bitcoin++ Nairobi 2026: Open Source Edition
2026-06-17..2026-06-19
Nairobi, Kenya
as the organisers put it
Join us in Nairobi next June for an incredible event. We’ll be partnering with local organizers to bring you a four day bitcoin developer bananza. bitcoin++ will be featuring our first ever “open source” edition, honing in on the open source builders and developers from Africa and around the globe.
who it's for
bitcoin developers, open source maintainers, lightning developers, wallet developers, contributor community managers, bitcoin mining engineers, developer advocates
topics
policy-based signing for Lightning; reproducible builds for Bitcoin; modern fuzzing in Bitcoin Core; LNURL pay and address endpoints; Nostr as decentralized data layer; Nitro enclave attestation flows; Cashu ecash protocol; cross-platform wallets with Flutter and BDK-Dart; Stratumv2 mining protocol; taproot privacy and anti-fee-sniping; implementing RBF (BIP 125) in LDK; reviewing pull requests and reviewer workflows
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Conference Kickoff | niftynei | 13m |
Conference is the 17th Bitcoin++ event and the first billed as an open source edition, held in Nairobi and framed around the four essential freedoms of FOSS… | ||
| Be Robin: A path into Bitcoin Open Source | Fabian Jahr | 24m |
Advocates starting as a contributor to an existing project rather than launching a flagship one, showing how to review pull requests to become indispensable… | ||
| Reviewing PRS | Naiyoma | 15m |
Claims that review scarcity is the main bottleneck in Bitcoin Core, that the good first issue label is removed, and that AI-driven volume is making the backlog… | ||
| Don't Trust Your Node: Policy-Based Signing for Secure Lightning Infrastructure | Sulaiman Aminu | 25m |
Validating Lightning Signer (VLS) separates signing from the node, enforcing 50+ policies that check commitment progression, HTLC state, fees and destination… | ||
| Hackable by Default: Software that's Really Open Source | shantaram | 28m |
Argues that open source should be hackable by default and demonstrates a concrete system: Nostr Canvas with network-published tiles as sandboxed Lua scripts… | ||
| Built Here, Used Everywhere: Closing the African Open Source Founder Gap | Femi Longe, Wisdom Nji | 01h 08m |
Panel lays out concrete work: a Rust reimplementation called joinmarketRS to make CoinJoin usable without full nodes; an SMS gateway stack (SMSWithoutBorders)… | ||
| LNURL in the Real World: Improving Payment Communication for Africa | Theophilus Isah, Kgothats... | 59m |
Explains how LNURL specs are used in production: implements L06 pay request and L16 lightning address endpoints as simple Express routes, calculates a… | ||
| Nostr, an open source database? | Sam | 28m |
Claims that Nostr is a decentralized, open-source data layer where every record is signed by a user (pubkey verification), stored on many independent relays… | ||
| Can AI Help Bitcoin? Responsible Practices for Open-Source Development | Kelvin Isievwore | 31m |
Claims that AI speeds debugging and rapid iteration but also produces convincing code that is wrong. Reports from 6 months with Bitrus grantees (27 grantees… | ||
| Don't Trust, Attest: Enclaves as a Trust-Minimization Tool for Bitcoin Apps | Joshua Aruokhai... | 35m |
A concrete design that uses Nitro Enclaves and reproducible Nix builds to get verifiable PCR0 attestation, KMS-gated keys (GenerateDataKey/Decrypt) and… | ||
| Modern Testing and Fuzzing in Bitcoin Core | frankomosh | 21m |
Describes how Bitcoin Core adds fuzz harnesses with a single target macro and fuz_data_provider, builds with sanitizers or no-sanitize then measures coverage… | ||
| The Cognitive Cost of AI-Assisted Open Source | Sadiq | 38m |
AI lowers the barrier to open source but creates measurable harms: copying AI outputs leaves contributors with 5% understanding, while using AI plus human… | ||
| Open Source is Dead | Alex Gleason | 26m |
