AUSTIN — On a Friday morning last spring, Mark Suman called out sick from his job as a senior engineering project manager at Apple and made his way downtown to a spot called the Bitcoin Commons, a form of clubhouse for enthusiasts of the world’s largest cryptocurrency, situated a number of blocks south of the Texas State Capitol.
On the time, Suman was, in his words, “an energetic hobbyist,” tinkering with the technology in his spare time. “I actually played around with it a bit inside Apple as well,” he says. “There’s not quite a bit I can say, apart from we were all the time exploring recent technologies, and so I used to be fooling around with a number of the open-source bitcoin tools inside Apple and performing some exploratory work.”
Suman was there for the annual ‘Bitcoin Takeover’ event. He had followed most of the speakers online and when he saw the gathering pop up on his feed, he took the time off to see it for himself.
“I used to be sitting in the group wanting to get into the space and really construct something recent and construct something novel,” Suman recalled.
What happened as a substitute was the start of an expert pivot: he struck up a conversation with a developer after a chat on the Commons, and was introduced to other coders who were winding down a project called Mutiny. Inside a number of months, Suman handed in his notice at Apple and with the developers he’d met, pivoted into something larger — co-founding Open Secret, a startup reimagining how user data is stored within the cloud. As an alternative of counting on centralized databases, the corporate encrypts data to every individual user — even after it’s uploaded. So if there is a breach, there’s nothing to steal, Suman explained. No honeypot.
Parker Lewis speaks on the Bitcoin Commons, where he helps lead educational efforts around bitcoin adoption and policy.
Rod Roudi/Bitcoin Commons
The leap was not without stakes.
“There are many sleepless nights,” he said. “I’ve got a family, I’ve got kids, I’ve got a child off at university.”
He had spent years working on privacy infrastructure — tackling tough technical problems around user protection at scale — but saw a solution to do it higher with blockchain. “Apple likes to speak an enormous game about privacy,” he says. “And having been there, I’ve seen very deep inside plenty of their systems that they do care about privacy at every level.”
That vision — and the Commons — helped give him conviction. The builders there have been all laser focused on creating something that mattered.
Inside Austin’s bitcoin clubhouse
Bitcoin Commons sits on the second floor of the Littlefield Constructing on the corner of Congress Avenue and Sixth Street — where the broad boulevard to the Capitol collides with the noisy sprawl of Austin’s nightlife district. It’s an apt metaphor for the space itself.
By day, it serves as a clean, open-plan coworking hub for bitcoin operators and builders. At night, it transforms right into a gathering place for rogue developers and off-the-record meetups. Events here draw a mix of enterprise capitalists, open-source contributors, off-grid energy technicians, and Lightning engineers — developers who construct software to make bitcoin faster and cheaper to make use of. On some afternoons, once joyful hour hits, the kitchen within the back converts right into a bar.
“Bitcoin is a very powerful technological innovation in any of our lifetimes, and it needs its due,” said Parker Lewis, certainly one of the stewards of the Commons and the creator of a brand new book on bitcoin called “Step by step, Then Suddenly.”
“And so while bitcoin has no CEO and no marketing team, we here on the Bitcoin Commons and Bitcoiners all around the world help educate people about bitcoin, why it is important, what’s being built, and present a vision for the longer term,” continued Lewis.
“The vibe, it is usually high signal,” said Dan Lawrence, CEO of OBM, which manages energy use for industrial-scale mining farms. Lawrence said he was “thankful” that the U.S. government had grow to be somewhat more pro-bitcoin under the brand new administration, but added, “Irrespective of what happens anywhere, everybody here is all the time going to bleed bitcoin.”
The “Bitcoin Commons” functions as a form of clubhouse for town’s bitcoin believers. It puts on a mixture of programming, including conferences and hackathons, in addition to hosts a co-working space by day.
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This yr, the Commons feels different — not because bitcoiners have modified, but since the world around them has. The mood is bullish. Strategic. Triumphant, even.
Bitcoin‘s price mirrored this optimism, surging to an all-time high of nearly $110,000 in January, coinciding with Trump’s inauguration. By early April, it had retraced to the low $70,000s before rebounding to almost $85,000 as of Saturday morning — volatility that underscores the market’s sensitivity to political developments and investor sentiment.
Only a yr ago, the vibe within the Commons was cautious. Even bitcoin — the asset largely spared by securities law — felt the coolness of an aggressive regulatory regime. Developers were being arrested all over the world. Wallet providers were being pressured. Open-source projects landed on sanctions lists. The query then was, who can be next?
Then got here the election. Trump’s return to the White House brought with it a full-court press of pro-bitcoin policy moves. Inside his first 100 days, he’d pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and three co-founders of the BitMEX crypto exchange, established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, and appointed a “crypto czar” to oversee the federal government’s digital asset efforts. Even skeptics found themselves nodding.
“I used to be in Nashville when Trump spoke,” Suman recalled of the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Tennessee, where Trump made his first major address to the crypto industry. “I wasn’t planning on going. But , when someone like that’s on the town, you go see it.”
