"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of open standards."
This isn't just a tagline in CEO Dan Trevino's email signature or a line he repeats to sound smart at crypto conferences. It's the hill he's been willing to die on since the days when explaining "open source" to someone was about as effective as teaching quantum physics to a golden retriever.
The Guy Handing Out Linux CDs (Yes, Really)
Picture this: Early 2000s. While most people were discovering the wonders of Windows XP and wondering if Napster was legal, Dan Trevino was that guy standing outside public libraries, enthusiastically handing out Linux CDs to bewildered passersby.
"I was one of those guys handing out Linux CDs at the early days in front of libraries, trying to get people to try this new operating system that barely worked," Dan confessed during a recent lightning talk, the kind of admission that makes you simultaneously respect his conviction and question his social survival instincts.
He ran a Linux user group in Florida—because apparently Florida needed something else to make it uniquely Florida—and later led a Google developer group. All this time, he wasn't just a tech enthusiast; he was a digital freedom fighter in flip-flops, convinced that someday people would care about controlling their own data.
"We definitely were advocating for people taking back control of their own data from early days," Dan explained, with the nostalgic tone of someone who was right too early—the tech equivalent of bringing reusable bags to grocery stores in 1995. "Privacy and data portability—user owning access to their own data—is kind of one of the things that's always been important to me."
This philosophy would later become central to what we're building at Boom.
When Crypto Was More Scam Than Substance
By 2016, the blockchain world was experiencing its first major hype cycle, full of projects with names like "MoonCoin" and "LamboCash" that seemed more focused on yacht-acquisition than actual development.
"We had a lot of blockchain people that were not authentic," Dan recalls, masterfully employing what might be the kindest possible way of saying "surrounded by scammers."
But amidst this digital gold rush, Dan discovered Blockstack—a community working on what they called "a new Internet." Unlike the blockchain bros promising 10,000x returns by Tuesday, the Blockstack developers were doing something unusual: actually building things.
This resonated with the values that would later guide us at Boom—focusing on real utility rather than hype.
"I found the block stack developers were focused more on like heads down development," Dan explains. "They weren't shouting about, you know, the fact that they were the greatest thing ever."
It was like finding a vegetarian at a BBQ competition—rare, principled, and secretly thinking they've got a better long-term strategy.
"I loved the ethos of the developers and the team that was running things back in the day," Dan recalled. This alignment of values inspired him to dive in, run meetups, organize hackathons, and eventually build a privacy-respecting note-taking app called Notewrite—where your notes were so private even you might have trouble finding them sometimes.
From "What's a Wallet?" to "We Built the First One"
As Blockstack evolved into Stacks and prepared for its 2.0 launch with a new blockchain and proof-of-transfer consensus mechanism, our journey at Boom began to take shape.
Dan and the early team had been working on an app discovery platform called Webby, because finding Blockstack apps was apparently harder than finding a vegetarian at the aforementioned BBQ competition. But as they approached the Stacks 2.0 launch, a new opportunity emerged—NFTs and wallets.
"We kind of evolved into scratching our own itch," Dan explained, using the startup world's favorite euphemism for "we pivoted because our first idea wasn't working." What started as a UI experiment with wallet functionality eventually transformed into something bigger.
The result? Boom—the first NFT platform and web wallet on Stacks, launching just a week after the blockchain itself. If being first to market is an achievement, being first to market before the market exists is either genius or madness. History suggests we might have been onto something, as Boom went on to mint the very first NFT on Stacks.
All Crypto Wallets Look Like They Were Designed by the Same Boring Person
If you've used cryptocurrency wallets, you've probably had this thought: "Did the same person design ALL of these?" Balance at the top, send button, receive button, maybe a swap function if they're feeling particularly creative that day.
Dan puts it bluntly: "These wallets all look the same. They're all essentially the same."
It's like walking into a party where everyone decided to wear the exact same outfit—functional, sure, but a complete failure of imagination.
At Boom, we aim to break this mold by reimagining what a wallet can be. In a moment of clarity that probably deserves dramatic music, our team realized something: the wallet shouldn't be the star of the show.
"We want to pull the wallet back," Dan explains. "When you go to an Amazon or Alibaba, they don't throw the wallet up as the first thing you see. They're showing you product."
This insight is so obvious in hindsight that it makes you wonder why everyone else is still designing wallets like they're digital versions of George Costanza's exploding wallet from Seinfeld. Our vision at Boom is closer to a digital marketplace where your wallet exists in the background—like at normal stores where people buy normal things.
