Upcoming talks at bitcoin++ Taipei 2025, sovereignty edition, Dec 15 - 17, 2025
Nicolas talks about his work building NBXplorer.
Venue: Main Stage
BTCPayServer
Most Bitcoin tools stop at self-custody, but self-custody only gives permissionless exit. Real sovereignty requires permissionless use and permissionless continuity — the ability for a tool to keep functioning w/o the creator if needed. Developers rarely see this side because the real chokepoints aren’t in code; they’re in governance, regulation, incentives, and legal structures that quietly shape what tools can or cannot ship. This talk uses real examples to show why technically sound systems still fail, why most wallets today aren’t actually sovereign, and why developers themselves should care about building tools that outlive the entities that create them.
Venue: Talks Stage
Bitcoin Keeper, Bitcoin Tribe, Bitcoin4India
You've got to be very careful applying a new cryptographic scheme to an existing problem because it's so easy to make things worse. FROST, the threshold multisignature scheme with applications to Bitcoin, is no different. Lloyd will reveal the tricks the Frostsnap team used to exploit FROST while hiding (most of) the complexity from the user.
Venue: Main Stage
Frostsnap
Get hands-on with Stable Channels, an open-source system that brings stabilized, bitcoin-backed dollar balances to the Lightning Network. Stable Channels offers a decentralized and self-custodial alternative to centralized stablecoins. Install the desktop app for macOS, Linux, or Windows, or build the Rust code from source. You’ll spin up a Lightning node, create a mainnet Stable Channel, and observe the stabilization mechanism end-to-end.
Venue: Talks Stage
Stable Channels
With the accessibility of AI, we are closer than ever to actualizing the promise of open source: an internet where all code is freely shared, edited, and shipped by anyone, anywhere. But AI companies are also the biggest threat to this vision, hijacking the spirit of openness in the arms race to corporate dominance. This talk will discuss what open AI actually looks like — with full user control at every level, from clients and agents to models — and how we’re making it possible through Nostr and Bitcoin. Join our workshop later to try it hands-on!
Venue: Main Stage
Soapbox
A brief introduction to sovereign identity with Portal: what it is, how it works and how to get started
Venue: Main Stage
Portal technologies Inc
Portal technologies Inc
This workshop will begin with a high-level overview of FROST, including Shamir secret sharing, distributed key generation, and threshold cryptography. Then we’ll get hands-on and collaboratively create a FROST multisig using a simple Rust command-line tool. We’ll finish by signing and verifying real threshold signatures. Can you sign a Nostr event? A Bitcoin transaction? Let’s find out.
Venue: Talks Stage
Frostsnap
Build a Nostr app with AI-assisted programming, open source at every level! No programming, code, AI, or Nostr experience needed — open to complete beginners and experienced developers alike! You will walk away from this workshop knowing how to build websites and apps on Nostr with open source AI tools, how to publish your project and share it, how to edit an existing project with AI, and how to submit your changes to open source developers.
Venue: Main Stage
Soapbox
Signing devices are great, but they are not wallets. You may use them for multiple different wallets, at the same time! While "accounts" were introduced for this purpose, users don't know/care about it. This talk is the presentation of the current state of research for making xpubs always different, each time you use your signing device for a new wallet.
Venue: Main Stage
Wizardsardine
Banks used to be great... then everything changed when the surveillance state attacked. Pt. 1 Learn about building self-sovereign community banks with federated Chaumian ecash. Pt. 2 Hands on workshop to build a fedimint wallet with the Fedimint SDK.
Venue: Talks Stage
Fedi
Silent Payment is a static payment code scheme that rely on non interactive ECDH operations between sender and recipient(s) of a transaction to generate the scriptpubkeys, which means wallet developers need to totally rethink the way a wallet works. Dana is an attempt at a pure silent payment, privacy preserving mobile wallet, and highlight the main challenges and opportunities that wallet developers will encounter working on silent payment.
Venue: Main Stage
Silent Payments
BIPs are the standards documents for Bitcoin, but they don't cover every aspect of how Bitcoin is used. In this talk, I will explain why anyone who is writing software for Bitcoin should also consider writing a BIP.
Venue: Main Stage
bitcoin/bitcoin
I will introduce the concept of medical sovereignty (what it is and why it's important), give an overview of healthcare data access within the US (it's very fiat), and lay out a roadmap of how someone
Venue: Talks Stage
Taiwan's unique role in Bitcoin in the context of Taiwan's history and culture
Venue: Main Stage
Taiwan BitDevs
Craig Raw has proposed a new BIP for how to express silent payments as output descriptors. This is a report on the new BIP and what silent payments are.
Venue: Talks Stage
Base58⛓️🔓
Building BDK exposed fundamental issues in how the Electrum protocol abstracts Bitcoin state. This talk examines how Electrum’s API incentivises unsafe assumptions, how wallets attempt to mitigate them, and what changes are needed to avoid a recurring class of wallet edge-case failures.
