Welcome to Freedom Tech Summit!

Cypherpunk philosophy in a business context: the costs and benefits of refusing to compromise.

We learn the phrase "Don't Trust, Verify" but even if we really want to, all but a small handful of people are capable of verifying all there is behind Bitcoin. This makes us 2nd class citizens subject to trusting the few who do get it. I am out to change that.

I have used AI to build a stack of math education tools designed to get people from basic arithmetic to understanding ECDSA and Schnorr signatures. The stack includes a podcast, online courses, textbooks, and video.

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In this talk, we'll review the graduated wallet in ZEUS, the Bitcoin wallet that grows with you. Start as a newcomer with Cashu ecash, get your first Lightning addresses and start stacking. As your balance grows, the wallet will prompt you to upgrade to self-custodial Lightning or swap out on-chain.

We'll review the architecture, UX, and dive into why we chose Cashu over other new L2s.

Nostr is one of the most talked-about protocols in Bitcoin. Praised for censorship resistance, questioned for scalability and UX.

Panelists: Aleksandar Svetski (Satlantis), Max Hillebrand (cypherpunk) and Denis Zaliskyi (Synonym/Pubky)
Moderator: Jordi Llonch (Barcelona)

Topics:

• The trade-offs between decentralization, usability and performance
• Whether Nostr can compete with or complement existing platforms
• The role of Bitcoin-native identity and communication layers
• Lessons learned from builders on the front lines

Following the development of electrs, I will present Bindex - a performant Bitcoin indexing library written in Rust (https://github.com/romanz/bindex).
It uses on a new indexing schema and relies on new Bitcoin Core REST API endpoints for efficient data storage and retrieval. In addition, it supports SQLite-based caching for faster history synchronization.

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Governments have "Chainalysis" tools to follow Bitcoin transactions. Let's build an open-source tool for everybody to have a "Chainalysis" tool!
Bitcoin Flow is a visual graph-based UI for Bitcoin Transactions - where each node represents a transaction with input/output edges connected to other transactions. You can enter a specific txids, addresses and xpubs to see their transactions, label them, etc.
I'll be happy to get help integrating this project on personal nodes, and extending the tool to be able to build/display chains of PSBTs.

This keynote introduces Stable Channels, a Bitcoin-native wallet that collapses trading, payments, and settlement into one system. Hold USD stability while staying in BTC—no banks, tokens, or stablecoins. Lightning channels rebalance in real time via peer-to-peer BTC/USD trades that settle instantly. Spend dollars, hold bitcoin, and bring a stablecoin-like experience to self-custodial bitcoin.

Bitcoin was designed to remove trusted third parties — yet many real-world transactions still need a safety net. That's why we have Escrows.This talk walks through every major escrow mechanism available on Bitcoin today. It's use cases and implementation details.

Your email remains the same, but your lightning address might not.
This creates a frustration when you need to switch to a new lightning wallet - you have to tell everyone to use your new lightning address instead of your old lightning address.
If only Email providers could turn your email address to a lightning address...
ln2.email turns your email address @.com to asimilarly-looking lightning address @.com.ln2.email, with a redirection that you control.

Internet is broken. Login with accounts. Decentralized network relying on domain names. Censorship. Internet blackouts ordered by governments. But 2026 is the year of cryptoanarchy and freedom tech. We have all the building blocks to make technology work for us. It's not sometime in the future, it's now. I'll talk about some experiments: bridging MeshCore and Bitchat networks, web apps without backend, decentralized identity and the plumbing.

Many less-technical Bitcoiners need a recovery mechanism that doesn't require them to switch to a multisig/miniscript wallet. Timelock Recovery is a solution based on 2 pre-signed transactions - one that keep the Bitcoin on the same wallet, and another that moves it to a second wallet after a relative-locktime (nSequence). Pre-signed transactions are safer to save online, but obviously have some disadvantages.
We will talk about how to create, backup, monitor and execute Timelock Recovery plans via the RITREK Android app.

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We'll discuss how AI changes the way we ship on Hivetalk. Nostr moves fast and we've had to move faster — tighter feedback loops, sharper product instincts, less overhead. We'll get into actual tools we use to ship quicker and write better code, and how to stay sane building for a chaotic protocol. We'll also be honest about the tension between running an open project and keeping momentum. Leave with real ideas for building lean AI-First teams, shipping better Nostr products, and not letting openness become an excuse for slow.