Argues that open source still matters because it preserves ownership and control even as AI accelerates vulnerability discovery, recommends running the same AI… | ||
| Hackathon Kickoff | Alex Lewin | 31m |
A 24‑hour hackathon kicks off with live demos using AI tools like Shakespeare to auto‑generate a web app that “fossifies” code (uploads snippet, selects… | ||
| AI-Powered Product Design for Bitcoin Experiences | Elizabeth Musanga | 39m |
Claims an AI-led workflow that actually replaces grunt work for discovery and moves design faster: agents (Gemini, Manas, Perplexity, Granola, Kasa + Figma)… | ||
| Lightning as Bitcoin’s Translation Layer | Sabina Waithira Gitau | 21m |
Lightning powers a working translation layer called Tando that routes Lightning payments into M-Pesa, mapping a phone number to a lightning address like… | ||
| Proto Fleet | Marvin Charles, Hadi Alamdar | 17m |
Proto Fleet is a free, open-source, self-hosted miner fleet manager that actually ships dashboards, bulk actions, site/rack drill-downs, and repair tracking… | ||
| "Beyond the Barrier: Female African Developers Reimagining Bitcoin Innovation" | Wandia Mugo... | 18m |
Dada Devs trains 300+ African female developers across 5+ countries with a 70% retention rate, teaching Programming Bitcoin, Lightning, UX and AI and running a… | ||
| Anatomy of a Bark VTXO | Matthew Vuk | 31m |
Bark stores spendable units as VTXO on disk inside a per-app SQLite DB; each VTXO is a leaf in a round Taproot transaction funded by a coordinator (captain)… | ||
| Bitcoin Transfer | WUOR BHANG | 13m |
MVP website converts Bitcoin to South Sudanese pound by generating a Lightning invoice and triggering an MTN MoMo payout so merchants receive SSP instantly… | ||
| Cross-Platform Bitcoin Wallets with Flutter & BDK-Dart | John Osezele | 10m |
Flutter apps get full BDK wallet primitives via BDK-Dart, exposing wallet creation (P2WPKH and P2TR), Electrum/Esplora sync, send/receive and tx history… | ||
| Mining Illustrated feat. Mujina Open-Source Firmware | Ryan Kuester | 01h 48m |
Guided walkthrough of the full mining data path with live demo: Mujina open-source firmware runs on laptops in CPU mode (roughly 1–10 MH/s per core), then… | ||
| The Future of Bitcoin Mining is Open | Gio Galt | 32m |
Claims that Bitcoin mining will become open and composable, backed by a concrete project: Tether publishes an open MDK (Mining Development Kit) — an… | ||
| Plugins, Not Forks | Tobses | 51m |
BTCPay Server moves feature work out of core into an extensible plugin system: about 30 plugins live in a directory, plugins build from a plugin template (C#… | ||
| Hackathon Expo | Alex Lewin | 24m |
A collection of hackathon projects demonstrates concrete builds: a cross‑border flow that takes Wave CFA in Senegal, calls an LN URL to Tando and delivers… | ||
| Working on Bitcoin | niftynei, Naiyoma, Fabian Jahr | 37m |
History: contributors start around 2019 and some go serious in 2023, now splitting time between reviews and feature work. Current work includes a P2P… | ||
| Building Tapnob: Connecting Lightning to Real-World Payments in Africa | Mubarak | 29m |
Tapnob connects Lightning to Nigerian bank rails and bills providers, running for 11 months and processing 100k+ transaction volume. Engineering focuses are… | ||
| Gating APIs with Lightning: A Hands-On L402 Workshop Using Aperture | Abdullahi | 01h 21m |
Workshop builds an L402-gated API from scratch using Aperture in a Docker regtest: backend runs on port 9000, Aperture listens on port 8700 and stores grants… | ||
| Stratumv2 | Sy | 29m |
Stratum v2 replaces JSON RPC with a binary, encrypted protocol that claims ~7.7% share-acceptance improvement and near-zero stale shares, preventing hash-rate… | ||
| Cashu ecash protocol | Martin Arts | 22m |
Demonstrates a working Cashu stack: users mint and melt via Lightning to get blind-signed e‑cash tokens, move tokens peer‑to‑peer as QR strings or printed… | ||
| Towards Better Privacy Reasoning | Shehu | 15m |
