Adopting Bitcoin is an organization that seeks to increase Bitcoin adoption through a global series of independent conferences focused on real world use cases and builders who are solving problems by building on Bitcoin. 2025 saw the second iteration of the Cape Town conference and it sought to expand on the success of 2024 in a number of ways, one of them being driving bitcoin payments to higher levels at the conference.
As organizers of the conference, we seek to leverage open-source tools as much as possible. Our entire conference backend is run on Pretix, with ticket payments being received exclusively in Bitcoin and facilitated by the BTCpay Server plugin to Pretix. Furthermore, in an attempt to drive spending in BTC as much as possible during the conference, all food and drinks sold at the venue to conference attendees were also sold in BTC. BTCpay Server was also used for this purpose, leveraging the Blink plugin for Lightning payments exclusively. This removed any issues associated with waiting times for on-chain payments.
Below is a diagram showing how BTCpay Server was implemented for food and drink payments at the conference.
View the interactive architecture here:
Due to the nature of the conference venue, a single vendor was able to provide all food and drinks for the entire conference. The vendor had a shopfront available for attendees to place orders at and collect their items. Additionally, in order to mitigate excessive queuing, an online menu was created to allow for remote order placement through the BTCpay Server POS functionality. This meant that conferences attendees could simply scan a QR code on the back of their attendee lanyard and place food and drink orders while watching a speaker present on a topic. They would then collect their items a few minutes later from a collection point. A third dedicated point of sale for the vendor was created through a barista stand, that was serving coffees at a separate point to the main vendor front desk. This served to reduce bottlenecks too.
To keep all of the above separate for accounting purposes, three distinct stores were created on BTCpay Server: One for the online menu, one for the café and another for the barista stand. This allowed for simplified accounting reconciliation for each store, which was a requirement from the vendor. As previously mentioned, only Lightning payments were accepted with the vendor. A Bolt card POS was also utilized at the barista stand, allowing for contactless card payments over lightning.
Usage Stats:
Over the course of the two days at the conference, the following transactions were made via BTCpay Server for food and drinks by conference attendees.
|
Store |
Transaction count |
Sat amount |
|
Online menu |
98 |
368,153 |
|
Café |
188 |
850,206 |
|
Barista stand |
204 |
383,370 |
|
|
|
|
|
total |
490 |
1,601,729 |
The conference had a total number of 356 attendees, thus an average of 1.4 transactions per attendee were made. This indicates that each attendee made at least one transaction using their preferred Lightning wallet.
Key Takeaways:
Payments at Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town 2025 were a huge success, with all ticket sales and a large amount of attendee food and drink sales taking place in Bitcoin, predominantly via lightning. From a merchant perspective the payment process was seamless and utilization of an Online menu accessible via QR code reduced physical bottlenecks at the food vendor, creating a better customer experience. The transaction count for food and drinks was higher than the attendee count, indicating a very high adoption rate of Lightning payments at the conference. Utilizing Bolt cards for quick NFC payments also streamlined the payment experience.
Next year, we seek to expand this model by incorporating more merchants in the surrounding area to allow for even greater penetration of Bitcoin payments.
The largest takeaway however, is the sheer volume of money that was saved on processing fees by using BTCpay Server. Between conference ticket sales and food sales, at least 3% was saved on processing fees. The total cost of running the server was approximately R400/ $20 for the months leading up to and over the conference. This was effectively the only cost carried for payments. Compare this to the 3% standard fee for card payments, which would have amounted to around R36 000 / $2000 for all the ticketing and food transactions. A saving of about $2000 was made on fees.
We would like to give a massive shoutout to the team at BTCPay Server, Blink and Pretix for making such great open source software that is so simple and easy to use!
If you would like to implement a similar payment system at your conference or event, please reach out to me at info@bitcoinonly.io and I'll gladly help.