Venue: Main Stage
Sovereignty requires permissionless AI: Routstr provides open, permissionless access to AI by removing accounts, identity, and centralized gatekeepers. Through open-source routing and decentralized nodes, Routstr turns AI inference into a free market—neutral, censorship-resistant, and pay-per-use. AI becomes infrastructure, not a product.
Venue: Talks Stage
routstr
Everyone hacks! Let’s build some tools for sovereignty
Venue: Main Stage
Fedi
Base58⛓️🔓
First round of hackathon judging. Judges will walk around between all projects in a science fair style exposition. Top projects will advance to participate in the finals presentation on the last day.
Venue: Main Stage
Fedi
Base58⛓️🔓
An exploration of the modern hardware wallet landscape and the technical approaches for creating unified interfaces across different devices and platforms. What You'll Learn: This talk begins with the fundamentals—examining the threat model that hardware wallets address and diving into the technical components that make them secure, including secure elements and communication systems that protect your private keys. The session explores why cross-compatibility has become essential in today's ecosystem, particularly for multisig implementations, and examines the evolving standards like PSBT (Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions) and BIP 388 that enable seamless interoperability. The core focus is a comprehensive implementation overview of common interface approaches. This deep dive traces the evolution from Bitcoin Core's original HWI through WizardSardine's async-hwi improvements, culminating in bhwi—the latest advancement that builds upon lessons learned from both predecessors. The presentation examines architectural decisions, compares approaches, and extracts practical patterns for building robust hardware wallet interfaces that work across multiple devices and platforms. This session is designed for developers building wallet software, hardware wallet manufacturers, and technical professionals looking to implement or improve hardware wallet integration in their projects.
Venue: Main Stage
Wizardsardine
In Bitcoin, censorship resistance depends on privacy: if transactions are transparent, it becomes trivial to blacklist, surveil, and suppress. The freedom to transact is necessary for free speech and assembly. Without the ability to spend, how can anyone publish writing or acquire transit to a meeting? This talk explores how Payjoin brings privacy-by-default to Bitcoin. Unlike other tech, Payjoin’s steganographic transaction looks ordinary while undermining surveillance heuristics to resist selective censorship. We’ll look at how Payjoin Foundation and the Payjoin Dev Kit (PDK) integrations make this privacy a practical default for wallets and services today. Finally, we’ll preview the consequences of next-genration Payjoin (v3) designs, which even keep knowledge of your addresses from your transaction counterparties.
Venue: Main Stage
Payjoin Foundation
Who will take home the top sats? Join us for the hackathon finals presentation where the teams advancing out of the expo compete to win bitcoin++’s first sovereignty hackathon
Venue: Main Stage
Fedi
Base58⛓️🔓
Zero Knowledge Proofs - and programmable cryptography more broadly - have exploded in popularity over the last several years. This talk gives an overview of what they are and how they enable sovereignty by letting us verify without revealing and compress heavy computation into succinct checks. We'll ground the ideas in cases studies across money, communication, markets and identity.
Venue: Main Stage
This is a hands-on workshop where you will learn how to use Ambrosia, a new point-of-sale application that uses PhoenixD for the wallet backend. Ambrosia was designed to be easily installed on very low-resource SBCs, allowing any merchant to accept bitcoin without trusting third parties with their funds or data, for under US$100. By enabling merchants to operate without TTPs, Ambrosia allows merchants to be truly sovereign, accelerating the separation of money and state. In this workshop, you will install and explore Ambrosia using your laptop.
Venue: Talks Stage
bitcoin devops
Bitcoin was born from the cypherpunk vision of self-sovereignty, a world where individuals control their money through code, not institutions. In this talk, we’ll explore how BULL Wallet, a fully open-source and Bitcoin-only mobile wallet, reclaims that ethos by blending usability with uncompromising privacy and technical purity. Built for both beginners and power users, BULL Wallet integrates on-chain, Lightning, and Liquid transactions, supports Payjoin, hardware wallets integration, autmated atomic-swaps and encryted vault backup (Recoverbull protocol), all without collecting a single data point or requiring user identification. Attendees will see how design choices rooted in freedom, cryptography, and simplicity can make sovereignty accessible to everyone, not just the cypherpunks. This is Bitcoin self-custody, sovereign by design.
Venue: Main Stage
Bull Bitcoin
Build a physical device which can notify you in the real world when you receive a Zap on Nostr. Requires $15USD for materials costs. Limited to 10 participants
Venue: Talks Stage
RITREK
Ruben Somsen has published a new method of performing the initial block download. By utilizing SwiftSync, Utreexo nodes that are performing full validation are able to have 0 proof download overhead while having the benefits of avoid a costly database. We'll be going through how it works on the low level.
Venue: Main Stage
OpenSats
We sit down with some wallet legends to talk about the state of sovereignty in the bitcoin self-custody space
Venue: Main Stage
Base58⛓️🔓
Payjoin Foundation
bitcoin/bitcoin
Portal technologies Inc
Frostsnap
Hackathon winners announced and end of conference closing
Venue: Main Stage
Fedi
Base58⛓️🔓