Your Name Is Not 0xF3D...921 (Unless Your Parents Really Hated You)
One of Boom's most standout decisions is making the Bitcoin Naming Service (BNS) a fundamental part of the user experience. Unlike other platforms where names are optional add-ons (like buying the premium version of an app to remove ads), Boom gives every user a BNS name immediately upon sign-in through BNS subdomains.
"Your BNS is your address," Dan emphasizes, in what might be the simplest yet most profound statement about crypto UX improvement ever made.
Think about it: would you rather send money to "sarah.boom.btc" or "SP1X3JPGFT57NS4S93XX0GYKFH5BHQKC7MRSF801K"? Unless you're a robot or have a strange fetish for hexadecimal characters, the answer is obvious.
This seemingly small detail transforms the user experience from "please triple-check this 42-character string before sending your life savings" to "I'm sending money to Bob." The psychological difference is enormous—like the gap between performing brain surgery and making a sandwich.
"We don't have to wait for somebody to get Stacks and then go to a different website and buy a name, and then come back and tell us what their name is," Dan explains, describing the current convoluted process with the thinly veiled patience of someone who's watched users struggle with it one too many times.
When Lightning Isn't Fast Enough (The Irony!)
After a stint at Deep Lake (a Bitcoin startup focused on Discrete Log Contracts), Dan returned to Boom with fresh insights about the limitations of Bitcoin's Layer 1 and Lightning Network.
Working with Bitcoin's main chain, Dan discovered, was about as user-friendly as assembling IKEA furniture with chopsticks. Even Lightning Network, Bitcoin's speedy layer 2 solution, came with enough limitations to make an engineer cry.
"We could see the kind of trade-offs that were necessary and the difficulties in working with Layer 1," Dan recalls, in what might be the understatement of the year for anyone who's tried to build Bitcoin applications.
These experiences shaped his vision for what Stacks and sBTC could become: "a better Lightning than Lightning." It's like promising a better chocolate than chocolate—bold, borderline blasphemous, but intriguing enough to make you listen.
"Lightning without the trade-offs," he explains. "Without having to lock liquidity into channels like you have to do with Lightning. Without the decentralization trade-offs. Without the trust trade-offs."
This vision materialized in Stacks Pay—a protocol so straightforward that Dan himself momentarily forgot its comparative Bitcoin technical specifications during his talk: "I can’t recall the exact Bitcoin BIP," he laughed, referring to BIP-20 and BIP-21 which Stacks Pay compares to, while discussing the similarities between the Stacks Pay SIP, Bitcoin BIP, and Lightning BOLTs. This lighthearted moment demonstrated that even the creators and contributors of protocols sometimes get lost in the alphabet soup of terminology.
Stacks Pay makes cryptocurrency payments as simple as scanning a QR code. It's designed to deliver the "scan, confirm, pay, done" experience that people expect in 2025, not the "copy this address, double-check every character, say a prayer, and wait 10 minutes" experience that Bitcoin has normalized.
"Right now, if you're using Lightning, you usually scan in a QR code, and then you validate, confirm that you want to make a payment. You press pay, and it's done—two steps, two seconds," Dan explains. "That's kind of the vision that we're unlocking here with Stacks Pay."
Our protocol handles not just simple token transfers but also complex smart contract calls, allowing users to easily share transaction information for buying NFTs, purchasing services, or for example acquiring digital pet rocks from Faizan (Spaces host).
Your Wallet Should Be as Social as You Are at a Party After Two Drinks
Perhaps Boom's most ambitious feature is our integrated social layer. Recognizing that "money is social," our team is developing a communication platform alongside our marketplace.
If you think about it, the idea of a non-social wallet is as absurd as a silent karaoke bar. Money has always been a social tool—from ancient marketplaces to Venmo's public feed where people announce they've paid their roommate for "definitely just utilities 😉."
"We're implementing a social platform which is deeply integrated with the marketplace, but also separate from it," Dan explains, describing something that sounds like the lovechild of WeChat and a cryptocurrency wallet.
Initially, Dan looked at Nostr as a potential foundation for this social layer, but quickly discovered that even the Nostr developers weren't using their own protocol. "I went to look for the Nostr Relay communities, and the Nostr relay builders are on Telegram," he recalls with a laugh. It's like finding out that Coca-Cola executives secretly drink Pepsi—not exactly a vote of confidence.