Suman says he feels Trump has delivered on his guarantees to the crypto community for essentially the most part. Still, he stays cautious. “I’m not one who embraces politicians,” Suman said. “I’m form of apolitical so far as which side. So I only trust them until I see the way it’s actually playing out in our life. To this point, I believe it’s going well, however it could really change.”
Austin’s “Bitcoin Commons” draws in an eclectic mix of individuals, including enterprise capitalists, bitcoin miners, and coders.
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Kevin Hurley, CTO at Lightspark, says Washington’s stance toward crypto appears to be shifting, with regulators just like the SEC taking a less combative approach — moving away from lawsuits and toward clearer capital markets rules. “Hopefully now we’re actually going to have some clarity on what’s and what is not a security, what can actually be done,” he said.
But even in a friendlier political climate, caution over government involvement stays a feature, not a bug, of the crypto community.
Joe Kelly, CEO of Unchained — a startup that helps clients store bitcoin securely by holding their very own private keys — said it’s smart to watch out what you would like for with regards to the U.S. government owning plenty of bitcoin. “That may go other ways,” he said.
So far, the federal government’s so-called Strategic Bitcoin Reserve has underwhelmed some digital asset advocates, because it’s limited to bitcoin previously seized in enforcement actions — not newly purchased assets or sovereign investment. Still, the administration has directed the Treasury and Commerce Departments to explore budget-neutral ways to accumulate more bitcoin.
Kelly acknowledges a shift within the regulatory atmosphere, but he’s also wary of premature celebration, even with big market wins just like the launch of exchange-traded funds that allow investors widespread access to bitcoin.
“If something just like the ETF had launched too soon, I believe it could have distracted from the people constructing on the actual technology itself,” Kelly said. “We have had the fortune that for many of Unchained’s life there wasn’t an ETF,” he added of the firm’s efforts to coach investors on the way to store their crypto.
Becca Rubenfeld of Anchor Watch explains how federal shifts could allow bitcoin to be treated as an admitted asset by insurers — a possible breakthrough for institutional adoption.
Rod Roudi/Bitcoin Commons
The shift has had ripple effects across the industry, including insurance.
Becca Rubenfeld, COO of Anchor Watch, says regulatory movement is opening the door for bitcoin to be treated like several other financial asset. Traditional insurers don’t cover bitcoin directly — they insure the infrastructure around it. But when bitcoin becomes an admitted asset on insurance company balance sheets, that changes the whole lot.
“Currently, the industry is amazingly underserved,” Rubenfeld told CNBC. “But what Anchor Watch is doing is specifically insuring the asset itself. So we built a proprietary custody solution. And when customers use us for custody services, Lloyd’s of London backed insurance is included in those services.”
The demand is growing. So is the pressure to construct — and secure — the technical infrastructure that makes bitcoin work.
Mike Schmidt of Brink discusses the critical have to support open-source developers who maintain bitcoin’s core infrastructure.
Rod Roudi/Bitcoin Commons
Mike Schmidt, executive director of Brink, which funds open-source bitcoin developers through a nonprofit structure, emphasized the importance of supporting the engineers maintaining bitcoin’s underlying infrastructure. “Bitcoin needs engineers,” he said.
“We’ve a $2 trillion asset. We’ve strategic reserves of bitcoin being held by countries, and there is just this small group of engineers which can be keeping this thing together on the code base,” Schmidt said. “There’s only perhaps 40 full-time engineers working on this. So we would like to make certain that the engineering growth can keep pace with its broader adoption.”
Lisa Neigut began as a back-end engineer at Money App, where she worked on their internal bitcoin product, before moving to Blockstream and spending six years as an open-source developer on the Lightning Network. As of late, she runs Bitcoin++, certainly one of the most important technical conference series within the space, with six events planned across six countries this yr.
“Bitcoin++ is targeted on bringing together bitcoin developers and builders to discuss what they’re working on — the frontier of bitcoin,” Neigut said. “You may get an idea of what bitcoin goes to seem like tomorrow.”
That sense of momentum resonates with filmmaker Alana Mediavilla, who spent five years at Google working on movies about big data and cloud infrastructure. She screened her recent documentary, Dirty Coin, a feature-length project taking a look at bitcoin’s energy footprint and the people behind the infrastructure, on the Commons.
Power supply for Whinstone’s bitcoin mine in Rockdale, Texas.
“I had put in my time within the cloud space,” she says. “I understood what data centers were, I understood where it was going, and I also understood how much energy it takes to run these huge facilities that straight away are running the backbone of our society.”
Her goal wasn’t to necessarily defend bitcoin mining but to broaden the conversation. “I just need to get everybody’s data center literacy as much as a certain point where we will proceed to have conversations about it, because it is not going away.”
She describes the group in Austin as a coming together of individuals “very committed to their craft” — and in her view, driven more by shared ideals than by profit-seeking.
