S15 E27: Adam Soltys & Cole on Coinos, Lightning & Merchant Adoption

Some Bitcoin products show up as whitepapers. Coinos shows up as a username field and a password. No email. No phone number. No KYC theater. You pick a handle (or smash the dice button until the site invents something like junglefowl31), land on a profile page, and suddenly you have Lightning, Liquid, and on-chain receive options that try not to make you think about any of those words. Season 15 Episode 27 is me sitting with the two people shipping that: Adam Soltys, the Vancouver engineer who has been in Bitcoin since 2011 and also built Raretoshi on Liquid, and Cole, the marketer who spends his calendar turning brick-and-mortar shops into places that take sats.

The recording date was 29 March 2024. The tension of the episode is not subtle. Coinos is custodial. Adam says so before anyone can accuse him of cosplay. He holds the hot-wallet keys. He could zero a balance in the database. He is a licensed Canadian money service business trying to follow the rules, and he still wants you to treat the account like a checking wallet, not a savings vault. That honesty is the product pitch. So is the map of cafes, barbers, butchers, glass shops, and one Miami exotic-car rental outfit that somehow ended up in the same story.

A Web Wallet That Pretends Bitcoin Is PayPal

Adam’s description is deliberately boring in the good way. Coinos is a web wallet. No App Store. No Play Store. Open the site, create credentials, spend. Payments show in local currency (they guess from your IP, you can override). Lightning addresses work. Username-to-username transfers work without typing the full user@coinos.io address if both parties live on the same server. Profile URLs are public receive pages: coinos.io/adam is his, with on-chain, Lightning, and Liquid routes sitting under the same face.

The real trick is the conversion glue. Receive on-chain, pay a Lightning invoice, and Coinos moves value between layers behind the curtain. Same story with Liquid. Scan a QR, see dollars, press send. Adam compares the UX to PayPal, Venmo, or a bank transfer. That is either blasphemy or product management, depending on how many times you have failed to open inbound capacity on a home node.

Merchants get the sticky features. Tip prompts before payment. Transaction history that freezes the fiat value at the moment of sale for taxes and bookkeeping, including a CSV dump your accountant will recognize. A merchant map at coinos.io/map. Shopify checkout scripts so a store can add Bitcoin next to Visa. Receipt printers that spit paper when a customer pays from the merchant profile instead of forcing staff to invent a QR on a phone. Cole treats that last one like the quiet innovation: less wallet training for employees, more “treat it like cash.”

Live Demo: Vlad Becomes Mule60

I tried to register as Vlad. Taken. So I let the dice invent me as mule60, watched Romania’s RON appear as the default unit, and got tip-jar dusted with a thousand sats from Adam’s He-Man avatar and another thousand from someone called Snowbird. New accounts also spawn a random Nostr pubkey. Importing your real Nostr identity was “coming soon” on that March tape. Alby and friends were already on the wishlist.

Then I did the bit every skeptic should do on air: generate a Phoenix invoice, paste it into Coinos, and watch sats leave the custodian. Platform fee on that toy send was two sats. Routing got picky for a second (Phoenix is a picky friend), then it cleared. I held the phone to the camera like a medieval notary. Custodial screens can lie. Verifying the receive on a non-custodial wallet is the adult version of “not your keys.”

Wasabi sponsored the middle of that segment the way Wasabi sponsors most of my life: big CoinJoins, the whitepaper-day mega round they advertised (400 inputs, 127 BTC made fungible), the usual sermon. Satochip and Cryptosteel showed up later for the self-custody counterweight. The episode never pretends Coinos replaces those tools. It pretends you might need a spending account before you graduate to them.

Custodial, Open Source, and Day-by-Day With Regulators

Adam’s threat model speech is the part I wish more wallet founders would record. Using coinos.io means trusting him. Bug hunters have drained the hot wallet before. He ate the loss personally. That is why he does not want to custody “hundreds of thousands of dollars” of other people’s bitcoin if he can help it. Auto-withdraw exists for exactly that paranoia: set a fiat threshold ($100, $1,000, whatever lets you sleep), point it at cold storage or another Lightning or Liquid address, and let the server sweep when the balance gets spicy.

Open source is the escape hatch. If you like the UI but hate the custodian, run the stack yourself for friends, family, or a small community. Adam points to that as deliberate future-proofing. Wallet of Satoshi had already pulled out of the United States when we recorded, after Binance heat. Adam’s strategy was wait for a letter. Comply if they call. Keep the code public so someone in a friendlier jurisdiction can fork the experience if Canada or the US makes his instance impossible. He is not LARPing as an offshore pirate. He is a licensed MSB who still sounds like an anarchist gardener with a GitHub full of Lightning and Liquid tooling.

Compared with Wallet of Satoshi, he claims sameness with accents: web-first (installable as a progressive web app), Liquid support, heavier point-of-sale focus. Compared with LNBits, the vibe is cousin rather than clone. LNBits is the modular plugin kingdom. Coinos is the website anyone can deploy that wants to feel like money for people who never asked what a channel is.

Cole’s Merchants, Vancouver Gravity, and 0.1%

Cole is the force that keeps trying to make Adam’s “please don’t get too big” posture fail productively. Focus: walk-in brick-and-mortar. Coffee, cafes, restaurants, butchers, barbers, glass shops in Vancouver, exotic car rentals in Miami, optometrists posting eye-appointment Lightning clips, a selfie museum in Tampa, clothing shops in El Salvador where Cole actually bought a shirt. On the March 2024 numbers they recited: over 400 businesses worldwide on Coinos, forty-plus Bitcoin acceptors in Vancouver with more than thirty-five of those on Coinos specifically.

