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Bitcoin Takeover 26: Bitcoin Doesn’t Build Itself

André Neves had the job most developers dream of. Engineering director at Big Human, a respected New York digital product studio, where he led teams of 20 developers shipping polished software for companies like TD Ameritrade, Time Warner, and Michael Kors. Good money. Interesting problems. Zero complaints. And zero stakes. Most people learn to live with that last part. Neves couldn't. In 2018, he walked into a room that changed everything.

Chaincode Labs' first Lightning residency. A two-week intensive in New York, run by one of the most respected Bitcoin research organizations in the world. Ten engineers, hand-selected, brought together to go deep on the Lightning Network before most of the industry had taken it seriously. The cohort included builders like Jack Mallers and Pierre Rochard. Engineers like Alex Bosworth and Christian Decker were in the room, people actively writing the first real implementations of Lightning. The technical caliber was unlike anything Neves had encountered in his career. But what he couldn't shake was simpler: Bitcoin was still his side project. "What am I doing just building stuff on the side?"

The residency didn't hand him a plan. It just made staying impossible. He quit. Then in 2019 he co-founded ZBD with two people he’d barely met. Chris Moss in Tokyo. Simon Cowell in London. He'd met Simon, the CEO, exactly once. None of that stopped them from committing to something serious: building a native payment service provider for the gaming industry, powering real economies inside virtual worlds, on Bitcoin's Lightning Network. Only six years later, ZBD would close a $40 million Series C led by Blockstream Capital.

Every line of code ZBD ships runs on a foundation someone else built for free: Linux servers, open-source tooling, protocols nobody got paid to write. Neves took that debt seriously from day one. In 2020, ZBD brought on Fiatjaf as a full-time open-source developer, funding his work on Bitcoin and Lightning infrastructure. Nostr, the decentralized social protocol that took over the entire Bitcoin ecosystem, emerged while he was there, enabled in part by the runway ZBD provided. ZBD engineers contributed to LNURL standards, and Neves himself created the Lightning Address, the human-readable payment identifier now used across the industry. "If you're choosing to spend 100% of your capital and treasury on closed-source stuff," Neves explained, "I think you're taking advantage more than you are supporting the mission." ZBD decided early that they would help foot the bill.

For Neves, the obligation isn't abstract. He grew up in Brazil, where his parents lived through five different national currencies. In 1992, one dollar equaled one real. Today it buys six. "Explaining Bitcoin to them wasn't hard," he reflected. His family doesn't need monetary theory. They carry instability in memory. That's the root of Vinteum, the Brazilian non-profit he co-founded with Lucas Ferreira to support Bitcoin Core and Lightning developers, modeled after Brink and Chaincode Labs, providing grants and running residency programs to train the next generation of builders. "I'm outside. I can bring capital, interest, and network so that Brazilian developers have a better chance," he said.

That pipeline of builders has paid off. The tools that took years to wrestle into existence: efficient liquidity management, reliable node infrastructure, interoperable payment standards. They're table stakes now. Bitcoin is permissionless. You don't need anyone's blessing to start building on it today. But Neves isn't convinced the outcome is assured. "Everyone's like, Bitcoin is inevitable. No, it's not," he said. "It takes people to build it." The inevitable narrative is dangerous because it breeds passivity. The protocol doesn't care how many believers it has, it cares how many builders it has.