Demonstrating that custodial, centralized, altcoin casinos are not the sole path to success in this sector, the privacy-oriented bitcoin exchange Bull Bitcoin has recently expanded internationally, establishing a team in France and extending its services throughout the eurozone. This expansion follows their entry into Costa Rica just a year prior.
“Bull Bitcoin is likely the longest-standing Bitcoin-only, self-custodial exchange,” Theo Mogenet, the Europe General Manager for Bull Bitcoin, shared in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine.
“When you purchase Bitcoin from us, it goes directly to your wallet; we never retain client funds—and this embodies Francis’s vision of privacy and the cypherpunk ethos.”
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Established in Montreal, Canada, in 2013, Bull Bitcoin is distinguished by its noncustodial exchange model. Instead of holding your fiat and crediting your account with bitcoin, Bull Bitcoin requires users to enter a Bitcoin public address before making a purchase. This ensures that once fiat reaches their account, they can swiftly transfer the bitcoin to the user’s specified wallet.
They have also been proactive and enthusiastic supporters of the Lightning Network and Liquid Network, even incorporating PayJoin into their platform, which significantly enhances privacy for their users.
Moreover, they have developed a suite of products aimed at utilizing bitcoin as currency, rather than for trading and speculation.
Bull Bitcoin allows customers to settle their monthly expenses with bitcoin, covering bills like rent, electricity, data plans, and recently, even real estate purchases. They have also introduced a Bitcoin wallet application, which is still in early development but quickly accumulating a rich array of features.
A notable yet subtle distinction between Bull Bitcoin and the majority of exchanges is their bitcoin-only policy, which eschews the selling of altcoins—common practice among many exchanges that monetize the speculative excitement of the crypto markets.
Bull Bitcoin disregards the entire crypto market, solely focusing on bitcoin. This specialization allows them to implement cutting-edge technologies ahead of many competitors, while also avoiding the compliance risks and technical challenges associated with supporting numerous altcoins.
The outcome is a profitable operation with a streamlined team that has successfully gone global.
Privacy is Not a Crime
A key aspect of Bull Bitcoin’s success is its origin story. Founded by French-Canadian entrepreneur and Bitcoin Maximalist Francis Pouliot, the company has been completely self-funded, avoiding any venture capital involvement to date.
Staying true to the original cypherpunk vision of bitcoin as sovereign money may have presented challenges, but it has empowered the company to make decisions and adopt strategies that other exchanges often shy away from.
Today, they are making strides into the EU at a time when many other cryptocurrency firms are withdrawing from the region. Companies such as Deribit exited Europe years ago, and even major players like Tether are under pressure to leave the European Union due to regulatory challenges. In contrast, Bull Bitcoin has jumped in, seizing the opportunity to tap into an underrepresented market.
In terms of compliance, Bull Bitcoin has adopted a significantly different strategy than most market players. Instead of engaging in excessive compliance due to fear, as seen with numerous crypto exchanges, they adhere strictly to the letter of the law, actively seeking means to safeguard their users from overbearing regulators and legislators.
“We have extensive experience in dealing with the government. Coming from Canada, we are accustomed to governmental oversight. While the compliance requirements of the European Union are considerably higher than those in Canada, we are not intimidated,” stated Francis Pouliot to Bitcoin Magazine.
Theo Mogenet added:
“We have established responsibilities regarding anti-money laundering that we cannot bypass. However, when a government—be it in Canada or Europe—requests a bulk of transactions without judicial oversight or legal justification, our policy is to resist and ensure we utilize every piece of legislation available to contest government demands.”
Expansion into Costa Rica
Bull Bitcoin’s expansion isn’t confined to Canada and Europe. In recent years, they have ventured into Costa Rica, marking their entry into Latin American markets, which are largely driven by peer-to-peer transactions and simple infrastructure.
As the first “Bitcoin exchange in the country,” they rapidly integrated with the popular mobile payment service SINPE Móvil, allowing users to trade sats for fiat effortlessly in a familiar manner for the local populace.
This initiative appears to have sparked rapid adoption among farmers’ markets and other retail outlets, often showcasing videos featuring Francis and the team enjoying the weather of Central America.
The decision to move to Costa Rica was famously influenced by a desire to escape the COVID restrictions in Canada, which Francis opposed vehemently.
