Newsroom
What the borrowers are saying
Every update from every loan, newest first. Borrowers are required to post within 72 hours of anything material: good or bad.
- Open
What the hackathon judges said afterwards
P2P Voicemail: a hundredth of a cent to leave a message →We placed sixth and I was fine with that. What stuck was a judge finding me at the bar to say the payment was the interesting part and we had presented it as a feature rather than as the point. He was right. The whole pitch is different now because of that conversation.
- Open
Why we are not chasing a big studio
ChainGames: a studio that cannot quietly revise the odds →Somebody asked why we are not talking to the large publishers. We did, twice, and the answer both times was some version of: this is a compliance problem we do not currently have. That is a fair answer and it tells you where this product lives. Small studios that want to say something credible about fairness are the market, and there are more of them than the two we have signed.
- Late
Where the twenty-two live hosts actually are
DraigFi: paid Wi-Fi for hosts with spare bandwidth →Fourteen pubs, four cafes, three community halls and a barber. Revenue per host is within 12% of what we modelled and the barber is somehow the best performing site in the estate. I am posting this because the extension proposal is easier to judge if you can see that the units that are up are working.
- Open
The venue has held our dates without a deposit
Rotterdam Micro-Summit 2027: a small BSV conference, done properly →Four years of running events in the same warehouse buys you a fortnight of goodwill. They will hold March for us until 10 October, which is the day the deposit is due and the day this loan needs to have closed.
- Open
Frantoio slot booked for the second week of November
Kora EVOO: the 2026 Sicilian harvest →Booked and paid. Twelve hours from picking to pressing is the whole claim on the dossier, so the slot is the single most important thing in the season and we take the first one available rather than the cheapest. Last year the crop came in on 12 November and was extracted the same day.
- Repaying
Issue 12 is bound and on a pallet
Proof of Work Magazine: four issues of print capital →Nine and a half thousand copies. Subscriber posting starts Monday, newsstand the week after. This is the first issue in the title's history where the print run was decided by what we could sell rather than by what I could float.
- Open
Issue five is fully pencilled
DragonBorne: issues five to eight, with numbered prints →Twenty-two of twenty-two. Levente finished the last spread on Tuesday. Inks start next week and Noor has the palette locked for the whole arc, which is the thing that went wrong on issue three.
- Open
Programme is half-built and two speakers are confirmed
Rotterdam Micro-Summit 2027: a small BSV conference, done properly →Two confirmed and eleven invited. The rule stands: if you cannot show it running, you are not on the programme. Early-bird tickets open the week the loan closes.
- Repaying
Anti-fraud caught 1,100 accounts this quarter
Twetch Arcade: prize float and two new titles →Multi-accounting is a permanent operating cost in a prize-pool game and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Eleven hundred accounts removed, roughly 0.4% of the pool recovered. The number that matters is that it is flat quarter on quarter rather than growing.
- Open
Two of the four pilots have been on a real river with it
Adventure SV: routes the guide owns, not the platform →Rogue River, two guided trips, six clients between them. The trace held through the canyon section where there is no signal at all, and both guides said the same thing afterwards without prompting: the part they cared about was being able to hand a client the route and the photographs at the end and have that be theirs, not ours.
- Repaying
Distributor pickups start next week
BSVPhone: the first production run of a Metanet handset →First 1,500 are bonded and the first two distributors collect on the 3rd and the 8th. Those are firm orders, already assigned to this loan, so the September instalment is covered before the run is even complete.
- In review
Why I am borrowing instead of open-sourcing harder
Cookies: the sign-in layer three other projects depend on →I have maintained this for free for eighteen months and the reason it is not better is that free work gets the hours nobody else wanted. Two teams have offered to pay for a support tier. This loan is me taking them seriously.
- Repaying
The tool is the boring milestone and the important one
PiWalletSV: an air-gapped wallet built from parts you can buy →Nobody gets excited about a mould. But the case is 84% of our per-unit cost above the Pi itself, and going from forty minutes of printing to eleven seconds is what turns a project people admire into a product people can buy. First shots the second week of September.
- Open
Script locked at 118 pages
Bitcoin 102: the second instalment, sold by the copy →Longer than 101 by about twenty minutes of finished runtime. The structural change is that 102 is not one continuous narration: three of the six chapters are built around interviews recorded on location, which is where most of the budget difference comes from.
- Open
Sixth standing order signed
Kora EVOO: the 2026 Sicilian harvest →The Busan account came back for a second season and increased volume by a third. Six of eleven now committed. Picking starts the second week of November.