@niftynei travels the world listening to what people are talking about and working on. In this 15m talk, she covers what matters more than ever for bitcoin development in an age of increasing access to information and infrastructure.

The proponents of BIP-110 made many bold claims about limiting the sizes of individual fields being effective at preventing putting contiguous data into the Bitcoin time chain which prompted me to put a 66kB contiguous image file into the time chain as the entire transaction to prove them wrong. In this talk, I will explain how I did this, some other ways of putting contiguous data into the chain, and debunk their strongest counterargument to my claim.

FIPS is a self-organizing encrypted mesh that addresses npubs over any medium you can send packets through.

Transport agnostic - WiFi, Ethernet, Bluetooth, UDP, TCP, Tor, Serial, Nostr.
Existing apps work unmodified via IPv6 TUN adapter.
Nostr keypair is your address - no registrars, no authorities

Bitcoin is scary — volatility, seed phrases, “make token.” None of it speaks human. Zappi brings Bitcoin, Cashu, and Nostr into one experience for everyday users by starting with what’s familiar. This session covers three design decisions that make Ecash feel like a regular payment: forward flows that hide the protocol entirely, mints that feel like cards rather than abstract servers, and backward flows repositioned as digital cash and vouchers. Built for the other 99%.

Centralized location-sharing services solve emergency alerting by asking users to trust a custodial provider with their real-time movements. Nostr offers a decentralized alternative, but the relay model leaks the metadata that matters in a duress scenario: who is alerting, who their trusted contacts are, and where they are.

This talk introduces NIP-GART (Group Alert & Response Transmission), an event kind for safety-critical alert and location broadcasts in which both content and metadata stay hidden from relay operators, as well as integration options.

Lunch and Chat

During this talk, I will explain the practical implications of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). In doing so, I will explore why it so important to be building freedom tech now as CBDCs continue to be launched. Building defenses for our freedoms is much harder after assualts have already begun.

I've been documenting CBDC development at the Cato Institute and Human Rights Foundation for years. In addition to writing a book on the subject, I also run the HRF CBDC Tracker where I detail developments in over 149 jurisdictions.

Bitcoin's L2 ecosystem is evolving fast, stablecoins and tokenized assets are coming to Lightning and beyond. The Kaleido SDK is the developer toolkit to swap them. In this keynote we'll walk through the architecture of the KaleidoSwap Protocol, API, and SDK, and show real code examples of how to connect to an RGB Lightning Node, get BTC and RGB asset liquidity from an LSP, and execute trustless atomic swaps across Bitcoin L2s.

Stop by and get help flashing MeshCore companion firmware onto a SenseCAP T1000-E — a pocket-sized device that connects you to the mesh. Our team will walk you through the process and have you sending off-grid encrypted messages in minutes.

MeshCore enables long-range communication with no servers, no SIM cards, no subscriptions. Your companion connects to nearby mesh nodes, and your messages travel the network without touching the internet.

Limited SenseCAP T1000-E devices available for purchase on-site. First come, first served.

Demo of Bitcoin Core Fee Rate Estimator and Fee Estimation Benchmarks.
Demo of Cluster Mempool Fee Rate Diagram UI.

https://bitcoincorefeerate.com

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What do people that choose a parallel way do? Introduction to a novel Tamers of Entropy that was just released. A cypherpunk tour of the mind and the universe.

Every active participant will build their own Specter Shield Lite in a pleasant group atmosphere. This is the improved Specter DIY, with a secure chip smartcard option.

In this workshop I'm going to explain what the idea is of the first DIY Hardware Wallet, which is completely Opensource, Air-Gapped and Bitcoin only.

Buy parts here:
👉https://clavastack.com/de/events/specter-shield-lite-workshop-freedom-tech-summit-prag

Since Bitcoin Core v30 you can use Cap'n Proto to connect to the node, which is much more powerful than RPC. It's currently only used for Stratum v2 but has the potential to do much more.

We'll use rust-bitcoin and bitcoin-capnp-types to try out the capabilities.

Additionally I'd like to discuss what new IPC methods would be useful, perhaps going beyond mining.

Learn how to bridge the gap between RAM offsets and the Lightning Network. This session demonstrates how to use memory injection to hook into a game’s internal state - like score or inventory - and trigger real-time bitcoin payments using a Lightning Address. We'll skip the source code and go straight for the RAM to turn binaries into a bitcoin-native experience.

At Wasabi Wallet I pushed for years to move the team off Slack, but switching cost was too high and nobody moved. When that infrastructure was compromised, we paid the price.

