Venezuelans Made Lightning-Savvy Hardware to Use Bitcoin During Blackouts

During the blackout earlier this year, it became clear to Brito that poor internet infrastructure was a leading barrier to crypto adoption.

Locha Mesh has created two hardware prototypes so far, Turpial and Harpy, both of which act like small routers that don't rely on local WiFi.

"These devices allow commerce by making it possible for users to send and receive payments using the bitcoin network," Brito said, describing the devices as "Easy to carry and hide" for safety purposes.

In March, these small devices created an experimental system that actually worked for 22 consecutive hours, even connecting Harpy devices to the Blockstream satellite and relaying that connectivity to other users via the Turpial device.

Next up, came a focus on enabling small, fast payments using a scaling solution called the Lightning Network.

"The Lightning Network requires you to be connected, otherwise, you wouldn't know if your counterpart is lying," Brito said.

"These nodes, these devices are always connected to the Lightning Network."

So Brito presented his latest mesh-network hardware tools for such transactions at the 2019 Lightning Conference in Berlin, because Locha Mesh is currently looking for investors and donors.

His six-person team aims to start selling these devices in the first quarter of 2020.

Locha Mesh's Turpial prototypes, photo by Diana Aguilar for CoinDesk.