Liquid Federation Growth: Alby, Breez, and Peach Bitcoin Among Nine New Members, Raising Total to 73

We have more exciting news following the release of the new Liquid Wallet Kit and the annual Liquid Federation board election. Nine new members are joining the Liquid Federation, each bringing their unique expertise: Alby, Botev Plovdiv FC, Breez, Changelly, Daedalus, Ditobanx, eNor Securities, Peach Bitcoin, and Spirit of Satoshi.

This marks a significant milestone, expanding the Liquid Federation to a total of 73 Bitcoin-focused members. Membership now includes major P2P platforms, Lightning companies, and leaders in the digital asset space, further strengthening our community.

We have also done some internal housekeeping, and the Federation's membership board has voted to remove several inactive or defunct members, including Wyre, The Rock Trading, and Bitcoin Reserve. Members must be actively engaged within the Federation and contribute to the broader Bitcoin ecosystem, and the Federation boards will continue to monitor for absentee members, ensuring a more secure and robust Federation.

As the Liquid Federation matures and grows, it has become more diverse and dispersed globally, opening up exciting new use cases for investors, such as the budding RWA market. Two recent noteworthy examples in this market are Mifiel's issuance of digitized promissory notes, now worth an estimated $1.2 billion, and Luxembourg-based STOKR's historic launch of the MicroStrategy Note (CMSTR), the first Bitcoin ecosystem-wide, tokenized security backed by stocks from a Nasdaq-traded company.

New Members and Integration Details

Let's delve into the details of each new member, their Liquid integrations, and what new use cases they bring to users seeking to leverage Bitcoin’s second layer.

Alby

Alby is a FinTech company launched in 2022 that specializes in Bitcoin payments. Its consumer-oriented products, such as a non-custodial Bitcoin Lightning wallet and a browser extension, emphasize user-friendly design and ease of use. These products are unique as they feature deep integrations with the Bitcoin app ecosystem.

For developers, Alby provides SDKs and APIs that simplify the complexity of Bitcoin's Lightning Network, enabling them to fully leverage Bitcoin as programmable money.

In 2023, Alby integrated Liquid into its browser extension. This integration allows users to store their Liquid keys and receive a Liquid address, facilitating seamless interaction with Liquid web wallets and apps in a secure, non-custodial manner.

Botev Plovdiv

Established in 1912, Botev Plovdiv FC is Bulgaria's oldest football club and the world's first top-division club to adopt Bitcoin and Nostr, aiming to grow into the first 360° sports club. Botev has evolved into an institution with a social and public mission to do good in all dimensions. The club sees Bitcoin technology as a tool with huge potential to bring good to its players, its fans, and the general public.

Botev currently accepts bitcoin for payment, including on their online and on-site stores, and offers a 10% discount when paying with bitcoin on-site. Botev is also the first club to have an official non-custodial wallet–JAN3's AQUA wallet—available in a yellow-black skin mode for the club's growing local and international fanbase. The club currently uses the Liquid Network as a backbone technology powering the AQUA wallet and has further plans to utilize Liquid for payments as well as for pioneering fan engagement using tokenized fan points and tokenized equity, all issued on the Liquid sidechain.

Breez

Breez is a self-custodial Lightning-as-a-Service (LaaS) company bringing permissionless, peer-to-peer Bitcoin payments to apps and services globally with the Breez SDK. The free and open-source SDK is the simplest solution for developers to integrate self-custodial Lightning payments—eliminating the need for third parties, reducing the complexities of Bitcoin and Lightning, and making it easier to onboard billions of users to the future of P2P payments.

Changelly

Changelly is a non-custodial exchange platform and mobile app that offers various services related to buying, selling, and swapping digital assets. In May 2024, they added LBTC and USDT (Liquid) to their non-custodial instant swap services, giving users the ability to move between two of Liquid's most popular assets with over 700 different altcoins.

Users can also buy BTC using fiat currencies through various payment methods, including credit cards, debit cards, bank transfers, and mobile payment options like PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.

Daedalus

Daedalus Labs was established in 2023 by a collective of Surinamese and Dutch Bitcoiners and is driven by a steadfast dedication to libertarian principles and the promotion of open-source development, cultivating vibrant and unrestricted markets.

Daedalus Labs is building RESIN to solve the real-world problems that have plagued the real estate market for decades, such as lack of transparency, high entry barriers, and limited accessibility. With RESIN, users will soon be able to acquire a property through a rent-to-own model and seamlessly invest in real estate properties backed by bitcoin. This will bridge the gap between Bitcoin and tangible assets, without banks or governments.

