Proving that custodial, centralized, altcoin casinos should not the one means to achieve this trade, the privacy-focused bitcoin trade Bull Bitcoin lately went multinational, bootstrapping a staff in France and increasing its companies to the whole eurozone. The transfer comes solely a 12 months after saying their enlargement into Costa Rica.
“Bull Bitcoin might be the longest-running Bitcoin-only, self-custodial trade,” Theo Mogenet, Europe Normal Supervisor for Bull Bitcoin, instructed Bitcoin Journal in an interview.
”If you purchase Bitcoin from us, it goes straight to your pockets, we by no means maintain consumer funds—and it displays Francis’s imaginative and prescient of privateness and the cypherpunk ethos.”
https://x.com/Bull Bitcoin_/status/1881371651251769619
Based in Montreal, Canada, in 2013, Bull Bitcoin’s major declare to fame is its noncustodial trade mannequin. Slightly than take your fiat and credit score a bitcoin steadiness to your account on their books, Bull Bitcoin forces customers to enter a Bitcoin public handle earlier than buy. This ensures that when fiat lands on their account, they will shortly pay out the bitcoin to the consumer’s pockets of alternative.
They’ve additionally been early and energetic supporters of the Lightning Network and Liquid Network, and have even built-in PayJoin into their platform, all of which supply important privateness advantages to their customers.
Lastly, they’ve developed a line of merchandise centered not on buying and selling and hypothesis however on utilizing bitcoin as cash.
Bull Bitcoin permits customers to pay their month-to-month payments with bitcoin akin to lease, electrical energy, knowledge plans, and as of late even purchase actual property. In addition they have a Bitcoin wallet app that’s nonetheless in its early phases, however is shortly gathering a robust record of options.
One delicate however highly effective distinction between Bull Bitcoin and most different exchanges is their bitcoin-only stance, which rejects promoting altcoins which can be the bread and butter of most exchanges — monetizing the speculative fervor of the crypto markets.
Bull Bitcoin ignores the entire crypto market, focusing solely on bitcoin, which permits it to deploy cutting-edge applied sciences earlier than lots of its rivals. The staff at Bull Bitcoin thereby doesn’t run the compliance threat or carry technical debt that comes naturally with supporting tons of of various altcoins.
The result’s a worthwhile firm with a lean and imply staff that has now gone worldwide.
Privateness is Not a Crime
The ultimate piece to Bull Bitcoin’s success is perhaps its founding story. Began by French-Canadian entrepreneur and Bitcoin Maximalist Francis Pouliot, the corporate has been fully self-funded, receiving no VC cash to date.
Whereas sticking to the early cypherpunk imaginative and prescient of bitcoin as sovereign cash couldn’t have been straightforward, it has enabled the corporate to make selections and make use of methods that different exchanges typically keep away from. 
Now, they’re getting into the EU in an period the place many different cryptocurrency companies are exiting the union. Corporations like Deribit left Europe years ago and even giants like Tether are being squeezed out from the European Union resulting from regulatory pressure. Bull Bitcoin has as an alternative dove in, seeing a possibility to achieve an underserved market.
On the compliance entrance, Bull Bitcoin has taken a really totally different strategy than different market individuals. Slightly than over-comply out of an abundance of warning as seen with many crypto exchanges, they’ve caught to the letter of the regulation, and appeared for methods to defend their customers from overzealous regulators or politicians.
“Now we have lots of expertise coping with the federal government. We come from Canada so we’re used to authorities oversight. The compliance burden of the European Union, though a lot increased than Canada, doesn’t scare us,” Francis Pouliot instructed Bitcoin Journal.
Theo Mogenet added:
“Now we have sure obligations when it comes to preventing cash laundering — that we can’t actually circumvent. However as you talked about, when, for instance, a authorities, be it in Canada or right here in Europe, will ask for a bulk of transactions with none judicial mandate, with none authorized foundation to take action, our coverage is simply to combat again and make it possible for we are able to use every bit of laws that’s on the market — to principally push again on the federal government’s demand.”
Growth into Costa Rica
Bull Bitcoin’s enlargement is just not restricted to Canada and Europe. Lately, Bull Bitcoin began making inroads into Costa Rica, marking their entrance into Latin American markets, an ecosystem typically pushed by peer-to-peer funds and low-tech infrastructure.
Turning into the primary “Bitcoin trade within the nation,” it shortly built-in with the highly regarded cell textual content funds service SINPE Móvil, permitting customers to commerce sats for fiat shortly and in a means the native inhabitants was aware of.
The outcome appears to have been a fast enlargement of adoption amongst farmers markets and different produce retailers, which regularly function movies from Francis and the staff, having fun with the Central-American climate.