- Repaying
Variance under 0.4% across a full parallel month
METAWATT: energy certificates that trace to the meter →Co-op one has run our reconciliation alongside their own for a full billing month. Variance came in at 0.37% and every case traced to a meter re-read on their side rather than to us. That is the number acceptance turns on.
- Open
Fourth slot signed
Money20/20 Amsterdam: a stand in front of the banks →Fourth of six contracted this week. Both remaining slots have interest from companies that exhibited in Rotterdam, and we would rather have them than a larger name that treats it as a logo placement.
- Open
Issue five is pencilled through page 18
DragonBorne: issues five to eight, with numbered prints →Eighteen of twenty-two pages pencilled. Levente is ahead of where he was at the same point on issue four, mostly because we stopped redesigning the armour every issue.
- Open
Offline sync is done
Adventure SV: routes the guide owns, not the platform →The last hard piece of the Android build landed this week: a trace recorded in a canyon with no signal now reconciles cleanly when the phone comes back up, including photographs. Two of the pilot guides have been running it on real trips for a fortnight. One bug left, and it is a UI bug.
- Repaying
Caught-rate is holding at about 3.1% of sessions
Rogue Platapi: an advert that pays you, if you were watching →Three point one per cent of sessions flagged and refused payment this quarter, roughly flat on last. The pattern that works best against us is still a human answering honestly on behalf of a farm of devices, which the question cannot detect on its own and which the device fingerprinting does.
- Open
Why we cap it at 350
Rotterdam Micro-Summit 2027: a small BSV conference, done properly →We could sell 600. We know because we sold out in eleven weeks last year and the waiting list ran to 240. Above about 380 the room stops being one conversation and becomes several, and the thing people come back for is that it is one.
- Open
What the dossier actually contains
Kora EVOO: the 2026 Sicilian harvest →Harvest date, bottling date, the Korean import declaration, the lab report, and a SHA-256 fingerprint of the whole file. Three parties sign it: the Diliberto family as producer, Doremi Cucina as importer, and us last as notary. We have been asked several times to add tasting notes and we will not. Every field on that document is something a machine measured or an authority issued, and mixing in something a person decided would make the whole thing worth less.
- Repaying
Remediation done, report expected mid-September
Git-Sats: bounties that pay themselves out →All three medium findings closed and re-tested. None touched the public escrow path: they were in the hosted tier, which is new code. Both enterprise customers have seen the remediation summary and neither has asked for anything further.
- Repaying
Issue 12 is at the printer
Proof of Work Magazine: four issues of print capital →Nine and a half thousand copies, the largest run we have ever done, and the first one I have not had to underwrite out of my own account. The cover story is the Rotterdam meetup scene and it runs to 6,000 words because it needed to.
- Repaying
Reconciliation tooling in acceptance testing
METAWATT: energy certificates that trace to the meter →Co-op one has been running the reconciliation tooling against a parallel book since July. Variance is under 0.4% and every case traced to a meter re-read rather than to us. Acceptance sign-off expected in October.
- Open
The sell-through numbers, since people keep asking
DragonBorne: issues five to eight, with numbered prints →Issue one 2,400, issue two 1,700, issue three 1,300, issue four 1,700. The dip at three was a four-month gap between issues and it is the clearest lesson we have had: this book lives or dies on shipping on time, which is exactly what the loan is for.
- Repaying
Title fourteen is in soft launch
Twetch Arcade: prize float and two new titles →First of the two new titles went to soft launch in three markets last week. Day-one retention is 41%, which is comfortably above our bar of 34%. The second title is in production and tracking to a January launch.
- Open
The insurance review is the thing I am least sure about
Adventure SV: routes the guide owns, not the platform →Every guide service asks for it before they put a tool in front of a paying client, and I have never been through one. The broker's first read was that we are a record-keeping tool rather than a safety-critical one, which is the answer we want, but she also said she has seen that reassessed. Budgeting eight weeks and hoping for four.
- Open
Sponsor three renewed this morning
Rotterdam Micro-Summit 2027: a small BSV conference, done properly →Third of five signed. The two open slots are the ones we hold for smaller companies at a lower rate, and both have interest.
- Repaying
First 1,500 units assembled and in the warehouse
BSVPhone: the first production run of a Metanet handset →Assembly started in June and the first 1,500 are boxed and bonded. The firmware certification came back clean on the first submission, which we did not expect. The BRC-100 interface on port 2121 has been running against two external desktop clients through the whole QA cycle without a restart.
