Proving that custodial, centralized, altcoin casinos are not the only way to succeed in this industry

input: Proving that custodial, centralized, altcoin casinos are not the only way to succeed in this industry

In an industry often saturated with custodial, centralized, altcoin casinos, Bull Bitcoin stands out as a privacy-focused bitcoin exchange that has taken a unique and successful path. Recently, they went multinational, bootstrapping a team in France and expanding services to the whole eurozone. This move comes a year after announcing their expansion into Costa Rica.

“Bull Bitcoin is probably the longest-running Bitcoin-only, self-custodial exchange,” said Theo Mogenet, Europe General Manager for Bull Bitcoin, in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine.

”When you buy Bitcoin from us, it goes straight to your wallet, we never hold client funds—and it reflects Francis’s vision of privacy and the cypherpunk ethos.”

Founded in Montreal, Canada, in 2013, Bull Bitcoin’s primary claim to fame is its noncustodial exchange model. Rather than take your fiat and credit a bitcoin balance to your account on their books, Bull Bitcoin forces users to input a Bitcoin public address before purchase. This ensures that when fiat lands on their account, they can quickly pay out the bitcoin to the user’s wallet of choice.

They’ve also been early and active supporters of the Lightning Network and Liquid Network, and have even integrated PayJoin into their platform, all of which offer significant privacy benefits to their users.

Finally, they have developed a line of products focused not on trading and speculation but on using bitcoin as money.

Bull Bitcoin enables users to pay their monthly bills with bitcoin such as rent, electricity, data plans, and as of late even buy real estate. They also have a Bitcoin wallet app that is still in its early stages, but is quickly gathering a strong list of features.

One subtle but powerful difference between Bull Bitcoin and most other exchanges is their bitcoin-only stance, which rejects selling altcoins that are the bread and butter of most exchanges — monetizing the speculative fervor of the crypto markets.

Bull Bitcoin ignores the whole crypto market, focusing only on bitcoin, which allows it to deploy cutting-edge technologies before many of its competitors. The team at Bull Bitcoin thereby doesn’t run the compliance risk or carry technical debt that comes naturally with supporting hundreds of different altcoins.

The result is a profitable company with a lean and mean team that has now gone international.

Privacy Is Not a Crime

The final piece to Bull Bitcoin’s success might be its founding story. Started by French-Canadian entrepreneur and Bitcoin Maximalist Francis Pouliot, the company has been entirely self-funded, receiving no VC money so far.

While sticking to the early cypherpunk vision of bitcoin as sovereign money could not have been easy, it has enabled the company to make decisions and employ strategies that other exchanges often avoid.

Now, they are entering the EU in an era where many other cryptocurrency businesses are exiting the union. Companies like Deribit left Europe years ago and even giants like Tether are being squeezed out from the European Union due to regulatory pressure. Bull Bitcoin has instead dove in, seeing an opportunity to reach an underserved market.

On the compliance front, Bull Bitcoin has taken a very different approach than other market participants. Rather than over-comply out of an abundance of caution as seen with many crypto exchanges, they have stuck to the letter of the law, and looked for ways to defend their users from overzealous regulators or politicians.

“We have a lot of experience dealing with the government. We come from Canada so we are used to government oversight. The compliance burden of the European Union, although much higher than Canada, doesn’t scare us,” Francis Pouliot told Bitcoin Magazine.

Theo Mogenet added:

“We have certain obligations in terms of fighting money laundering — that we cannot really circumvent. But as you mentioned, when, for example, a government, be it in Canada or here in Europe, will ask for a bulk of transactions without any judicial mandate, without any legal basis to do so, our policy is just to fight back and make sure that we can use every piece of legislation that is out there — to basically push back on the government’s demand.”

Expansion Into Costa Rica

Bull Bitcoin’s expansion is not limited to Canada and Europe. In recent years, Bull Bitcoin started making inroads into Costa Rica, marking their entrance into Latin American markets, an ecosystem often driven by peer-to-peer payments and low-tech infrastructure.

Becoming the first “Bitcoin exchange in the country,” it quickly integrated with the very popular mobile text payments service SINPE Móvil, allowing users to trade sats for fiat quickly and in a way the local population was familiar with.

The result seems to have been a quick expansion of adoption among farmers markets and other produce retailers, which often feature videos from Francis and the team, enjoying the Central-American weather.

The move to Costa Rica was famously driven by an escape from the Covid restrictions in Canada, which Francis protested and opposed.

Bull Bitcoin soon partnered