The intersection of Bitcoin and AI

Why bitcoin is the native currency for the internet and AI, how Nostr Wallet Connect enables seamless and controlled AI access to a bitcoin lightning wallet, and real world examples and tools that enable users to spend bitcoin using their AI agent and developers to charge bitcoin for AI access.

Kickoff (Conference + Hackathon)

The Last Mile of Lightning: Tools for Non-Technical Builders

This talk looks at how we’re moving from Lightning as a tool for developers to Lightning as a platform anyone can build on. I’ll share what it’s been like building Tando as a non-technical person and how we’ve used Lightning to create something real and usable for everyday people. The goal isn’t just innovation for its own sake. It’s about making Lightning simple enough so more people can build with it, especially where Bitcoin is actually needed.

medium of exchange

Description to come.

Hackathon Team Building

Hackathon Ideas Workshop

Hacking Time

Lightning Sparks

An in-depth analysis of the tradeoffs between new protocols like Spark, Spark vs Lightning, and Spark vs. LND

Requiem for a Decentralized Bitcoin

Description to come

User, Not Coder: How Lightning Feels on the Trenches

Developers build the Lightning Network, but users like me live it [I work front-of-house at LN Markets, handling customers every day, and I’m not a dev.]. This talk brings a fresh perspective to the table, showing you how your work impacts real people. By sharing my experience, I’ll help you see where Lightning excels and where it needs refinement to onboard the next million users (hopefully). For a developer audience, this is a chance to align technical innovation with practical usability, straight from someone who’s been in the trenches.

Early Bird Sessions: Bitcoin at Work(shop)

Formerly known as the Bitcoin LARP, join us for a Bitcoin Work(shop) where we walk through how nodes work in real time.

Hackathon Expo

RGB assets ride the Lightning

In this workshop, we’ll explore how the RGB protocol extends the Lightning Network with asset capabilities.We’ll start with a quick overview of how RGB works on LN. Next, we'll dive into a live demonstration of managing two RLN nodes: opening a channel, transferring RGB assets, and performing an asset swap. We’ll then take a peek at the code of RLN and its custom fork of rust-lightning, showing how straightforward it can be to adapt an existing Lightning node for RGB compatibility. An open discussion on future developments and potential applications will wrap up the workshop. Throughout the session, active participation will be encouraged.

Flux Presentation

Description to come

Lexe: Next-generation Lightning infrastructure based on TEEs

Lightning Network adoption faces critical challenges: unreliable offline receive capabilities, expensive node hosting, and loss of self-sovereignty from custodial wallets. Lexe’s radical next-generation architecture fixes these problems by leveraging Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to create secure, always-online Lightning nodes that don’t compromise on self-custody.

Lightning Node Security

We'll describe how we secure one of the largest Lightning Nodes on the network, why usual go-to solutions don't work, and why it applies to most crypto-currency applications (layer 2, smart contracts, ..).

This One Math Trick Powers the Future of Lightning - PTLCs 101

Discover how a simple elliptic curve trick enables more private and flexible Lightning payments. This talk breaks down the math behind PTLCs — including adaptor signatures, scalar tweaks, and how they improve on HTLCs

Everything I know about Routing Reliability and Liquidity on the Lightning Network

Since 2018 I have been studying the Routing dynamics of the Lightning Network. My results have been influential to all major implementations. Yet many of my findings and knowledge is scattered over various research papers, git discussions and articles. Also I have obviously read quite a bit about the ideas of other researchers. I would like to use this opportunity to summarize everything that I have learnt over the years about the routing dynamics and liquidity management challenges on the network. Hopefully this will give you a solid basis of insights to improve your lightning network operations.

Challenges of Building a Non-Custodial Lightning App

Stacker News moved to non-custodial on Jan 3, 2025. This talk will cover how we transitioned to it over the course of 2024, the challenges we had to overcome to deliver a good user experience, and how it’s going.

Graduated wallets

Graduated wallets allow users to onboard to a custodial system and experience the magic of making a Lighting payment, then upgrade when it's economically feasible to self-custody. Learn about how ZEUS is thinking about graduated wallet UX and our Cashu integration.

Gossip v2: Measurements to inform Minisketch-ing

The gossip network that exists between lightning nodes is a fundamental component of the lightning payment channel network; without it, payers could not easily build routes and attempt to send payments. However, the health and performance of this network is not being actively monitored. Anecdotally, serious issues are discovered intermittently, and patched over with fixes. There are also observed issues with lost messages, or high bandwidth consumption, that are fundamentally at odds, given how gossip works today. With the gossip v2 proposal underway, this talk explores: - The performance of the existing mainnet gossip network, by presenting analysis of observed gossip traffic - Historical changes in implementation behavior, and how may that impacts gossip performance - Brief introduction to Minisketch and Erlay as an alternative to batched flooding; differences between Bitcoin L1 gossip, and Lightning gossip - Discussion on how the current gossip v2 proposal impacts usage of Minisketch / set reconciliation - Call to Action / Call for Feedback

Ark: Your gateway to lightning

Lightning is becoming the de-factor interoperability layer for bitcoin payments. However, as an end-user you might not want to run a lightning node. In this talk I give a short intro to Ark and explain how it can make your lightning experience go better

Early Bird Sessions: Programming Lightning

A workshop that teaches developers how lightning works and how to build a node using LDK. This is a condensed version of a longer, multi-day course. At btc++ we’ll focus on "Intro to Payment Channels". This workshop walks developers through how to build a Lightning channel. We start with the concept of simply sending off-chain transactions to a peer via email or text, and then we work our way towards adding components one-by-one (ex: multi-sig, spending paths, timelocks, revocation keys). With each step, we discuss the shortcomings of channel constructions that don't work well, and we'll eventually make our way to a robust Lightning Channel. The entire workshop is in Replit, so students will build funding, commitment, and HTLC transactions and broadcast them themselves into a regtest environment running in the background.

Running Lightning at Scale

Description to come

Differential Fuzzing on Lightning Network

This talk introduces fuzzing and differential fuzzing techniques. We'll explore how these testing methods can make the Lightning Network more secure and robust by uncovering inconsistent behavior between different Lightning implementations and their adherence to the BOLT specifications.

Implementing Lightning

Desc to come

Hackathon Finals

Sim-ln

SimLN is an open-source Rust tool for simulating Lightning Network payment activity across real or mocked topologies. Compatible with LND, CLN, Eclair, it enables developers, researchers, and signet operators to generate realistic traffic for load testing, protocol evaluation, or synthetic data generation. This session introduces SimLN’s capabilities, demonstrates how to configure and run simulations using a simple sim.json file, and explores its flexible modes—from fully randomized traffic to precisely scheduled payments. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of how to integrate SimLN into their own environments to accelerate testing and experimentation on the Lightning Network.

Splicing Lightning

What’s new in Lightning and how it’s currently splicing out.

Cashu: Money at Lightning Speed

Description to come

Receiving Bolt12 payments in LND

Description to come

Panel

Hackathon Awards + Closing