We were hot, confused, and 3 miles off course. South Beach had betrayed us, or maybe we just didn’t know Miami had been raising restrictions against spring breakers worse than Democrat lawmakers have against Bitcoin.

The Boss Answered

Turns out, while we were trudging through the sun like dehydrated pioneers with swag bags of coins and equipment, The Boss, Emilio, had landed due north from our position. “Where are you guys?” he texted. We looked around. A restaurant, sand, leathery retirees… “Down the boardwalk from you,” we said. “Send me your location and I'll start walking towards you,” he said. “Fair enough”, we thought, “Maybe we should start walking towards him to cut down on time.”

We started north, dotting from shaded spot to shaded spot, weaving our way between foreign families and crazy people screaming at the wind. After a mile or so we realized we should’ve run into him by now and decided to check our phones. Missed Call. Voicemail. The Boss.

We called him back immediately. “Hey, I-uh, I looked at how far you guys were from me and just Ubered to your location. But I guess you guys aren’t here,” he said. “We started walking north to meet you thinking you were walking. Stay right there, we’ll start walking back towards you,” we replied while we started walking as fast as our newly jello tentacles would allow us.

Voltage Bros & Hotel Hijinks

We regrouped and made our way to the hotel—the kind of place where the valet has better shoes than you and the lobby smells like eucalyptus and generational wealth.

Inside, we finally met the Voltage team: Nate, the burly and bearded bastion of Voltage and Support Engineer, and Bobby, the down-to-earth conduit of lightning networks and VP of Marketing for Voltage. Together, these two are working wonders in the world around them by leveraging the disconnect felt in our expedition through the sand.

We started filming content in a tucked-away corner, trying to stay low-profile talking about wallets, networks, and the future of decentralized finance… Until the meek waitress informed us we were not allowed to film on hotel grounds without prior approval from the hotel’s marketing department. We smiled and apologized and turned off the camera. We tried explaining the transformative power of Bitcoin. They did not care. So we ordered an Uber to the food.

Enter: The Brazilian Steakhouse

Defeated but still hungry for something, we headed to our dinner reservation at a Brazilian steakhouse, the kind of place where meat doesn’t stop coming until you wave a white flag or physically roll under the table. The kind of place buttons spontaneously shoot off the waists of unsuspecting diners. We ate like bitcoin was going to zero, like there was no tomorrow. Picanha. Ribeye. Chicken hearts. Lamb. Garlic steak. Round after round after round, until the table looked like a scene from a Viking banquet. We gorged ourselves and slowly, one by one, fell out of the service circle and into the meat-sweats.

The dinner was supposed to be for 18, but only 11 of us showed up- the rest being Ripple representatives, and who needs them anyways? So we filled the room with laughter instead.

The Interview

The night wasn’t over. We capped the evening with an interview: the Boss and the Voltage guys sitting among their minions and the leftovers of everyone’s hard work.

Legend has it, it went a little bit like this:

Emilio: Let's talk Bitcoin.

Nate: Yeah.

Emilio: Cheers. What's your Bitcoin journey? When did that start?

Nate: It started when things got more expensive in dollars, but things got cheaper in Bitcoin and settled it off for me. But I've always been libertarian focused anyway, so when I heard about it at a libertarian meetup, I definitely started following it until I actually had spare money and then started getting into it more and more and more. I got more technical and really got into the Bitcoin Lightning Network, which is the payment slider of Bitcoin. And I work at a company called Voltage where we provide those services to folks that wanna integrate with that.

Emilio: Cool. So, would it be safe to say that Voltage makes it really easy for people to integrate with Lightning?

Nate: Sure. The challenges are if someone sees the power of the Lightning Network in the instant settlement and the low fees and and and that sort of thing, the next question is, okay, how do I do this? And so at the rawest, lowest level layer is: install some software and learn how to use it. And, that is actually a very challenging thing to do. And there's a heck of a learning curve. So what Voltage has done is hired the best and brightest, in my opinion, of the the lightning world, and we have packaged it up and optimized it and now offer it as a service, make it easy for businesses, banks, neo-banks, exchanges to integrate Lightning without having to hire or train engineers to do it. We will just do it for you.