Marmot is a messaging protocol you can add to any Nostr client. Build your own interface, customize the workflow, keep encrypted groups interoperable across every app that implements it. Users stay because the UX fits them, not because they are locked in. This talk covers the MDK and what it takes to integrate Marmot into your app.

Linky is a cashu wallet that lets people send bitcoin through any messenger, store it on an NFC tag for private in-person transfer, or deliver it via gift-wrapped nostr messages. The recipient does not even need an app at first, yet can still receive and use bitcoin right away. In this workshop, you will be able to try it yourself, explore real use cases, and learn more about how it works.

Existing studies of coinjoin ecosystem offer little information beyond tx detection and aggregation of stats visible on-chain. The talk explain combination of on-chain tx analysis, coordinators monitoring, and active coinjoin participation to: 1) estimate the number of active users at a time, 2) detect previously unknown coordinators, 3) retrospectively observe prominent activity patterns and 4) deliver continuously updated ecosystem insights at https://crocs-muni.github.io/coinjoin/. The goal is to support informed decisions by coinjoin end-users.

For years I've chased the same goal: expressive, non-custodial Bitcoin apps requiring minimal trust.
First DLCs. Then DLC channels on Lightning. Then DLCs on Arkade. Each step hit the same wall: Bitcoin Script is too limited. Transaction covenants would solve it, but a softfork is far away.
The Arkade Emulator brings real covenant primitives to Bitcoin today, without a softfork. Inspect outputs, verify amounts, propagate spending conditions.
I'll talk about what this actually unlocks, what you can build with it, and where the limits are.

This presentation introduces a security architecture for Lightning nodes that combines Multi-Party Computation (MPC) wallets with validating signing (based on VLS) to eliminate the fundamental weaknesses of traditional Lightning deployments.

Lightning nodes are inherently hot wallets - they must keep funds online inside channels, often at significant scale. This creates a critical attack surface: if a node is compromised, an attacker can either steal private keys or trick the node into signing malicious channel states and draining funds.

Stop by and get help flashing MeshCore companion firmware onto a SenseCAP T1000-E — a pocket-sized device that connects you to the mesh. Our team will walk you through the process and have you sending off-grid encrypted messages in minutes.

MeshCore enables long-range communication with no servers, no SIM cards, no subscriptions. Your companion connects to nearby mesh nodes, and your messages travel the network without touching the internet.

Limited SenseCAP T1000-E devices available for purchase on-site. First come, first served.

Coinswap is a decentralized atomic swap protocol enhancing Bitcoin fungibility by swapping UTXOs without traces. Originally by Greg Maxwell (2013), developed by Chris Belcher (2019), revived by Citadel FOSS (2023), enabling privacy-preserving transactions over decentralized marketplaces.

Workshop: 45-minute theory + 75-minute live demo with multihop swaps.

Requirements: Bitcoin Mutinynet node (sync ~1 hour), Tor, compiled components (makerd, maker-cli, Taker) or Docker setup.

Details: https://hackmd.io/@ZR2r5ihhS8-ASbqDvOGtwg/BkljgyqdZx

Rather, what assures the integrity IN your pockets. Smart cards and secure elements. A deep-dive of "why?" and "how?" into the abyss of Java Cards and Global Platform, the dominant technologies that secures everything and anything from border crossings, phone calls and fiat payments to bitcoin wallets. From snorkelling among the colourful fish, to the untouched dark depths of the ocean ... with an empty can of SPAM.

Every platform makes decisions about what you see. The question isn't whether filtering happens, it's who controls it and whether switching away is a real option or a fantasy.

This talk makes the case for communities as the missing trust primitive: transparent, forkable, and accountable in ways that neither central platforms nor pure individual judgment can be. A practical framework for building software distribution that is genuinely free without being ungoverned.

Crypto-anarchy uses cryptography, decentralized money, and monetized decentralized apps to empower peer‑to‑peer economies and private coordination outside state control.
Key tools — mesh networks, distributed storage, secure distributed computing, privacy coins, and Nostr as a web‑of‑trust — enable resilient, private collaboration.
We can use these tools to join homesteaders, regenerative farmers, intentional communities, freedom cells, and allied groups to coordinate, trade, share knowledge, and mutual‑aid with privacy, resiliency, and dignity.

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An exploration into running a Bitcoin node on older, not sexy hardware. From 10+ year old laptops to even older SBCs and Android phones (via Termux).

