Hackalajara 2.0: PlebLab Startup Day Guadalajara Brings Bitcoin Builders Together

Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, August 2026 — What started Thursday morning with laptops spread across Stacker Space ended Friday night with demos, prizes, pizza, beer, and a room full of Bitcoin builders at Cervecería Gibbons.

Hackalajara 2.0 kicked things off Thursday, August 20th at Stacker Space in Guadalajara. The format was deliberately simple: bring an idea, find people to work with, use the workshops and people in the room, and try to ship something real before the demos the following day.

Builders received remote sessions from Moritz Kaminski of Alby on building Bitcoin apps with Alby Hub and Nostr Wallet Connect, Justin from ShockNet on building with CLINK, and Super Testnet on coordinatorless coinjoins with Emessbee. The workshops were less about sitting through presentations and more about putting tools directly into builders’ hands while they still had time to use them.

That became especially visible with CLINK.

Justin had previously introduced CLINK at Startup Day Yucatán, but Guadalajara showed how much the ecosystem around it has grown. During Startup Day he shared integrations across wallets, merchant software, Lightning infrastructure, Nostr apps, and a new command line approach designed to make Lightning payments easier for AI agents and scripts.

The basic idea is to let applications communicate with a Lightning node over Nostr rather than requiring the normal collection of public servers, certificates, addresses, and infrastructure around it.

Then builders actually used it. Six Hackalajara projects eventually made their way onto the Startup Day stage.

Lightning Rewards built a Lightning native loyalty system where merchants can automatically give customers rewards as part of the payment flow.

Black Hole Mempool turned the mempool into an interactive educational visualization designed to make transactions, blocks, fees, and mining easier for newcomers to understand.

Savings Vault experimented with collaborative Bitcoin savings using Taproot, PSBTs, time locks, and Nostr coordination.

Lamppost built a simple Nostr hosted storefront generator where someone can list things for sale, generate a physical flyer with a QR code, and receive Lightning payments through CLINK without needing to build a traditional ecommerce site.

Nakamoto Bitwatch turned a smartwatch into a Bitcoin focused dashboard for price, block height, mempool data, and fees.

BitSimp extended an existing digital content marketplace with CLINK so payments could move directly toward creators instead of passing through the platform itself.

It was exactly the kind of range we hoped for. Some projects were polished. Some were experiments. Some had existed before Thursday and used the hackathon to push a new feature forward.

Others were much closer to something that started because somebody in the room simply wanted to try an idea.

By Friday night, the original prize pool had grown to 1,000,000 sats, including a surprise 100,000 sat Best Community Build award added by White Paper House. Fulgur Ventures supported the 300,000 sat overall prize, ShockNet put up 500,000 sats for the best CLINK implementation, PlebLab supported the Lightning prize, and PlebTV Impress supported the design award both for 50,000 sats.

The final awards included:

The judging was closer than expected. More important than the prizes, though, was seeing several projects continue straight from Thursday’s build room into Friday’s public demo session.

Friday moved everything over to Ciudad Creativa Digital for PlebLab’s sixth Startup Day since the event began in 2022, and the first one we have hosted in Guadalajara. The program ran from breakfast and coffee in the morning through startup announcements, workshops, panels, demos, networking, and finally the Hackalajara celebration at Gibbons.

The opening was also an opportunity to talk about where PlebLab itself is going.

Car shared an update on PlebTV Impress and the work being done around AI dubbing, where creators can take an uploaded video and generate additional language versions while paying for the work with Bitcoin.

For an event happening between builders from Mexico, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, the problem became particularly obvious: content increasingly travels globally while language still creates a very real boundary around who can use it.

The opening also included an update on PlebLab Startup School and Zap.Cooking, one of the teams going through the 2026 program, along with an early announcement for the next AI Startup Rodeo coming to Q Branch in Austin on October 30th.

Zap.Cooking later showed what it has been building across its web and Android apps.

What started around simplified recipe publishing has grown into a much broader Bitcoin and Nostr powered cooking product with peer to peer zaps, recipe extraction through its AI Sous Chef, Chefy for recipe assistance, meal planning, grocery lists, nutritional analysis, social feeds, and an integrated Lightning wallet experience.

It is also a good example of something we talk about often at PlebLab: some of the most interesting companies start with a problem that seems small or niche, then become much bigger as builders stick with it long enough to understand what they are really solving.

The keynote came from Gustavo J. Flores Echaiz, CEO and Founder of Aureo, and it became one of the clearest expressions of the theme running through the entire week.

Persistence.