The transfer to Costa Rica was famously pushed by an escape from the Covid restrictions in Canada, which Francis protested and opposed.
Bull Bitcoin quickly partnered with the Bitcoin Jungle, an open supply grassroots effort just like the Bitcoin Seashore neighborhood in El Salvador, which maps and educates Costa Rican locals on the best way to profit from bitcoin and leverage it as a cash and ecosystem.
The Burdens of Self-Custody
Bull Bitcoin’s dedication to cypherpunk values has not come with out challenges. Self-custody specifically, whereas eradicating an ideal burden from the corporate when it comes to compliance and safety threat, calls for a extra educated consumer base and really responsive help staff.
Boasting a self-hosted “easy chat system” for buyer help that even Francis himself will at instances run, the strategy permits customers quick and dependable entry to a savvy Bitcoiner who can provide them a fast turnaround, with out counting on third occasion platforms.
“In our case, it’s a self-hosted everlasting chat. So it’s operating on our servers. Like no consumer knowledge is shared with exterior events. And you’ll principally chat with a human, normally like, for instance, in Europe, it will typically be me or Jimmy or buyer help officer. Typically it’s even Francis that’s answering to shoppers,” mentioned Theo Mogenet about their buyer help course of.
They’ve processes designed to assist stop customers from getting scammed as effectively, going so far as to calling their customers when they’re in a buyer help monitor.
“We are able to even have like a 10-, 15-minute dialog with them to make it possible for they know what a Bitcoin pockets is, what the dangers with self-custody are to make sure that they don’t seem to be pressured or pushed by somebody to do this,” Theo defined on the podcast.
Phishing scams are a standard challenge for Bitcoin and crypto exchanges, and naive customers get talked into shopping for crypto to ship to scammers, with a view to relieve stress from numerous lies or stress techniques.
Apart from their energetic help staff, in 2022 Bull Bitcoin acquired Veriphi, a “white glove service supplier for Bitcoin self custody”. The agency had deep roots within the Bitcoin Quebec scene and developed lots of expertise with superior self-custody consulting.
Right now, this service is built-in into their product line with a devoted web site at bitcoinsupport.com, providing customers a variety of consulting and schooling packages to maneuver them alongside the journey into bitcoin self-custody with correct steering.
Self-Hosted Infrastructure: The Fork Warfare
The give attention to self-hosted infrastructure didn’t come from a spot of ideology alone, however was a hard-earned lesson from the 2017 Bitcoin fork struggle—the inner battle inside the Bitcoin trade about what path Bitcoin scaling growth ought to take and who received to resolve this.
In a 2017 speech, for instance, Francis Pouliot defined the dilemmas the Bitcoin neighborhood confronted on the time, the sport concept of financial nodes, and the thesis of Bitcoin consensus that in the end emerged victorious.
Confronted with a faction of the Bitcoin neighborhood known as Bitcoin Limitless that wished to scale Bitcoin by growing the block measurement—a technical choice rejected by Bitcoin Core builders on the time—Francis Pouliot and the Bull Bitcoin staff led an effort to teach and rally Canadian Bitcoin companies towards the proposed exhausting fork, as seen on this letter of intent from 2017 signed by 16 Canadian companies.
Bull Bitcoin additionally started constructing Cyphernode, a “modular Bitcoin full-node microservices API server structure and utilities toolkit to construct scalable, safe, and featureful apps and companies with out trusted third events.”
This software program suite, launched as open-source software program a 12 months later, allowed Bull Bitcoin and related corporations to take a stand in that schism with software program that they had full management over, enabling them to decide on which model of Bitcoin to sign help for and which model of Bitcoin to comply with within the occasion of a contentious bifurcation of the community.
That software program independence would show helpful towards one other entrance on this tradition struggle: a company alliance of mining swimming pools, knowledge service suppliers, and exchanges that might quickly be a part of the fray and pursue a special consensus change to the Bitcoin protocol, often called the NY Settlement, which supported a model of Bitcoin known as SegWit2x.
The mighty company alliance included giants akin to Blockchain.com, Coinbase, and 50 others, together with mining swimming pools that on paper had greater than 80% of hashing power behind them, but additionally challenged developer and community consensus.
Each Bitcoin Limitless and the NY Settlement coalition would find yourself shedding this fork struggle to neighborhood and developer consensus, who used instruments just like Cyphernode (UASF) and stood behind the backwards-compatible SegWit delicate fork, a scaling resolution for Bitcoin that maintained consensus with older variations of Bitcoin and would ultimately show victorious.
Bull Bitcoin’s position in defending the decentralization of Bitcoin in 2017, alongside their alignment with cypherpunk values for over a decade, locations them comfortably as legends within the annals of Bitcoin historical past.