“People think that it’s like a get-rich-quick,” she said. “Possibly those were the old days for bitcoin. Now, if you happen to want 100x it’s best to have a look at altcoins and meme coins and other stuff, but you are probably not going to get that with bitcoin.”
“What brings them together is that they need to have higher money, they usually need to have a more fair world,” she added. “So the principles are solid. How we implement those principles — that is where the variability and spice of life is available in.”
Big money meets big ideas
A surge of recent funding can also be reshaping bitcoin’s builder economy.
Enterprise investment in bitcoin-related startups soared in 2024 alongside the crypto market’s rally. The variety of pre-seed deals within the space climbed 50% last yr, in response to research from Trammell Enterprise Partners, an Austin-based VC firm focused on bitcoin-native startups. Across all early-stage funding rounds, nearly $1.2 billion has been invested in bitcoin firms since 2021.
The renewed interest comes after years of technical upgrades to the bitcoin protocol and growing confidence in its long-term resilience.
“Serious people not query whether bitcoin will remain 15 or 20 years into the longer term,” said Christopher Calicott, managing director at Trammell. “So the subsequent query becomes: Is it possible to construct what the founder is trying to attain on bitcoin? Increasingly, the reply is yes.”
PitchBook projects that crypto enterprise funding will surpass $18 billion in 2025 — nearly doubling the annual average from the previous two-year cycle. Much of that capital is flowing into bitcoin infrastructure and applications — payments, privacy tools, custody solutions — relatively than the speculative trading platforms of previous cycles.
Turning ideals — and enterprise dollars — into reality still requires real-world infrastructure. And that is where entrepreneurs like Steve Barbour, the founding father of Canadian firm Upstream Data, are available. He’s spent years constructing off-grid mining containers for distant oilfields, but this spring, he’s expanding operations into Wyoming, a bet he attributes on to the Trump administration’s rollback of energy regulations and renewed push for domestic production.
Wyoming — home to each sprawling coal operations and a number of the country’s most permissive crypto laws — has emerged as a hub for bitcoin miners and the lawmakers who support them.
The administration’s latest executive orders loosen environmental restrictions and encourage more fossil fuel development — a boon for oilfield miners like Barbour, whilst critics warn it could come at a steep climate cost.
“I’m extremely optimistic and bullish on Trump’s administration,” Barbour said. “The EPA finally got here out with a brand new stance on all this stuff they have been doing to only destroy the energy sector in America, which has affected us very negatively. I’m seeing plenty of things going the best way now with the choices the Trump administration is making, and clearly they’re attempting to attract investment in America and manufacturing.”
Zaprite’s Parker Lewis shares policy insights on the Commons, calling for federal laws just like the proposed Bitcoin Act to cement regulatory clarity.
Rod Roudi/Bitcoin Commons
Zaprite’s Lewis, certainly one of the Commons’ most vocal policy thinkers, agrees that things are moving in the best direction — particularly around the federal government’s decision to determine a proper national bitcoin reserve.
While a crypto executive order is a crucial first step, “codifying it with law will help drive further regulatory clarity that the U.S. is open for bitcoin,” Lewis said. “It would even be good for the country … the most important priority can be for the regulatory clarity piece, pushing Sen. Lummis’ Bitcoin Act to codify and make everlasting.“
Senator Lummis, a longtime advocate for the industry, is pushing laws to codify bitcoin protections into federal law. Her proposed laws outlines a plan for the U.S. to purchase bitcoin with “existing funds” of the Treasury Department, which incorporates tax revenue. The thought, partially, is to position bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset — one that might appreciate over time and reduce reliance on debt. The senator has said that the last word goal is to cut back the federal deficit, in addition to position bitcoin alongside gold and other hard assets as a solution to strengthen the dollar over time.
Without the Bitcoin Act becoming law, Lewis warns that today’s tailwinds could reverse with a single administration change.
But while Washington debates bitcoin’s role in the longer term of the U.S. economy, Suman was already betting his own on it.
“Why did I leave this really cushy job at Apple, where I used to be getting paid quite a bit and had stock and that form of stuff, to come back here, where my future is uncertain?” he said. “It’s the opportunity of constructing something recent that I believe is absolutely needed on the planet. And I hope that it pans out. … If it doesn’t, and we go down in a glory of fireplace, no less than I could have tried something that I actually consider in.”
Even after he accepted the offer to hitch Mutiny — later pivoting into Open Secret — things didn’t calm down. “That was right when a distinguished group of developers were arrested,” he recalled. “They were developing an app called Samurai, they usually got arrested. I had accepted my offer with Mutiny, but I had not yet left Apple.”
The gamble wasn’t just career-based. It was emotional. Existential.
“Knowing that individuals were being arrested and there was plenty of uncertainty, I still dove in,” he said. “The fellows said, ‘Listen, if you happen to’re apprehensive, we will just call this off and you possibly can stay at Apple,'” Suman recalled. “But I said, ‘No, I actually consider in what we’re constructing. Let’s make this thing scale.'”
