At the beginning of December 2019, Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase and a co-founder of Coin Center, listed Bitcoin as the most successful unicorn of the 2010s.
Bitcoin is not a company — as many snarky commentators were quick to point out. But they’re missing the point, Srinivasan protested. Speaking from an investment standpoint, “nothing else founded in the same timeframe held at $100B for a longer time” than bitcoin, he tweeted, not to mention that the return on investment for bitcoin far exceeds the tech unicorns that Srinivasan said it eclipsed.
Viewed as an open-source unicorn, Bitcoin is ultimately a portent of a trend to come, Srinivasan argued: that protocols will compete with companies in the not-so-distant future.
Maybe he’s right, and maybe Bitcoin has already spawned another open-source unicorn of its own.
It’s name is BTCPay Server[1].
Build It and They Will Come
BTCPay Server[2] could very well be a frontline soldier in Srinivasan’s anticipated struggle between companies and protocols.
Nicolas Dorier began the open-source project as a direct adversary to BitPay after the payment processor posted an August 2017 blog post[3] urging users to upgrade their BitPay software to SegWit compatibility. Only it wasn’t the real SegWit; BitPay was urging users to upgrade to SegWit2x, warning that its clients’ software could be at risk and that it would be supporting a minority chain if it didn’t push the upgrade.
Further Reading: What Is SegWit?[4]
Dorier famously called B.S. on the masquerade, and vowed to make BitPay obsolete.
Two years later, the decentralized payment processor has outperformed expectations. It has 3,151 commits on GitHub from 57 contributors. It has integrated the Lightning Network, has been integrated itself in a handful of consumer-facing products like the Nodl
