After a year of jumping through hoops, MasterCard approved our Lightning based solution. Here's part 2 of our story in the journey from India to Silicon Valley to push for adoption

We'd ranted about our dream to create a solution that would enable people to actually use and do things with Bitcoin as evident in my post history. As a bunch of young founders, we realized quickly after developing our first hardware prototypes how hard that was actually going to be and how ridiculously capital intensive that process was, for a market that was waning away during the "crypto-winter". We ended up open-sourcing a portion of our developed hardware and had to absolutely put it on ice until we have more funds to build it out.

Almost every investor in the Baltics told us to go away when we mentioned the word Bitcoin and today we're proud to say that we didn't pivot into launching a random token, IEO, or whatever to raise funds to make our dream come true. We realized Silicon Valley was where we needed to be and we managed to get UC Berkeley's SkyDeck VC interested in the problem we wanted to solve. Our first in person interaction was - "We don't usually invest in hardware, crypto companies and B2C companies, but you guys are all three!" Long story short, as a bunch of young adults, we got UC Berkeley and Charlie Lee to invest in us among others! Admittedly, it's been uncertainty layered upon uncertainty but we didn't want to solve any problem other than the one pushing for the mass adoption of Bitcoin.

As beautiful as it would be if the entire world cared about privacy and security, and used hardware wallets to secure their crypto, the first steps are to push adoption, bring new users onto Bitcoin and provide new and better ways for existing Bitcoiners to do things with their Bitcoin. With that in mind, being a tiny company, after hundreds of conversations with financial institutions, banks and electronic money institutions in Europe and the USA, it's clear these big organizations still do not want to be associated with Bitcoin unless you're coming to them with atleast $2-10M in the bank. Despite this, after a long winded uphill battle, we've finally built out our Lightning Network based card product whose absolutely most primitive form was approved by MasterCard today. This is a tiny ftraction of all the stuff we've shelved away until we can grow to be a larger company with more resources. In any case, if you would like to join our private beta and test it out firsthand, it's on lastbit.io. This is a fully functional testnet application that gives you a feel for what this is all about and mirrors the main app as well.

​

Thanks for reading this rant. Your feedback, if any, would be greatly appreciated.

Submitted June 30, 2020 at 11:23PM by shadow12348 https://bit.ly/2Bs0xHP