Emilio: You know, I think that's safe to say. You know, my head's been under a rock since at least, I would say, late twenty fourteen. And, Nate and his team at Voltage have made it really easy for us to accept lightning payments and, soon we'll be sending out lightning payments as well. So I think that's super cool.

Now, I want to backtrack. You said, your libertarian ideology brought you to Bitcoin, right? Have you ever been to New Hampshire?

Nate: I always wanted to go to New Hampshire, but I have never really been able to go to Porcfest and support, yeah.

Emilio: I mean, that's what I was gonna ask. I was gonna ask you about that. Interesting. Okay. All right. Well, you know, I think you should check it out at some point.

Nate: I keep hearing that, I have a friend that goes every year and tells me about it. I don't know if he's been, but he talks about it.

Emilio: Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. Live free or die. I think that's the motto there.

Nate: Yeah, yeah, that's the New Hampshire state slogan, I think.

Emilio: Yeah, I think so, yeah. That's why I made my cash username Bitcoin or die. I thought that was pretty cool when I came up with it, but it might not be that cool, I don't know.

Well, you know, you know, frankly speaking, I, I don't really know that much about Lightning, and we're utilizing Voltage now through BTCpay server to accept Lightning payments. For people that want to sell their bitcoin and get fiat, you know, obviously we all can't stack SATs 100% of the time. Sometimes you have to offload a little bit to pay bills, uh, the merchant doesn't accept Bitcoin…You know, there's always a reason, right? I'm still learning a lot about Lightning. But one of the cool things that you had mentioned to me yesterday was BOLT 12 invoices. Would you like to speak a little bit about that?

Nate: Sure. I mean, for those that don't know about the Lightning Network, the idea is that you could use cryptography to basically send Bitcoin. But instead of actually broadcasting it to the Bitcoin base layer, you're just updating the bitcoin transaction that's timestamped. So there's a valid bitcoin transaction at all times and it's being updated the more you send lightning payments back and forth. And then you could settle back down to get physical-built Bitcoin on the base layer at any time. So this allows really rapid payments. So BOLT is a specification for the protocol. Basics of lightning technology is what the mold is.

So when they were developing it open source, which is a big chaotic mess usually, they have these specifications to the folks and build and still be interoperable. So BOLT11 is the invoice standard. And so, BOLT11 is a method of like I want to receive a thousand Sats, which is a small piece of bitcoin. And so I'm going to go to my lightning wallet, type that in, it's going to generate an invoice, either through QR code or a string of letters and numbers. Then I'll send it to who wants to pay me. They'll send it, and decode it. It's all automatic, but then I'll get my thousand Sats.

So that's a full method of payment. Normal Bitcoin, you just get a Bitcoin address, and you push the payment to it. So this is different. It's a little bit of a pull mechanism. Push payments are obviously a little bit more convenient. But we have developed technologies such as LNURL, which allows you to have like a human-readable email style thing to do push payments, however on the back end that's still pulling a BOLT11 invoice.

BOLT12 is a push invoice standard, but it's very, very programmable. So you can create what's called a BOLT12 offer, and you can send it to somebody, and you can have certain things like, if they register it, you know, they pay you $10 a month or something. So you can have subscriptions, you have all these really new use cases that are important because they are part of the open standard, they’re part of the protocol, it’s not some third party dictating it, which is really important, which is a little bit different than LNURL. That’s a little thing on the side.

So BOLT12 yeah, it's on, for lightning and Éclair, which powers the Phoenix Lightning wallet, which if you've never played with lightning before, I recommend the Phoenix wallet, as your first one, honestly. If that's a little bit too advanced for you, though, Aqua is probably your best [choice]. So that's pretty cool. And so LND by Lightning Labs is an implementation that is the biggest on the whole, like 90% of nodes on the network use LND because it's very, very easy. They include user interfaces. They do it with packages and stuff. But they've been slower to implement the BOLT12 offer.

I know that was a mouthful or whatever, but the point is lightning’s just begun. The people who are smarter than me, the developers, the core components of it are continually building, so it's not going away anytime soon.

