It’s no surprise that a city with such a deep history of revolution, defiance, and liberty also became an early breeding ground for Bitcoin development.
From Trezor, the world’s first hardware wallet to Slush Pool (now Braiins), the first Bitcoin mining pool, there’s a reason Prague is known as the Bitcoin capital of Europe. It was also the place where the first-ever International Bitcoin Conference took place only a couple of months after Satoshi published his final farewell message in 2011.
Fast forward fifteen years and BTC Prague is now the largest Bitcoin conference in Europe, attracting over 8,500 visitors and a star-studded lineup of incredible speakers.
I was in town for this year’s edition and here’s a few moments that stood out as I reflected on the week.
₿ The price was never the point
Here’s something worth noting before anything else: Bitcoin’s price barely came up. BTC hit an all-time high of $126,000 in October 2025 and has since pulled back more than 50%, trading around $60,000 at the time of the conference. We are, depending on who you ask, somewhere in the early stages of a bear market. For many other crypto conferences that would be the topic on the tip of everyone’s tongues but for Bitcoiners, its just par for the course.
The mood in Prague was grounded, focused, and almost deliberately indifferent to short-term price action. The people in that room weren’t there to speculate, they were there for the long term. They recognised we’re still early. That psychological shift, from “wen moon” to “what are we actually building towards,” has always seperated Bitcoin conferences from the wider crypto scene but this year that division was even clearer.
₿ From HODLing to building
The most striking shift at this year’s conference was the conversation moving firmly beyond “just HODL.” Across the main stage and expo the conversations have changed. It’s no longer if Bitcoin wins, it’s what Bitcoin does next. Even Saylor, long the king of “never sell your bitcon”, spent part of the conference having to defend Strategy’s sale of 32 BTC the week prior as well as explaining how he sad Bitcoin underpinning the financial infrastructure of the future. A topic very close to our hearts at RootstockLabs.
Bitcoin-secured finance, productive use of long-held BTC, and the infrastructure needed to get there were all big topics this time around. A couple of years ago the diehard Bitcoin maxis would have shuddered at the thought of doing anything but HODL but it seems like tides are changing. In my conversations with some of the attendees views on borrowing against bitcoin were resoundingly positive.
For me the conference made one thing clear: as Bitcoin matures, miners, treasuries, and long-term holders are all looking for productive use cases, ways to put their stack to work without sacrificing the proof-of-work security and decentralisation that sets Bitcoin aside from other digital assets. In fact we saw the same thing when asking attendees to confess when they last bought somethinfg with Bitcoin or when they last sold it. People had endless answers for what they bought. But when it came to selling, the answers got a lot simpler and narrower.
That’s the point. Bitcoin is becoming something people want to get value from but It’s still something a lot of people don’t really want to give up.
Day 3 @BTCPrague and it’s never too early to confess your sins pic.twitter.com/91Vk30G2sU
— Sam Golden 🪬 (@GoldenGatsby) June 13, 2026
₿ Mallers vs. Saylor
The week kicked off hard at Bitcoin Corporate Day with a heated exchange between two Bitcoin Treasury Co figureheads. Strike’s Jack Mallers vs Strategy’s Michael Saylor. Both strong characters with their own distinct views of what Bitcoin was built for. If Saylor is the Bitcoin Capitalist, Mallers is the Bitcoin Moralist. Where Saylor sees a $100 trillion asset class, Mallers sees a generation’s escape route
Mallers pushed Saylor hard on whether Strategy’s capital raises were genuinely non-dilutive, asking him to produce a concrete example of a dilutive transaction under his own framework. Saylor countered that mNAV is just one of several valid lenses through which to evaluate the company. What I found particularly pertinent here wasn’t the debate itself but the fact these kind of conversations. Its a sign of market maturity and the kind of conversation that usually happen behind closed doors.
“Companies issuing perpetual preferred equity are signing up to owe money forever.”
— Jack Mallers, Strike / Twenty One · BTC Prague 2026
Jack Mallers sits down to discuss the Saylor controversy, the debt spiral, and what the ideal Bitcoin treasury company looks like.
₿ The Cost of Our Inheritance
Mallers’ keynote wasn’t a product pitch or a price prediction. It was something rarer: a genuine moral argument delivered with conviction. A millennial who has spent 13 years in Bitcoin, Mallers opened with his own account of his generation’s reality: friends lost to addiction and suicide or buried in debt they didn’t choose to take on.
Rising housing costs, falling birth rates, declining life expectancy. Mallers’ argument was that these aren’t unrelated failures of culture or policy. They are the predictable downstream consequences of a monetary system designed to export inflation while enriching those closest to the money printer.
“The cost of printing is not paid in currency — it’s paid in us. The youth bear it.”
— Jack Mallers, BTC Prague 2026
For Mallers’ Bitcoin isn’t primarily an investment. It’s a moral stance. It’s a refusal to participate in a system that steals from future generations without consent. Honestly this one is worth a watch, a masterclass in communication and a reminder of why we’re all here.
₿ Bitcoin-Secured Finance: The Next Phase
Away from the headline debates, some of the most valuable signal came from the quieter conversations. The mining tracks, the BTCFi panels, , and the side events.
On the morning of June 12th, RootstockLabs hosted a Bitcoin & Business Breakfast with our friends at Xapo Bank a focused four-hour gathering from 9am to 1pm bringin gtogether miners, infrastructure builders, and Bitcoin-native finance teams for the type of high-signal conversation that rarely happen in a crowded conference hall.
Then on the evening of the 13th, the Rootstock community brought back the legendary Bitcoin and Brews at the infamous Bar No. 7, now in its third consecutive year alongside BTC Prague. This is the off-agenda gathering where the badge lanyards come off and the real conversations continue.
₿ And we’re still so early
One thing that emerged from all the the week is its clear the next phase of Bitcoin-native finance needs to stay true to Bitcoin’s core values: security, decentralisation, self-custody, and resilience. The conversations the RootstockLabs team had across both the conference and our own events reinforced why the Bitcoin-secured infrastructure like Rootstock matter: Bitcoin’s proof-of-work security model as the bedrock for productive financial applications, without compromising on the values that make Bitcoin worth building on in the first place.
The shift from “how can me or my business buy bitcoin” to “what can me or my business do with bitcoin?” is real and it’s happening faster than many expected. The team at RootstockLabs and the wider Rootstock community were here for the last decade and will be here for the next. We’re still early and I can’t wait to do it all again next year.