Six months ago it was Dharamshala — snow, a mountain stream, and a demo that pushed a Bitcoin transaction out over radio waves with no internet at all. The BOSS Summit is back. This time: Jaipur. Winter edition.
Huge shoutout to Bitshala, Rajarshi Mitra, Setu / Saurabh, Amol, Anmol and the entire Bitshala team for organizing this BOSS and hosting us.
For the older ones:
- 2022 Mumbai bitcoin meetup
- 2022 B4I Conference @ Goa
- Bitshala and BitPlebs Summit, March 2025 @ Goa
- Bitshala BOSS Summit, April 2026 @ Dharamshala
Bitshala and Bitmela were announced for Jaipur. Months back, I had already decided I was letting this one slide, for family reasons.
So the plan was made. Skip Jaipur, watch it from Twitter, save the money.
Then Santhosh pinged me. Would I like to talk on something at Bitmela?
I said no.
Somehow he figured my weakness. He came back with the topic — “Trails and tribulations of a startup founder”.
Oh shit. It’s hard to say no to that topic.
So things got moved around. Family, work, everything — shuffled just enough to fit Jaipur in. We are good to go.
Day 1 / Oct 27 (Tue)
We started from Chennai on Oct 27 and reached Jaipur (the pink city) by noon. Rented a bike, as always, and hasted to Ranavilas.
Sessions had started in the morning. We were already late by half a day.
What we walked into — the afternoon half of the AI, Developer Tooling & Bitcoin Core day:
- BitcoinKernel Project Workshop — Yuvic — Bitcoin Core’s validation engine as a library, from block 170 to verifying Satoshi’s signature, then breaking the transaction and watching verification fail. Less theory, more hands dirty.
- What’s new in BDK — codingp110
- Taproot Assets — Raj Saraogi — issue assets on Bitcoin, move them over Lightning
- OpenSwap: Intro + quick demo — Stark — private peer-to-peer swaps on Bitcoin, no central marketplace
What we missed in the morning (still a little bitter):
- AI Deep Dive — Adi Shankara of Summer of Bitcoin, Abhijay Jain and Anmol
- Don’t trust, attest: TEEs for remote multisig and auditable AI — Yshok
- Sattle demo — Om Swami and Yash Gandhi — bill splitting on Bitcoin and Lightning. Only one person installs an app, everyone else just opens a payment link
- Sovereign Engineering Project Showcase — Yo (sovereignengineering.io, Madeira)
- The Blind Spot in Bitcoin Adoption — Paper
Vyrus recommended we hit Clock Tower for chill alcohol and good food. I’m a tee totaler and a vegetarian, but I went along with the plebs and enjoyed my vegetarian food just fine. Bala, Saravanan, Alok, Brazilian Luiz and qlrd were there. Super good time.
Once back, it was BIP 110, Bitcoin businesses, and other intense, hyper-engaging topics on the terrace of Ranavilas with the other plebs. Twelve people on a hotel terrace at midnight, arguing about money that no ministry can switch off. Nobody in that room needed permission to be there, and that’s the entire point.
All of Day 1, session by session
Day 2 / Oct 28 (Wed)
Day 2 was a bunch of amazing sessions — the whole day was Post-Quantum Cryptography & Self-Custody UX:
- Bitcoin After Quantum: Understanding the Threat — Anubha Jain
- Building Bitcoin payments in the Bull Bitcoin Wallet — Ishi — Lightning, Liquid swaps and Ark, and the trade-offs of using Liquid
- Post-Quantum Signatures in Practice: Hash, Lattice, and Isogeny Schemes — Jamal
- Challenges building Epoch Shield: Cryptography meets Chaos — Sameer — MLS group encryption running on Nostr relays, made safe in a permissionless environment
- Shroud: Intro + Quick Demo — Anmol — a wallet built around Silent Payments (BIP352)
- Self-custody UX trade-offs — Veronika — the design decisions inside Zeus
- Self-Custody Models and Penlock Workshop — Paper — checksum for the 12th word, seed split into three shares, recover with any two
- Krux showcase — qlrd — an integration-testing framework for hardware wallets, because “it worked once” isn’t testing
- Exploring Zero Knowledge Proofs for Bitcoin — sha512rma
Sit with that list for a second. In one day, one terrace in Jaipur covered what happens to Bitcoin when quantum computers get good, how to prove things without revealing them, how to sign a transaction on hardware that never touches the internet, and how to survive losing half your backup. The agencies that want to watch every payment you make need the math to stay broken. Everybody in that room is working on making sure it doesn’t — publicly, in the open, for free. Read that and sleep well, central bankers.
In the evening, myself, Bala, Vikas and Saravanan went for a swim in the pool.
Then we went out to try Rajasthani local food. Some genuinely new recipes, and honestly — we didn’t like it.
Back to Ranavilas for dinner. Then back to the terrace for more hot cypherpunk, change-the-future discussions.
All of Day 2, session by session
Day 3 / Oct 29 (Thu)
Started with swimming, then steam bath and sauna with the fellow plebs. In the meat side of the blockchain, Recovery is part of the protocol.
First session of the day was Coconut Wallet — Louis, on stage with Coconut Wallet. We mined testnet coins, sent them back, then seed phrases for wallets holding different amounts of sats appeared on screen and it turned into a race to sweep 36,000 sats. Under the hood: watch-only wallet online, Coconut Vault signing offline, PSBTs moving between devices as QR codes. Keys never touch the internet.
Then the rest of a jam-packed Lightning, Ecash & Decentralized Web day:
- Creating a Cashu Wallet with CDK — Luiz Medina
- Smite: Lightning Fuzzing Engine — Nishant Bansal
- Lightning Sandbox Demo — Duggirala Venkata Sai Viswanath — a soundbox that announces a payment the moment sats land, so a merchant never has to stare at a phone screen
- Nostr Wallet Connect: How It Works and Its Integration into Zeus — Ajay, on Zeus — NIP-47, per-app permissions and spending limits, no direct node connection needed
- Pool Your Spare Disks: Self-Hostable Distributed Storage on Open Protocols — Manas
- Formstr Drive: Your Cloud Storage Ends Here — Siddhant, of Formstr — four people uploaded their first file and walked away with 1,000 sats each
- Monetizing APIs with L402 and ngx_l402 — iamthesvn — 402 Payment Required, a Lightning invoice, done. No API keys, no subscriptions, no payment processor deciding who’s allowed to earn
Look at what’s on that list. Fuzzing the Lightning implementation that moves real money. Your own storage on your own disk. Paying for an API with no bank, no card, no account, no permission from anyone — just a protocol that settles in sats. Every single one of these exists to delete a middleman whose only product was compliance.
All of Day 3, session by session
With that, BOSS Summit Winter 2026 @ Jaipur was over.
Last thing: Thank you Rajarshi, Saurabh and the entire Bitshala team — again. Running a summit this smooth is invisible work, and nobody claps for the logistics. But what you are actually building, cohort after cohort, is people: curious ones in, Bitcoin contributors out. The sessions were brilliant, but the machine that makes the sessions possible is the real freedom tech here. See you at the next one.
Next is Bitmela — Oct 30 and 31 — which gets its own post.