Gustavo walked through a Bitcoin journey that went back more than a decade: hearing about Bitcoin, starting a mining company with friends, losing money, building Verify, organizing communities in Montreal, moving to Mexico, helping build community in Querétaro and Mexico City, launching Swapido, losing an important infrastructure provider, rebuilding the product, raising capital, and eventually turning that work into Aureo.

The company now reports more than 1,500 signups, 10,000 transactions, and roughly 40 million pesos in volume.

Gustavo also used the keynote to announce a new service allowing people to buy or sell real estate in Mexico using Bitcoin as one side of the transaction, alongside the return of third party payouts that allow Bitcoin users and companies to pay Mexican bank accounts.

There was a useful lesson underneath all of the numbers.

Aureo did not start because somebody went looking for an abstract Bitcoin market category. The founders were earning Bitcoin while living in Mexico and kept running into the same problem themselves. They built around that problem, broke things along the way, rebuilt them, and kept going.

CarLos Ruz gave another version of that same story, only from the open source developer side.

His talk, From Pleb to Dev, followed his path from someone who originally knew almost nothing about software or Bitcoin development into contributing to Core Lightning, building plugins, helping with meetups and BitDevs, contributing to other open source projects, and eventually working on Ambrosia.

Ambrosia is being built as a free and open source Lightning point of sale system for real businesses. The project handles products, users, roles, orders, reports, notifications, and the Lightning payment flow while trying to keep the merchant in control.

The team began with PhoenixD as a simple backend and has since added support for connecting external infrastructure through Nostr Wallet Connect. The broader plan is to expand the system beyond stores into restaurants, freelancers, hackerspaces, appointments, and other business types.

What made the talk interesting was not just Ambrosia.

It was seeing what happens when somebody starts by showing up to a local Bitcoin meetup, learns a little code, contributes something small, keeps coming back, takes responsibility for more of the community, and eventually becomes one of the people building the tools everyone else is discussing.

A lot of Startup Day Guadalajara ended up coming back to the community, probably because the local community is the reason the event happened there at all.

Mercedes shared the work White Paper House has been doing in Yucatán, particularly with indigenous communities and women who have historically had little access to the traditional financial system.

Her approach was intentionally different from simply arriving somewhere and trying to convince everyone to buy Bitcoin. The work begins with existing needs and existing community relationships, then introduces Bitcoin gradually through education and, importantly, actual use.

At White Paper House in Mérida, artisans have been able to bring products such as honey, hammocks, textiles, and embroidery directly to events and sell them for Bitcoin.

Her argument was that adoption has to make sense inside the culture where it is happening rather than expecting every community to follow the same Bitcoin playbook.

Adrián Treviño brought another side of education with Tus Llaves, Tus Bitcoin, a project focused on personalized self custody training. Instead of treating a hardware wallet as the end of the process, Adrián argued that the bigger problem is often human error.

Different users have different amounts of Bitcoin, levels of experience, family situations, inheritance needs, and security requirements, so good self custody education has to begin by understanding the person before recommending the setup.

Then Chris Guida and Laura Meza spent time telling the story of Guadalajara itself.

The current community grew slowly out of earlier meetups, weekly coffee gatherings, Bitcoin & Lightning Guadalajara, Hacker Garage, the arrival of Super Testnet, the creation of Guadalajara BitDevs, and eventually a group of builders pooling resources to create Stacker Space.

Chris described the frustrating part of local community building pretty well: sometimes you keep showing up and nobody comes. Until eventually somebody does.

Then another person starts learning. Somebody writes a plugin. Somebody else starts organizing. A few people begin working together every day. Eventually there are enough of them that they need their own space.

Chris also talked about seeing PlebLab in Austin and using it as part of the inspiration for what eventually became Stacker Space. Now the relationship is starting to run in both directions, with Guadalajara producing projects, contributors, businesses, and ideas that other communities can learn from.

That was probably the most important part of bringing Startup Day to Guadalajara. PlebLab did not need to manufacture a Bitcoin community there. One was already doing the work.

That local model is beginning to spread.

Ge from San Antonio Bitcoin Club used Startup Day to announce plans to open a PlebLab in San Antonio, moving the community there from its education phase toward a more deliberate builder phase.

His point was that the infrastructure and open source tools are increasingly available. The next constraint is finding people who are willing to use them, experiment, and build companies around them.

San Antonio also sits in an interesting place geographically. Austin is just up the road. Mexico is just south. Guadalajara and Mexico City have growing builder communities. Instead of treating each of those cities as separate Bitcoin islands, the opportunity is to create more movement between them.

He described that this is starting to look less like a collection of meetups, communities and more like a network.

The afternoon moved from announcements into three larger conversations: Can Bitcoin Win at Payments in Mexico?, Can Lightning Finally Become Normal?, and Bitcoin Is Local: How Communities Create Adoption.