Emilio: Well, I'm excited for BOLT12.

Nate: Let’s talk about Unbank on that real quick

Emilio: Yeah.

Nate: So with Unbank, you can simply, on your account now, make a BOLT12 offer on your lightning wallet, if it’s enabled and just register it on your thing. Now, you don't have to deal with copy paste and invoices or anything anymore. It's just registered.

Emilio: That's right. It's almost like the lightning address standard.

Nate: Yeah, but the only difference is you're not limited by DNS.

Emilio: That's right. Which I was not a fan of. I think that's a very good attack vector, you know, for possibly tricking people into sending funds to an address you no longer control, basically. So that was something that, you know, I thought of that I told our resident marketing guy, Leon, about. But I want to talk about developing countries now. So we're talking about tether coming to the Lightning Network. What kind of things do you think that we could see in the future with tether on lightning?

Nate: So with the power of Taproot, which is a software protocol from a few years ago, you can now have, this is kind of about my head, cryptography and tap trees and all this stuff. But the basic idea is you can use the Bitcoin network to mint arbitrary tokens. In El Salvador and adopting Bitcoin, I believe it was, they announced that Tether would be minted and using Taproot assets protocol, which is built by Lightning Labs of LND and the implementation, which like 90% of the network. And so, at Voltage, we use LND exclusively. So we're primed to go when they decide to start issuing that stable coin.

And, the Taproot assets protocol is really interesting to me because unlike Tron and Ethereum, it keeps the core standard network. It's instant. It's cheap. All that stuff is still there. Plus it is interoperable with any token using the Taproots asset protocol, including Bitcoin. So if I'm a Bitcoiner, I only want bitcoin, and, Emilio, you're a dollar guy, you only love dollars, I can still send you from my Bitcoin balance and you receive your Tether and vice versa. I don't know what token you're getting or whatever, but the point is you send what you want and receive what you want on it. I think that's really powerful. I've done a lot of testing myself on that, and it works well. So we're just waiting for them to issue. But the idea is they're using covered assets to do remittances and things like that.

Emilio: Yeah, that's super cool. You know, I look forward to the day of not hearing about Tron, and USDT on Tron. I think Tron is the biggest shitcoin that I've ever come across. I don't even think Ripple is a cryptocurrency. It's more so just like numbers on a database. But, I will say that I have no idea why people use Tron. I think it's one of the biggest scams, besides Ripple, to ever come across in crypto. I think it's even a bigger scam than the Trump memecoin on Solana. I mean, to think about it, Tron has higher, higher fees for sending USDT than Ethereum. It's fucking expensive. And in a second and third world country, what are they going to do? Are they going to send this money and half their half their weekly paycheck goes to the mining fee? It's just ridiculous. So I think that USDT really has a good home on Lightning when it comes. So I'm excited for that.

Nate: Yeah. Our CEO is in talks with them and Lightning Labs and stuff, so we're going to try to be on the front of that. To our knowledge, there is one else that is going to provide that as a service, as close to day one as possible, as Voltage is.

Emilio: Super cool. We're going to have it on there as soon as it comes out.

It felt like being included in a Top Secret group chat on Signal, unknowing of what we did in life previously that made us so deserving of being here. And, yet, here we are: discussing the future abilities of digital currency and setting a pathway for users that will never know that this was the beginning.

We talked about the real future of Bitcoin—not just hype and memes, but real-world apps, financial freedom, and the human side of building in this space. The boss lit up when describing Unbank's mission. The Voltage guys geeked out on the Lightning Network. And for the first time that day, it felt like the journey—all the sweat, all the sand, all the meat—was worth it.

By the next morning, two of our coworkers were down for the count. They had been meat-maxed. One sent a Slack message that just said, “Never again.”

So yeah—we got lost. We got scolded. We got stuffed.

But we also connected, not just with our partners, but with the mission. Unbank x Voltage isn’t just a collaboration. It’s the energy of possibility, the belief that financial systems can evolve, and that even when things go sideways (or south, literally), we keep building.

—The Unbank Street Team