Chain analysis ties inputs by wallet clustering using heuristics like common input ownership and change detection and breaks pseudonymity rather than… | ||
| Bitcoin, Demystified: A Live Walkthrough from M-Pesa to Self-Custody | Fidel Otieno | 50m |
Live demo inspects a real block on mempool.space, explains UTXO vs account models, and shows mining economics (halving to 3.125 BTC reward). A new Moon wallet… | ||
| Lightning + Mobile Money: Bridging Two Financial Worlds | Bright Kportiklah | 22m |
Bitsenda connects Lightning to African mobile money by generating a Lightning invoice that the payer settles and routing that receipt through third‑party fiat… | ||
| Building contributor-friendly repositories with Devenv | Godefroid Chapelle | 35m |
Workshop shows how Devenv plus Nix creates reproducible dev shells: init makes three config files and an env shell, adding one line language = "python" yields… | ||
| The 256 Foundation's Open-Source Mining Stack | Ryan Kuester | 44m |
Two manufacturers control roughly 97% of ASIC supply and pools concentrate ~75% of hashrate; the project publishes four open components: Ember One 100 W… | ||
| Lightning Education as Infrastructure: Scaling Technical Capacity Across Multiple Countries | M | 19m |
Runs a repeatable pipeline that finds coders, delivers a five-day bootcamp + hackathon, then funnels graduates into Bitrust pathways; outcome shows… | ||
| Don’t Trust, Verify. Reproducible Builds in Bitcoin | Ojok Emmanuel Nsubuga | 13m |
Explains how to confirm distributed binaries match published source code by building locally and comparing hashes, notes timestamp and metadata differences… | ||
| Hackathon Finals | Alex Lewin | 44m |
Six hackathon finals present concrete demos and claims: a GitHub-scanning onboarding tool using retrieval augmented generation to match contributors to issues… | ||
| Open Sourcing Developer Community | Mubarak, Bright Kportiklah, Sadiq, Sy | 01h 06m |
Local chapters report concrete results: Kaduna runs monthly meetups that spin contributors into projects, Mauritius grows to about 50 members and schedules an… | ||
| Hackathon Awards | niftynei, Alex Lewin | 20m |
A fast rundown: the hackathon fields a record 37 projects and hands out cash and tickets: third wins 1 million Satoshi, second 1.5 million Satoshi, first 2.5… | ||
| Anti-Fee-Sniping and Privacy for Taproot Transactions | Abiodun Awoyemi | 32m |
BIP326 standardizes use of nSequence on Taproot outputs to hide Lightning channel closures by randomly choosing per-input relative locktime or per-transaction… | ||
| Defining an Open (Human) Agent Network for Bitcoin On/Off-Ramps | Jodom | 19m |
Hands-on workshop walks through the Pontmore protocol (a Nostr‑native spec family) and the minimum interoperable core: PIP0 agent definition, escrow… | ||
| Implementing Replace-By-Fee (BIP 125) in LDK Node | Rita Anene | 28m |
LDK Node implements BIP 125 using BDK as the wallet backend and ships a new pending payment store that persists to file/SQLite/Postgres and tracks a tree of… | ||
| Bearer Tokens for Bitcoin: A Look at Cashu | Mikey | 29m |
Cashew is a Chaumian e‑cash protocol built on Bitcoin and Lightning that issues bearer tokens by minting lightning sats into blind signatures via the Blind… | ||
| Sending and Receiving silent payment transactions with bdk-sp | Sonkeng Maldini | 34m |
Experimental bdk-sp code demonstrates sending and receiving BIP-352 silent payments end-to-end: a silent payment address (SPRT...) encodes Bcan/BPEN separation… | ||
| Workshop: Building Nostr apps with open source AI tools | Mary Kate Fain | 45m |
Workshop shows how to use Shakespeare and Open Code with an OpenRouter key and GLM 5.1 to build a Nostr app end-to-end: a Bitcoin feed site is generated in… | ||
| Sending and Receiving silent payment transactions with bdk-sp | Sonkeng Maldini | 34m |
Demonstrates sending and receiving silent payments with the bdk-sp experimental repo, using ECDH shared secrets from BIP-352 to derive per-output pubkeys and… | ||
| nothing matches | ||