Liquid will enable RESIN to distribute earnings to investors even in a high-fee environment, while also allowing users to transact with USDT on Liquid to avoid volatility. Daedalus also sees potential for Liquid in areas such as equity ownership, equity payouts, and accepting less volatile currencies for clients who prefer this.

DitoBanx

DitoBanx is a Bitcoin fintech company headquartered in El Salvador with a mission to achieve financial inclusion in Latin America within the next five years. The company has operations in the US, El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Panama and is working on creating a circular Bitcoin economy by encouraging unbanked merchants to use its services.

DitoBanx offers various Bitcoin-related services, including a Bitcoin and Lightning wallet, prepaid Mastercard , payment processing, Bitcoin gift cards, credits, cash-in/cash-out services, and the tokenization of digital assets.

DitoBanx's initiatives have already made a significant financial impact. They partnered with Liquid member Bitfinex Securities and are planning the issuance of several financial assets on the Liquid Network.

eNor Securities

eNor Securities is a regulated, global investment exchange for tokenized assets. From crypto to treasuries, eNor Securities provides access to traditional investment through blockchain technology. By offering a complete set of tools like spot and futures, instant trade, fixed-income, payments, and others, eNor Securities is accessible for any individual or institution willing to diversify their portfolio, trade global assets and earn passive income. 

By integrating with Liquid, eNor offers a secure, compliant environment for all digital assets issued on the Liquid Network, leveraging Liquid’s multisignature and AMP support, as it can enable more securely to comply with regulatory bodies. The AMP server is a policy server that has a second signature that signs every transaction of regulated assets. In that policy server, the logic of regulation is built in, for example, for KYC, whitelisting, dividend payments, coupons, transfer restrictions for whatever reason, and other flexible asset management tools.

Peach Bitcoin

Peach is a Swiss-based company that aims to bring an easy, private, and secure way of buying and selling bitcoin to the masses. It is a peer-to-peer exchange that connects buyers and sellers, securing the process through an escrow mechanism, dispute resolution, and reputation system. Peach has also developed a public API and a mobile application for iOS and Android.

One of the many advantages of a P2P exchange is the variety of different payment methods that can be used to facilitate a trade, since the payment itself happens outside of Peach. For example, Peach added the ability to buy bitcoin with and sell bitcoin for USDT (Liquid) back in July 2023.

Peach has also started to work on integrating Liquid at a more fundamental level, offering API support for buying and selling LBTC. Work on a full integration into the Peach app has also started. The goal is to continue improving the ease and speed at which users can trade on Peach and minimize costs to both our users and the company. For this, they deemed integrating Liquid to be the best option.

An integration for swaps from Lightning to Liquid and vice versa using Boltz (another Liquid member) is also planned, enabling users to sell on Peach using both Liquid and Lightning.

Spirit of Satoshi

Spirit of Satoshi launched in 2023 and is the most “based” large language model in the world. It is the culmination of nine months of experimentation on a whole suite of open-source models. The Spirit of Satoshi suite of products includes tools dedicated to developers. Among them, the Technical Assistant is focused on assisting Liquid and Elements developers with up-to-date and comprehensive guidance. The service is available via Spirit of Satoshi’s web app, using the same UI as the other Spirit of Satoshi models (i.e., Satoshi 7B, Code Satoshi…). 

The Technical Assistant pulls from data sources, including the Liquid developer portal, the Liquid blog, the Liquid BOL2 community and in particular the Liquid documentation site. Spirit of Satoshi is supported by its Geyser.fund contributors, in particular: Brad Mills and Brady Swenson, and investors, including Ross Stevens, Axiom and Timechain.

Integrating Bitcoin L2 Into Your Business

For parties interested in leveraging Liquid's benefits into their business, such as transacting with faster, more confidential bitcoin, integrating Lightning with Liquid, or issuing digital assets and tokenized securities, we recommend getting in touch with us on Telegram or the Build On L2 platform.

If you have Liquid integrated in some capacity and would like to be more involved by becoming a member of the Liquid Federation, you can read about the membership process here. Leave a comment under the thread or reach out through the email listed.

For the latest updates and announcements from our members and team of engineers, follow us on X and subscribe to the Liquid YouTube channel.

The press release of this announcement with more details can be found here.