Inspired by the whitepaper quote, that a node doesn't need to be a heavy server and the current RAMpocalypse:

With computer systems typically selling with 2GB of RAM as of 2008, and Moore's Law predicting current growth of 1.2GB per year, storage should not be a problem even if the block headers must be kept in memory

The game theory of just-in-time channels could be improved using fraud proofs: proofs that a LSP stole funds instead of opening a Lightning channel. The difficulty lies with the requirement for the proof to be public, without having to trust the victim. To solve this, we propose to use the blockchain as an arbitration layer. This results in a protocol where client and the LSP do not need to trust each other.

Full article: https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/proposal-public-fraud-proofs-for-just-in-time-channels/2451

Most apps still treat your device as a cache and the cloud as the source of truth. Local-first flips that model. I'll start with Ink & Switch's essay and its case for ownership, offline capability, privacy, and resilience, then show how Evolu implements those ideas with SQLite, end-to-end encrypted sync, CRDT-based merging, and stateless relays. I'll end with a broader argument: the future of software is not less cloud, but a different cloud.

As Bitcoiners, we can imagine a truly free
market where prices fall and anyone can save
without speculating. That's only possible if
Bitcoin becomes money people use. Payment
infrastructure is here. Payment volume isn't.
The missing piece is incentives, the same lever
card networks used to drive mass payment
adoption. We built the Bitcoin-native
equivalent: merchant-funded wallet-linked offers
on Lightning and NWC, instant and programmable,
without banks or surveillance, available to any
merchant anywhere in the world. Live demo

In this hands-on workshop, attendees will set up a self-sovereign Bark wallet and connect it to their Nostr client via Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC). By the end of the session, you'll be sending zaps directly from your own VTXOs and receiving inbound zaps to a wallet no custodian controls. Bring a laptop and a Nostr account; we'll handle the rest.

Bitcoin and AI give us powerful tools, but the most important stories still live inside people, and they only come out in person. Story Mining is a hands-on methodology I developed running intimate community sessions across Kenya, Puerto Rico, and Africa to surface real Bitcoin use cases through human conversation and creativity. In this workshop, we’ll use AI as a support tool while centering what only humans can do. You leave with a real story brief for your project. Here you will find our first StoryLab session online: https://youtu.be/NxD8Uz-5khw

Stop by and get help flashing MeshCore companion firmware onto a SenseCAP T1000-E — a pocket-sized device that connects you to the mesh. Our team will walk you through the process and have you sending off-grid encrypted messages in minutes.

MeshCore enables long-range communication with no servers, no SIM cards, no subscriptions. Your companion connects to nearby mesh nodes, and your messages travel the network without touching the internet.

Limited SenseCAP T1000-E devices available for purchase on-site. First come, first served.

Nostr based Submarine Swap marketplace of Electrum Wallet.

• Development and growth
• Future plans
• Privacy benefits

Don’t fight network effects. Build tools that are useful for one person or a small group, but can scale organically.

Nostr VPN is a Tailscale alternative with no third-party accounts. It runs on the Nostr-based FIPS network, using Nostr pubkeys instead of IP addresses.

Iris Chat is a Signal-like messenger built on Nostr Double Ratchet.

Hashtree is Nostr-native “IPFS lite”: Blossom, file chunking, directories, and encryption.

Since Bitaxe there are many decentralized home miners, and almost all are used in solo mode. Why? Pooled usage is cumbersome, plus there’s not much use of the few sats they would make. How about for daily zaps on Nostr? With Zappool you can do that: just plug your npub into a Bitaxe, and get daily zaps from it! Permissionless and easy.
Zappool -- likely the first working proxy pool -- solved the bootstrapping issue by being based on top of another pool. It creates a simple user experience by combining the bitcoin mining, lightning and Nostr stack.

In this workshop we go hands-on. We will get you connected to the FIPS mesh!

By the end of this workshop you will be able to communicate with other people in the local mesh, in a way that would keep working even if the internet goes down!

If you're up for it you can even expose your own server over FIPS with almost zero effort. If you have a spare OpenWRT router, bring it!

What to bring:

• Your laptop
• OpenWRT (24+) router (optional)

My research explores new ways of remembering and interacting with Bitcoin wallet seed phrases through movement and body memory. Using ballet movement patterns and choreography, I explore how the body and memory can work together as an alternative approach to learning and remembering digital information. The project combines ideas from movement, memory, and Bitcoin technology in a more human-centered way.