Fee story, as Cole tells merchants: 0.1% conversion fee when you hop between on-chain, Lightning, and Liquid. Lightning-to-Lightning inside the network: free. No setup fees, no maintenance fees, and a sales pitch against the Visa-plus-Clover stack that can eat 3% in British Columbia. Free marketing via meetups (four to five a month from Adam and Cole) hosted at the shops themselves. Primary geographic obsession: Greater Vancouver. Open invitation: any legal jurisdiction on Earth can ping their Telegram.

I needled them about the two-headed company: one head builds a careful custodian that hopes never to become systemically interesting; the other head onboards liquidity that makes regulators notice. They did not resolve the paradox. They live in it. Adam still said the project was not profitable yet, a labor of love from someone who quit a web-dev day job to keep skills sharp and give something back. Monetization ideas floated as future maybe: in-app sponsors, custom avatars, badges, themes. Not the current engine.

Three Lightning Nodes, PeerSwap, and Liquid Middle Ground

Adam runs Coinos’s Lightning plumbing as an ops problem, not a slogan. Three nodes: two Core Lightning, one LND. Channels to Wallet of Satoshi, ACINQ (Phoenix’s world), Bitfinex, Kraken, plus random smaller peers who ask. On stream we looked up public capacity: one node around 0.88 BTC, the bigger CLN face at ln.coinos.io nearer 8.9 BTC. Clearnet via a VPS proxy so the real server IP stays quieter. He had just been on a call with Alex Bosworth and Lucas Ferreira from Lightning Labs. He also tracks Blockstream’s Core Lightning world. Neutral pleb running both, watching which stack hurts less.

Liquidity management is the unpaid second job. Someone deposits on-chain and withdraws over Lightning, and suddenly outbound LN is thin. Someone does the reverse, and on-chain piles up. Add Liquid as a third balance to babysit. PeerSwap had just entered his toolkit: atomic swaps of channel balance against on-chain or Liquid with channel partners, submarine-swap style so nobody holds the bag mid-transfer.

Sideswap and Boltz still appear when he needs to rebalance Liquid the hard way. He also cheered on teams building more decentralized Liquid exchanges and covenant-style AMMs, the moon-math end of the stack that still needed better UX and volume.

He sheepishly admitted he lost a Liquid peg key that would have let him peg out without third parties, and was waiting on functionary updates for a replacement. That is the unglamorous middle of “we have our own Liquid liquidity.”

On Liquid philosophy he is warmer than half of Bitcoin Twitter. Federated custody beats a single company in his ranking, still loses to mainchain. Confidential transactions, hardware-wallet cold storage with a normal key model, no channel babysitting: a middle ground between on-chain and Lightning. He remembers Raretoshi’s organic Liquid community wave, then the cold water when Adam Back called NFTs a scam while the project still lived in Blockstream’s orbit rather than Samson Mow’s JPEG universe.

For a longer map of how Lightning and Liquid have been arguing for years, my old essay Lightning vs Liquid: The New Bitcoin Scaling War still holds the scars. For a Season 15 Lightning skeptic who used to be a Lightning maximalist, see John Carvalho on Synonym. Adam’s bet is that bull-market fees push people into these layers whether the timeline is neat or not.

Cole’s pushback against Lightning FUD is experiential: five-figure Lightning payments he has personally completed, luxury rentals that can fall back to on-chain or Liquid when a thousand-dollar-a-day invoice is too spicy for the graph. Understand the tool, he says, before you dunk on it.

Maps, Meetups, and the Anti-Pet-Rock Sermon

The Coinos map pins are merchants who tagged themselves on OpenStreetMap as using Coinos. Bigger picture sits at BTC Map, where Coinos shops are a subset of every Bitcoin merchant pin. Clicking around on air became a geography lesson: Vancouver gravity, Minnesota and Wisconsin surprises, Mexico, Brazil’s east coast, El Salvador, still thin in Argentina despite the country’s Bitcoin mythology, nothing much yet in Asia, Africa, Europe, or Australia on their map that day.

The close is ideological without being a TED talk. Michael Saylor’s “never spend it” culture makes Adam and Cole sound crazy in some rooms. Adam’s answer is utility compounding: merchants save card fees, feel number-go-up, pay staff, ask suppliers, grow a circular economy that is not only Libertarians sitting on rocks. More spenders, more holders, more people who can quit day jobs and build. Virtuous cycle, not a purity contest about which wallet logo you use. He will not die on the hill of Coinos specifically. He wants Bitcoin used. Coinos is just one of the easiest doors he knows how to hang.

Cole’s closing stats remix: 400-plus businesses, Vancouver shops reporting more sales, optional 0.1% conversion fee, free Lightning-to-Lightning, auto-withdraw toward cold storage, account in under thirty seconds, no KYC, no email, no personal data warehouse. Find them via the link tree on coinos.io, Adam most active on Twitter and Telegram (adam@coinos.io), Cole in the Coinos Telegram group.

I closed proud of the boring website with teeth. Real merchant adoption is the hard part. Four hundred is not five thousand. A bull market might change the arithmetic. Still: go verify the sats yourself.

Listen on Bitcoin Takeover audio or watch the YouTube upload. For more Lightning tooling energy from the plugin side of the family, revisit Ben Arc on LNBits and Nostr.