If you’ve ever tried explaining Bitcoin to a friend, only to watch their enthusiasm fade as you mention private keys, Lightning channels, or liquidity, you’ll understand why Coinos feels like a breath of fresh air.
Created by Adam Soltys, Coinos is a free web-based wallet and payment platform that strips away the complexity, making Bitcoin as intuitive as Venmo. No downloads, no technical hurdles, just log in and start transacting.
Bitcoin News recently sat down with Adam to discuss Coinos, his accidental journey into Bitcoin, and his mission to make satoshis accessible to everyone. “I guess I created it in 2012 as a hobby project,” he told us, setting the stage for a story that’s equal parts ingenuity and pragmatism.
The Accidental Bitcoin Entrepreneur
Adam didn’t plan to build a Bitcoin company. Back in 2012, he was a web developer for the Canadian federal government, “slacking off at work,” when he stumbled across Bitcoin online.
Instantly hooked, he didn’t just want to buy it—he wanted to use it. “I found a Meetup in Vancouver,” he recalled. “There was one other guy at the first Meetup I went to. It was just me and him.”
That humble beginning grew into something more. “We just kept on meeting up, eventually more people started attending, and we started going around to local businesses,” Adam explained.
They’d ask cafe owners and merchants if they’d accept bitcoin. Some said yes, and Adam built the first version of Coinos to help them: a simple tool where merchants could input a Bitcoin address, get payment notifications, and see the dollar value at the time of sale.
“It would record the price in dollars,” he said, “so the merchant would know what the value of bitcoin was at the time.”
That early Coinos helped onboard Vancouver merchants, but Adam shelved it for a few years. Then came the Lightning Network, a game-changer for fast, cheap Bitcoin payments.
“When Lightning came around, I got interested,” he said. “I started Coinos back up again and rewrote it from scratch to just make it into a Lightning wallet.”
Today, it’s his main focus, fueled by his early Bitcoin investments that freed him from a day job. “I don’t have a day job anymore,” he remarked, his humility striking for someone with the foresight to buy bitcoin early and hodl, “thanks to my Bitcoin investment in the early days mostly.”
Custodial vs. Self-Custodial: Walking the Fine Line
Coinos defaults to a custodial model, where the platform holds users’ bitcoin. It’s a choice Adam made for simplicity. Running a Lightning node is, as he put it, “a little more involved” than most people can handle.
“A lot of people just don’t have the bandwidth to try to figure out how to open channels and maintain liquidity,” he explained. With Coinos, “you just log into the website and you have an account and it just kind of works.”
But Adam’s uneasy with being a custodian long-term. “I don’t really like that for the long term,” he admitted. “The idea of me being responsible for all the funds that are in everyone’s account makes me a target for hackers and for regulators.”
More importantly, it runs counter to Bitcoin’s core promise. “It’s not really the point of Bitcoin to have these trusted third parties or middlemen,” he said.
“Here I am … my goal was to take down the banks and the governments of the world and now I’ve become one,” Adam notes with a laugh.
Still, he sees Coinos as a pragmatic entry point. “I see it as a stepping stone to get more people into Bitcoin now with an easy user interface, and user experience,” he explained.
“and then once they have some money and it’s starting to appreciate in value and they get the hang of it, then it sends them down the path to go and figure out how to get that moved into cold storage or get a hardware wallet or a paper wallet or something and move it into self-custody at some point.”
It’s a deliberate progression: hook them with simplicity, then empower them with sovereignty.
To make that journey real, he’s introduced a self-custodial option: a standard on-chain wallet with a 12-word seed phrase. “I did add a self-custodial account option to Coinos a few months ago,” he shared.
He’s also designing a hybrid approach: “Once you hit a certain threshold, it’ll prompt you to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to create this self-custodial wallet for you now. It’s time to write down your seed phrase and then we’re going to move most of the money there.’”
For Adam, it’s about meeting users where they are, offering ease of use first, then gently nudging them toward Bitcoin’s ultimate goal of financial sovereignty.
Beyond Lightning: eCash, Nostr, and Ark
Adam’s ambitions extend beyond Lightning, as he explores additional layers like eCash to enhance Coinos. eCash is a privacy-focused protocol that allows users to swap bitcoin into anonymous tokens, effectively breaking the connection between a user’s identity and their funds.
This turns Bitcoin into something akin to digital cash, untraceable and discreet, offering a level of privacy that Lightning can’t fully match, since Lightning transactions can still leave some digital breadcrumbs. By obscuring who’s moving funds in and out of an eCash mint, it also reduces the custodial risks Adam faces, making Coinos less of a target for hackers or regulators.
Yet, these technologies aren’t silver bullets.
Lightning excels at fast, cheap payments but demands technical know-how to manage nodes and liquidity, limiting its accessibility.
eCash, a standout for anonymity and instant transactions, operates off-chain and can’t settle directly on Bitcoin’s base layer, introducing trust assumptions that deviate from Bitcoin’s fully trustless ideal.
Each approach brings its own powerful piece to the puzzle, Lightning with efficiency, eCash with privacy, but none fully resolves every challenge, leaving room for innovation as Adam continues to refine Coinos.
Then there’s Nostr, the decentralized communications protocol gaining traction among Bitcoiners. Coinos already supports Nostr login, but Adam envisions more: “I want Coinos to become a Nostr client and Bitcoin wallet,” he said, imagining a future where users can chat, post, and pay seamlessly.
He sees Nostr as “your PGP key of the 21st century,” a tool for privacy, identity, and data sovereignty. He hopes one day it can replace email, chat apps, and even social media platforms dominated by “big corporations that are surveilling everything.”
He’s also eyeing Ark, a promising scaling solution that could combine Lightning’s speed with on-chain simplicity. “You get the speed and the low fees of a Layer 2, but you also get the simplicity of a regular on-chain wallet,” he enthused. “I’ll be looking to integrate that into Coinos at some point.”
The Merchant Adoption Challenge
Convincing merchants to accept bitcoin has evolved since the early days. Back then, “we just found a couple of cool merchants who had heard about Bitcoin and were open to trying it out,” Adam said, often for the novelty or publicity.
Now, with years of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) tainting Bitcoin’s reputation, it’s harder. “Most people have heard about Bitcoin, and a lot of people still have a negative attitude towards it,” he noted.
His solution? Leverage Vancouver’s thriving Bitcoin community. “We’ve got a pretty good Bitcoin community,” he said. “We host regular Bitcoin & Beers, Bitcoin & Coffee, guest speakers beaming in, and we do tech talks like BitDevs.”
When a merchant signs on, “we can host an event and bring like 100 people in.”
That immediate sales boost, coupled with free promotion on social media and BTC Map, often tips the scales. “They have to feel like they’re going to be getting new customers,” he emphasized. “That’s what tips people over.”
The Bigger Picture
For Adam, Coinos isn’t just about usability, it’s about freedom. “I think that is one of the main ways we can drive adoption,” he said, “getting it into the hands of these everyday business owners who aren’t really Bitcoiners yet.” As they see bitcoin’s value rise and feel community support, adoption spreads organically.
Bitcoin offers a stark contrast to fiat. It is a fairer, more honest form of money unbound by the control of centralized systems. There’s a striking irony in its journey: what often begins with greed, the allure of “number go up,” transforms into something deeper.
The further one ventures down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, the more it feels like a moral calling, a push for a world where financial power rests with individuals, not institutions.
Adam isn’t waiting for permission or approval.
He’s forging ahead, crafting tools that work. Tools that edge us closer to a future where money isn’t a weapon wielded by banks and governments, but a choice people can claim for themselves. With Coinos, he’s turning that vision into reality.
