and you want to criticize. You can also write a negative comment, of course.

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It is all permissionless. It is on Nostr, so there is no middleman. It is a decentralized network and there is no censorship.

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So what does this do to a room? You can see Roger performing in Brazil in this picture. The audience stops being just passive. You stop just being here, watching and receiving. You can also interact, you can also donate, and you can be part of the conversation. This creates a kind of synergy that breaks the line between stage and audience.

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For the speaker, other than being rewarded and getting some sats — of course, I am sure everybody here loves to get some sats — it is also useful feedback. The speaker can see immediately, oh, I got this zap. In that precise moment, you were saying something and you get this zap, and you think, okay, maybe somebody resonated with this.

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From there, it grew. Roger really liked it. Everything went perfectly well at the first after party we organized. He got many zaps and used it at other conferences. Then other musicians tried it.

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We also did a partnership with the Human Rights Foundation to donate using Pubpay Live to activists. Many times, activists do not have other ways of getting donations. They can be censored, and governments can close their bank accounts. Using Lightning and Nostr, it is all permissionless, and it allows everybody to send and everybody to receive.

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We kept using it in Bitcoin conferences. We went to Amsterdam, to Barcelona, to El Salvador, to Brazil. I kept seeing the same pattern: speakers come, they provide value, they spend years learning their craft, and then they share it here with you. You guys observe it all. What if there was a way that we could also reward speakers while they talk?

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That is when we decided, okay, let's try to do this for a whole conference. We did it for Adopting Bitcoin in El Salvador in November. For that, we built an integration that could connect the schedule of the conference to the posts of the speakers.

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But that was not the hard part. Now with AI and coding, it is super easy, if you have an idea, to implement it. The hard part is to coordinate everyone, to onboard most speakers on Nostr, to make sure they have a Lightning address, to make sure they make the post on time, and then to gather all the information and put it in a way that the program can read.

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This was a lot of work, but when it worked, it was magical to see the stage and to see people interacting. The separation disappeared because the audience was on stage with the speaker, and the speakers were finally being rewarded for the work they were doing. It was awesome to witness.

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For Adopting Bitcoin, we were able to get 47 speakers to create their notes. During the conference, we got 419 zaps, totaling 325,000 satoshis. Back then, we were at an all-time high, so it was a bit more than now.

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We did not just theorize. We did not just talk about Bitcoin. We were using Bitcoin as money, as it should be, not only as a store of value.

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So with Pubpay Live running on these stages, like I was telling you, it is super easy. You just get your Nostr client. Any Nostr client works. If you are not on Nostr, you can use Pubpay payments, and you can just use the camera to scan the QR code. You decide how much you want to zap, and you use your Lightning wallet to send the payment.

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In this case, if you do not have an account, it sends an anonymous zap. It is all on Nostr. It is not a walled garden. Everything is open, everything is permissionless.

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When speakers use Pubpay Live at a conference, it is on forever. You cannot be censored, you cannot be deleted. Even months later, when people are watching this at home on YouTube or something, they can still scan the QR code. The post will be online, and people can still donate, so it continues even after the conference.

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It has been a really beautiful journey. I want to end this talk with a more personal note. I have been building in Bitcoin for many years, and what keeps me coming back is not the number go up. It is not the Bitcoin price. It is the people.

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It is the kind of people who zap activists. It is the kind of people who come from all over the world to a Bitcoin after party to perform for free. It is people who are there at 11 p.m. troubleshooting why the software is still not working, because we want everything working so that at the conference we can all enjoy, use Bitcoin, learn more, and be together as a community.

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This is so beautiful that it keeps me coming back. Bitcoin is not just something that we hold. It is something that we use, and it is something that we can earn together. Thank you very much.