Can a Community Own Its Own Money? An Evening on Fedi & Local Economies
"Why doesn't everyone just use Bitcoin?"
We've spent 17+ years getting the technology right. Self-custody works. Lightning, Liquid, Ark works fast. The math is phenomenal. And yet, if you handed your neighbour a hardware wallet tomorrow, they probably wouldn't use it. Not because Bitcoin is broken, but because money has never been only a technical problem. It's also a social one.
Money works when a group of people agree to use it together. A savings circle. A street of merchants. A village. A community of builders. That coordination is the hard part, and it's the part most Bitcoin tools skip right past.
Fedi is one serious attempt at that problem. It's a community super-app built on Fedimint, a federated e-cash protocol, that puts chat, payments, and community tools in one place. The whole thing is built around a simple idea: that money is something a community holds together, not something each person has to defend alone.
We're going to walk through one of the more interesting bets in freedom tech right now, which is that the next wave of Bitcoin adoption might look less like personal sovereignty and more like local economies.
What we'll get into:
The basics of Fedi
What it is, how Fedimint works at a high level, and why a federated approach to custody and e-cash exists at all.Spaces
How Fedi organizes communities, and what that means for local groups, savings circles, merchant networks, and developer collectives.Wallet services
How money actually moves inside a community and across communities: fast, and private by design.Real-world usage
Not hypotheticals. Concrete examples of how communities around the world are using Fedi today.Mini Apps & India (the part we're most excited about)
Mini Apps turn Fedi from an app into a platform, where developers can build tools, services, and experiences on top of a community's money and identity. We'll get into what they are, what they make possible, and why India might be unusually good ground for them.For developers
How to start building on Fedi, and where things are heading.
Who should attend?
Developers curious about building on a platform where money, identity, and community tools live together
Designers interested in what financial tools look like when they're built for groups, not just single users
Bitcoiners who care about adoption beyond the usual crowd, and want to see where federated e-cash fits
Builders & founders thinking about local economies, merchant networks, or community products in India
Anyone curious about where Bitcoin goes once the hard technical problems are mostly behind us
No prior knowledge of Fedi or Fedimint needed. Just bring your curiosity about how money actually spreads through a community.
If any of that sounds like your kind of evening, come hang out and ask hard questions. The best conversations usually happen after the talk anyway.
Is it your first time coming to Bitspace for a session? Wondering what to expect?
Browse through some highlights and recaps from our previous events to get an idea:
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