The Aureo workshop room ran in parallel with sessions around the legal and fiscal realities of building Bitcoin companies in Mexico, real estate, Bitcoin business opportunities, and self custody.

There was also room for disagreement.

Chris Guida closed the main program with a technical and contentious discussion around Bitcoin consensus, BIP 110, Bitcoin Knots, mining, node authority, and a proposed Blake2B proof of work fork.

Whatever side someone takes on those arguments, having the conversation at the end of a day mostly focused on payments, companies, adoption, and products was a useful reminder that Bitcoin remains a technical system where serious disagreements about rules and governance still matter.

In the original announcement for Hackalajara and Startup Day, we wrote that these events work best when they are not simply dropped into a city from somewhere else. They work when they are built alongside people who have already been showing up, teaching, organizing, building, and earning trust locally.

After spending the week in Guadalajara, that feels even more true.

The most encouraging part was not one announcement, one company, one panel, or even one winning project.

It was the story of a local meetup turned into a hacker space. A community member turned into an open source contributor. A hackathon project turned into a Startup Day demo. A founder from Mexico City shared what he learned building a company in Mexico.

Builders from Guadalajara used protocols created elsewhere and turned them into new products. People from Austin, San Antonio, Mérida, Monterrey, Mexico City, and Guadalajara were swapping ideas, code, contacts, and lessons in the same rooms.

That is a much healthier picture of Bitcoin adoption than simply measuring how many people attended an event.

The goal is to create more people who can build, help those builders turn ideas into projects, help those projects become products, and give the strongest ones a chance to become real companies, all while strengthening the communities around them so the next person does not have to start from zero.

Hackalajara 2.0 and Startup Day Guadalajara gave us two days to see what that can look like in practice, and now everybody gets to go back to work.

None of this happens without the people who show up, build, teach, organize, sponsor, and keep these local communities moving forward. A huge thank you to the Guadalajara Bitcoin community, Stacker Space, Bitcoin & Lightning Guadalajara, Laura Meza, Chris Guida, and everyone on the ground who helped make the week possible.

Thank you as well to every builder, speaker, workshop leader, judge, volunteer, founder, and community member who traveled to Guadalajara and gave their time to be part of it.

We also want to thank the sponsors and partners who made Startup Day Guadalajara and Hackalajara 2.0 possible: Aureo, Bull Bitcoin, ShockWallet, Zaprite, Fulgur Ventures, PlebTV Impress, Zap.Cooking, Bitcoin News, Bitcoin Only Events, Stacker Space, Guadalajara Connect, and Bitcoin & Lightning Guadalajara, along with everyone who contributed prizes, resources, space, time, and support throughout the week.

Hackalajara 2.0 ultimately reached a 1,000,000 sat prize pool, giving builders another reason to take an idea, work on it together, and put something real in front of the community.

More importantly, those projects did not stay inside the hackathon. They carried directly into Startup Day the following afternoon, where builders could demo what they made in front of founders, developers, operators, and the broader Guadalajara Bitcoin community.

From Stacker Space on August 20th to Ciudad Creativa Digital and Cervecería Gibbons on August 21st, the entire week became one continuous builder experience.

Two days. One builder week.

Hopefully, this is only the beginning for Guadalajara.

Hackalajara 2.0
https://hackalajara.pleblab.com/

Startup Day Guadalajara
https://www.pleblab.dev/startup-day-guadalajara

Videos from Startup Day and Hackalajara 2.0
Coming soon to PlebLab YouTube and PlebTV Impress

Contact PlebLab
[email protected]

PlebLab is a founder led Bitcoin hackerspace and community accelerator based in Austin, Texas.

Since 2021, PlebLab has worked alongside early stage founders and open source builders through Startup School, Top Builder, Startup Day, hackathons, mentorship, and a growing network of builders and operators across Bitcoin.

The goal is simple: help more people build, help ideas become products, and give builders the community and support they need to keep going.

Hackalajara is a Bitcoin and Lightning hackathon built around practical experimentation, open source development, payments, and local adoption.

After the first Hackalajara brought builders together in Guadalajara in 2024, the event returned in 2026 with a second chapter focused on workshops, mentorship, collaboration, and shipping projects that could be demonstrated the following day at Startup Day.

Startup Day Guadalajara brought PlebLab’s Startup Day format to Guadalajara for the first time, connecting founders, builders, developers, operators, and local Bitcoin communities for a full day of keynotes, product announcements, technical talks, workshops, panels, Hackalajara demos, and conversations around what it actually takes to build Bitcoin companies and communities.