Instead, Boom's social layer is built on Matrix, an open protocol championed by developer Friedger (Dude’s like among the Jedi coders on Stacks). "Friedger and I actually had this discussion a couple of years ago about how the Matrix protocol is really modular," Dan admits, "and I wasn't listening properly at the time." It's the tech equivalent of ignoring your friend's Netflix recommendation only to discover two years later that yes, that show IS actually amazing.
The social layer emphasizes user ownership and data portability. "If we're creating a user account and we're creating a chat account for you, you can take that chat account with you and go somewhere else," Dan emphasizes. "You don't want to see Stacks anymore? Your chat account is still your chat account."
This commitment to user autonomy is the digital equivalent of a restaurant letting you take your unfinished meal home in a doggy bag—it's your data, you should be able to take it with you.
Building LEGO Blocks for Money (No, Not Those $20,000 Bitcoin LEGO Sets)
Throughout Boom's development, we've focused not just on building a better product but on creating open standards that benefit the entire ecosystem. From co-authoring SIP-16 (the NFT metadata standard for Stacks) to developing Stacks Pay as an open protocol, our approach emphasizes collaboration over competition.
When asked about involving other parties in building Boom's "super app" vision, Dan articulated a vision for "Lego blocks for like a super app"—a modular platform where developers can plug in their own components. It's less about building a walled garden and more about creating a public park where anyone can set up shop.
"We'd want to build like this kind of basic platform and allow people to plug in their own kind of pieces," he explains, sounding more like a community organizer than a tech founder protecting proprietary code.
"What we're hoping for is that Stacks Pay creates this environment where we see multiple wallets and multiple POS systems evolve using the same standard," Dan explains, envisioning a world where Bitcoin payments are as standardized and simple as email.
When asked about Stacks Pay's potential for adoption by retailers—coffee shops, food chains, and local businesses—Dan acknowledges the challenge: "There's obviously limits to what you can do as a single company getting started."
But he points to how Lightning evolved: "There used to be at least like 12-15 different Lightning wallets." His hope is that Stacks Pay will catalyze a similar flourishing of compatible applications, especially in emerging markets where crypto adoption is outpacing traditional finance.
"If you go to a lot of 3rd World countries, a lot of growing economies these days, people have kind of thrown out the whole POS system," Dan observes. "They're just using their phones." It turns out the future of payments might not involve fancy terminals, just the same device you use for doomscrolling during bathroom breaks.
What If It All Goes Wrong? (The Stakes Are Higher Than You Think)
The stakes are clear and surprisingly profound: if projects like ours can't make Bitcoin accessible to everyday users, cryptocurrency remains a niche technical curiosity—the digital equivalent of that bread maker you bought and used exactly once before relegating it to the back of your cabinet.
But at Boom, we aren't building just for crypto enthusiasts or traders comparing charts on multiple monitors. We're building for everyone who deserves financial sovereignty—which, last we checked, includes pretty much all humans.
The parallels to Dan's early Linux advocacy aren't subtle. Linux eventually succeeded not by convincing everyone to learn command line interfaces, but by powering billions of devices, from super computers to phones - whose users never type "sudo" anything. Similarly, Bitcoin's success depends on hiding its complexity behind interfaces so intuitive that users never have to know what a "UTXO" is.
Full Circle: From Handing Out CDs to Handing Out Financial Freedom
Today, Dan's journey has come full circle. The idealistic Linux advocate who once handed out CDs to promote open-source software is now building open-source money based on Bitcoin.
"We're fighting for open source money," he says, connecting his current work to those early days of digital advocacy when explaining "operating system" to strangers required both patience and creative analogies.
As Boom continues to evolve—focusing on mobile-first design, simplifying payments, and creating an integrated marketplace—the core mission remains unchanged: empowering individuals through technology that respects their autonomy.
The Linux enthusiast standing outside the library with a stack of CDs has grown up, but his fundamental belief—that technology should free people, not constrain them—remains intact. He's just upgraded from distributing operating systems to distributing the future of money.
The blockchain world needs more Dan Trevinos—people who care more about usability than buzzwords, who prioritize user autonomy over lock-in effects, and who understand that the best technology often disappears into the background rather than demanding attention.
As for Boom itself? While other wallets continue showing you how many tokens you have (congratulations?), we're building something more ambitious: a platform where regular people can use Bitcoin without feeling like they need a computer science degree first.
And that might be the most revolutionary idea of all.
Visit boom.money to learn more about the project or follow us on X @boom_wallet and Dan at @DanTrevino.