Bull Bitcoin soon allied with Bitcoin Jungle, an open-source grassroots initiative similar to the Bitcoin Beach community in El Salvador, which educates and maps out opportunities for Costa Ricans to leverage bitcoin as both currency and within a broader ecosystem.
The Burdens of Self-Custody
Bull Bitcoin’s commitment to cypherpunk principles has not been without difficulties. The practice of self-custody, while alleviating substantial compliance and security burdens from the organization, necessitates a more knowledgeable user base and a highly responsive support team.
They offer a self-hosted “simple chat system” for customer support that even Francis occasionally utilizes, allowing users quick and reliable access to a knowledgeable Bitcoiner for prompt assistance, without the reliance on third-party platforms.
“In our case, it’s a self-hosted permanent chat running on our servers. Client data is never shared with external entities. You will essentially converse with a real person, often in Europe, it could be me, Jimmy, a customer support officer, or sometimes even Francis responding to clients,” Theo Mogenet explained about their customer support strategy.
They have also established processes designed to mitigate the risk of scams, including calling users who are in a customer support inquiry.
“We can engage in a 10- to 15-minute conversation with them to ensure they understand what a Bitcoin wallet is, the associated risks with self-custody, and to confirm they are not being pressured or coerced by anyone into this decision,” Theo shared during a podcast.
Phishing scams are a prevalent issue for Bitcoin and crypto exchanges, frequently preying on unsuspecting users who may be urged by various deceptive tactics to buy crypto for scammers.
Alongside their proactive support team, in 2022 Bull Bitcoin acquired Veriphi, a “white glove service provider for Bitcoin self custody.” This firm, deeply entrenched in the Bitcoin Quebec community, has developed extensive expertise in advanced self-custody consulting.
Today, this service is woven into their product suite with a dedicated website at bitcoinsupport.com, offering customers a variety of consulting and educational packages to assist them on their journey toward bitcoin self-custody with proper guidance.
Self-Hosted Infrastructure: The Fork War
The emphasis on self-hosted infrastructure arose not merely from ideology, but as a hard-earned lesson stemming from the 2017 Bitcoin fork war—an internal struggle within the Bitcoin community regarding the appropriate direction for Bitcoin’s scaling development and who held the authority to decide.
In a 2017 address, Francis Pouliot articulated the challenges faced by the Bitcoin community at that time, including the game theory behind economic nodes and the thesis of Bitcoin consensus that ultimately prevailed.
Confronted by a faction within the Bitcoin community known as Bitcoin Unlimited, which sought to scale Bitcoin by enlarging the block size—a technical approach rejected by Bitcoin Core developers—Francis Pouliot and the Bull Bitcoin team spearheaded an initiative to educate and unify Canadian Bitcoin enterprises against the proposed hard fork, as demonstrated by a 2017 letter of intent signed by 16 Canadian businesses.
Bull Bitcoin also initiated the development of Cyphernode, a “modular Bitcoin full-node microservices API server architecture and utilities toolkit for creating scalable, secure, and versatile applications and services without the reliance on trusted third parties.”
This software suite, released as open-source software a year later, enabled Bull Bitcoin and affiliated companies to assert their stance during that schism with software they could control, allowing them to select which Bitcoin version to support and which to follow during any potential network bifurcation.
Their software independence would prove advantageous against another front in this cultural battle: a corporate coalition of mining pools, data service providers, and exchanges that sought to implement a different consensus change to the Bitcoin protocol, known as the NY Agreement, advocating for a version of Bitcoin designated SegWit2x.
This formidable corporate coalition encompassed major entities such as Blockchain.com, Coinbase, and over 50 others, including mining pools that, theoretically, controlled more than 80% of hashing power, posing challenges to developer and community consensus.
Ultimately, both Bitcoin Unlimited and the NY Agreement coalition succumbed to the community and developer consensus that employed tools akin to Cyphernode (UASF) and backed the backwards-compatible SegWit soft fork, a scaling solution that maintained compatibility with older Bitcoin versions, ultimately prevailing.
Bull Bitcoin’s involvement in safeguarding the decentralization of Bitcoin in 2017, alongside its alignment with cypherpunk principles for over a decade, solidifies their reputation as legends in Bitcoin history.
