04-13-2025 
|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
If you’ve never been to Austin, Texas, let me tell you: it’s not just a city. It’s a mood.
Between the smoky drift of mesquite BBQ, the ever-present pulse of street music, and the curious mix of hipster minimalism and Southern grit, Austin has long been a city for builders. So it was only fitting that a swarm of BSV developers, entrepreneurs, and blockchain fanatics descended on the city last weekend for the latest BSV Hackathon—a test of code, caffeine, and conviction.
I arrived Friday with my brother Karl and headed straight to GorillaPool Mobile HQ, where Luke Rohenaz and David Case were already elbows-deep in code as we awaited a visit from “Root,” our co-founder and SysAdmin of the GorillaPool server infrastructure.
We linked up with a ragtag crew of familiar faces: Freddy from Elas, Colin the fresh-faced dev, Brett Banfe, Amy Voluntary, and Rafael LaVerde, among others. After settling in, we made our pilgrimage to Terry Black’s BBQ—a cathedral of meat where the brisket is biblical and the sides could feed a battalion. From there, we caught a beach volleyball game, soaked up the Austin ambiance, and watched the GorillaPool team begin building something genuinely special: a fully decentralized paymail system using the 1Sat Ordinals protocol—an on-chain DNS where domains are mined and mapped directly to user identity.
Saturday morning cracked open at Texas Sake Co., tucked into an up-and-coming industrial neighborhood littered with coffee dens, taco trucks, dive bars, and enough tattooed freelancers to staff a Vice documentary. I was expecting a small, scrappy gathering—maybe a few code junkies hacking from laptops on folding chairs. What I got instead was a full house: 13 teams, dozens of devs, and a palpable buzz of real momentum.
I worked the event as CoinGeek’s roving media host while running logistics support for the GorillaPool team—translation: food, caffeine, and moral support while Luke and David typed their creation into the void. Ty Everett, the unofficial wizard-in-residence, commanded the room with a gleam in his eye and a quiet demand that every competitor dig into the Babbage Stack, his custom suite of Bitcoin development tools. The devs answered the call.
One quiet surprise was the universal praise for MNEE, a stablecoin designed for real-world use that just works. About half the projects deployed it in their demos, and the MNEE team even sent a rep with T-shirts and live tech support to the venue—a solid hustle for a protocol still under most people’s radar.
As day turned to night, some of us managed to sleep (beauty rest, anyone?), while others pushed through—writing code by the glow of laptop screens and the buzz of a neighborhood that doesn’t believe in bedtime.
By Sunday morning, the air was tight with urgency. 11 AM was the hard cutoff. Teams scrambled to polish demos, squash bugs, and tighten pitch decks. Then it was showtime.
One by one, projects demoed everything from games to identity systems to decentralized services. There was laughter, applause, a couple of live code meltdowns, and more than a few “aha” moments.
The top prize—$30,000—went to Ishan Lahoti, who created “GitPaid,” a BSV-powered bounty app for GitHub contributors. It was simple, useful, and timely. Other winners included services for digital notarization, real-world payments, and, while we didn’t win any prizes, GorillaPool’s own decentralized paymail system got a nod from Ty who shook my hand and let me know “Kurt, this is a compliment. You guys are the most free-thinking, cavalier group I’ve ever seen.”
After the dust settled, we celebrated in true Austin fashion—over drinks and jokes at The Mothership, Joe Rogan’s iconic comedy club on 6th Street, where the chaos of tourists, guitar players, buskers, and panhandlers collided like a drunken symphony. If you want to see the American experiment in a single night, just spend a weekend on 6th.
Austin keeps it weird, and they clearly like it that way.
I left Texas feeling like I’d seen a glimpse of what Bitcoin was meant to become—not a place for passive HODLing or desperate moon-boy speculation, but a living economy of builders solving real problems in real-time.
It’s not always glamorous. It’s not always profitable. But it’s honest work. And in a world built on hype and high-frequency grifts, that makes all the difference.
The blockchain that wins won’t be the one with the biggest brand or the flashiest tokenomics. It’ll be the one with the best builders.
And this weekend, they were in Austin.
Watch | Texas BSV Hackathon: Ty Everett on Building an Open-Source Ecosystem
Recommended for you
