How the idea was born

It was July 2020 and I was about to buy for my dad his usual weekly bitcoin stash. I've been doing it every week, for years, as it has always been too complicated for him to do it himself.

That was the moment something clicked for me and I realized a simple way to buy bitcoin was missing in the market.

The problem

Buying bitcoin through regular exchanges can be daunting for people with little Bitcoin and investing knowledge.

When my dad tried to setup a Kraken account few years earlier he had to go through their KYC process. This was already quite complicated for him, but when he finally got his account setup, he was completely lost because he simply wanted to regularly buy some Sats and he couldn't understand how to do it on a full-fledged trading platform, with an intimidating user interface and all sort of things that are not Bitcoin popping here an there.

The solution

I wanted to created an alternative solution mostly for people like my dad but at the same time usable also by Bitcoiners. I gave a call to my good friend Enrico and we started to shape out how Bitkipi would work.

It only had to follow 3 simple rules:

1. Easy to use - Anyone should be able to use Bitkipi
2. Bitcoin-only - That's it
3. Non custodial - We want our users to own their coins

The MVP

I immediately started to hack around and coding the initial version of the app. We didn't have a designer in our team so I started to look for inspiration out there. I needed to create a user interface which supported multiple wallets. I was a Blue Wallet user and I've always been amazed by the way they handle multiple wallets, the carousel and the overall wallets UX. I wanted to implement a similar experience for Bitkipi and what the Blue Wallet team designed was a huge inspiration for me. Big ups to their team.

One year later

After one year working on the MVP, around 2000 commits spread across 8 git repositories, hundreds of cups of coffee, the app is almost ready to launch in Europe.

Oh... and my dad has been stacking Sats with Bitkipi for few months now :)

We can't wait for the official announcement.

Stay tuned 😊