Advances in confidential computing have enabled wider use cases and deployment into broader freedom tech space. Verifiable software and confidentiality of data in use creates another layer of protection and privacy, both for users and service providers. The talk is meant to explain what the benefits are, what types of projects can benefit from it and how the entire community can benefit from added protection and assurance.
Further info:
https://primal.net/aljaz/the-end-of-trust-me-bro---confidential-computing-for-everyone

1. What is Routstr?

2. Setting Up a Routstr Node: Docker Setup

3. Admin Interface: What Node Runners Can Do

4. Using the Node as a Client

• Point any OpenAI-compatible SDK to your node URL
• Authenticate using a Cashu token as the API key

1. Using routstrd Client: Automated Routing

• Discovers best providers via Nostr NIP-91
• Automates routing based on price and availability
  6. What we learned!
• How to host your own sovereign AI gateway
• Basics of private, pay-per-request AI billing

Ark, Spark, ZK rollups: how they work, what they enable, risks & trade-offs, Lightning interoperability

A case study style talking covering features we have implemented to allow people to use Bitcoin in group settings, whether it's for savings, tip splits, or businesses.

Slides: https://d.nostr.build/o1aXJOuJ8mGNkFfF.pdf

• Arké (Christoph)
• Numo POS Testing (Erik)
• Zappi (JM)
• Maybe: Linky (Hynek), etc.

Screen printing session by @CypherpunkNOW 🔥

You'll have a unique opportunity to get your very own piece of swag by @CypherpunkNow himself. Bring your sweatshirts and tote bags and get yourself an exclusive collectible right on the spot!

NostrMail is a cross-platform, end-to-end encrypted email client that bridges Nostr and traditional email protocols. NostrMail avoids the pitfalls of PGP by using Nostr for key discovery. It works with existing email providers like Gmail and uses wordlist encoding (e.g., BIP39) so signatures and ciphertext remain valid under forwarding and quoting. NostrMail is open source, cross-platform, and available now on the Zapstore.

Brazil's Pix system has achieved remarkable financial inclusion, but at a hidden cost: by enabling personal identifiers, such as phone numbers and tax IDs, to be used as payment keys, the system has essentially created the perfect conditions for an epidemic of fraud. The lesson is clear: privacy is essential infrastructure, not an optional extra.

A deep dive into the LNbits stack, software and hardware:

• LNbits Software (20 mins): General overview + merchant stack updates overview, vibe coding extensions with new sandboxing feature
• LNbitsPoS (5 mins): The all-in-one merchant PoS
• LNbitsBox (15 mins): Nix-based, plug-and-play LNbits in a box
• BitcoinSwitch Workshop (20 mins): Pay an invoice → trigger a real-world action

• Bitcoin's economic security model, the role of blockspace as a free market, and strategies for preserving censorship resistance.
• Mining pool architecture, key attack vectors, and innovative approaches to decentralized mining incentives.
• Building FOSS Bitcoin applications with AI.
• Distinctions between consensus rules and relay policies, debates around spam, and meaningful metrics for evaluating consensus changes.

An interactive exploration of the beautiful mathematics behind Distributed Key Generation.

Together, we'll start on paper: contributing inputs as a group, and using them to create a shared secret that no single person knows. Nothing beyond high school mathematics required!

Then we'll use a browser-based FROST tool to coordinate key generation over a Nostr bulletin board, and walk away with a working secret share.

Q&A throughout, and a bonus challenge: sign a Nostr event under the group key.

Bitcoin is self-custody money—if keys are lost, funds are gone forever.
Inheritance remains an unsolved problem.

Existing approaches (seed sharing, multisig, custodians) have trade-offs in security, privacy, and usability.

Our approach uses Taproot:

• Key-path: normal use via single or MuSig2 signature
• Script-path: inheritance via timelock (CLTV) + heir signature
• Hidden policies: only executed paths are revealed (MAST)

This provides strong privacy, lower fees, and flexible design.

👉 Taproot enables invisible, secure inheritance.

How to be non-standard and still obtain fulfillment: Personally, in a family life, and in a creative life. What works, what satisfies, what doesn't, and why.

Official Freedom Tech Summit afterparty at the boat!

Come to the legendary boat Altenburg 1964

• Google Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/gHMe5SeHypopYxcu6
• Apple Maps: https://maps.apple/p/~nLnc16ZGYkGq6
• OpenStreetMap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/679349415