- Open
Why we are borrowing instead of pre-selling
Bitcoin 102: the second instalment, sold by the copy →We could open pre-orders tomorrow and we would probably clear the budget. We would also owe a film to several thousand people on a date we cannot yet promise, and every one of those obligations would be a different conversation. A loan is one obligation, with a number and a date on it, to people who have read the terms. That is a better thing to owe.
- Repaying
Observation window opened
SEMAIL: end-to-end email without changing the client →The Type II observation window formally opened on 1 August. Twelve months of evidence collection from here; the auditor's readiness assessment came back with two findings, both remediated inside a fortnight.
- Default
Arbitration opened
Bloxers: side-effect reports that cannot be revised →BitBacker has opened case BB-ARB-0031 following the third missed instalment. The file, the credit note and the indicative recovery figures are visible to every lender with a position. A vote on the recovery route opens on 5 September.
- Open
Grove report: the year looks average, which is good
Kora EVOO: the 2026 Sicilian harvest →Salvatore walked the groves last week. Fruit set is roughly in line with 2025 and there is no sign of fly. Average is what we want. The exceptional years are the ones where everyone's oil is good and the price falls.
- Repaying
Conformance suite is running against all three implementations
BetaBOLT: validation carried inside the token →Two hundred and six cases, and it found nine disagreements between the three teams on first run. Seven were their bugs, two were ours, and one of ours was in the specification rather than the code. That last one is why a running reference is worth having.
- Late
We are going to miss August, and here is the proposal
DraigFi: paid Wi-Fi for hosts with spare bandwidth →I would rather say this three weeks early than send an apology on the 1st. Installs have run about six weeks behind since May and we are short on working capital by roughly the size of one instalment. The proposal we have put to BitBacker is a four-month extension with August's coupon capitalised. Twenty-two hosts are billing and the numbers per host are holding. I am available in the lender chat every day this week.
- Repaying
Tool is cutting, first shots in September
PiWalletSV: an air-gapped wallet built from parts you can buy →The toolmaker started cutting in July. First shots expected the second week of September, then a fortnight of fit testing before we commit the batch. Component orders for the 900 kits are placed and staged.
- Open
Why we are not doing a Kickstarter for this
DragonBorne: issues five to eight, with numbered prints →We ran one for issue one. It worked and it cost us four months of fulfilment admin for 900 copies, and the pledges came with three hundred separate promises attached. A loan is one promise, to one group of people, with a number on it. We prefer that.
- Open
Why we are borrowing rather than raising
Adventure SV: routes the guide owns, not the platform →A few people have asked. The honest answer is that eight months of runway is not worth 20% of the company, and the licences give us something to borrow against that a seed round would not price any better. If this goes the way the pilots suggest, we repay it and we still own the thing.
- Repaying
Audit fieldwork complete
Git-Sats: bounties that pay themselves out →Fieldwork wrapped last week. Three medium findings, no highs, all three in the hosted tier rather than the public escrow path. Remediation is a fortnight of work. Report expected mid-September.
- Repaid
Closed out, fifteen for fifteen
GorillaPool: usernames nobody can take back →Final instalment sent. Thank you. Resolver p99 is under 40ms against a set four times the size it was when this started, which is what the money bought.
- Repaying
Second photo essay commissioned
Proof of Work Magazine: four issues of print capital →Two per issue as promised. The second for issue 12 is a shoot in the Diliberto groves above San Cataldo, which some of you will recognise as another borrower on this platform, and no, we are not being paid for it.
- Repaid
Final instalment paid
Clockchain: time logs a payroll dispute cannot rewrite →Twelve of twelve. Thank you to the sixty-three of you who funded this: it did exactly what it said it would, which I appreciate is not always how these go. We will be back for a larger one in the spring.
- Default
We will miss June, and probably the rest
Bloxers: side-effect reports that cannot be revised →The ethics finding in March removed the only revenue line this company had. I have spent three months trying to find a second pilot and have not. I am not going to pretend otherwise to buy another quarter. There is a company that wants the anchoring method and I would rather that sale happen while the code is current.
- Repaid
Closed out
Hodlocker: a feed ranked by conviction, not engagement →Final instalment sent this morning. Eighteen for eighteen. Thank you: this was funded when nobody else would touch it.
- Repaying
Funded, and a subscriber offer for lenders
Proof of Work Magazine: four issues of print capital →480 BSV in six days. Anyone holding a position gets the print edition at the digital price for the life of the loan: email us from the address on your BitBacker profile.
- Repaying
Funded, and the eleventh advertiser signed
Rogue Platapi: an advert that pays you, if you were watching →580 BSV. The eleventh signed the week after close, which takes the top three from 71% of billings to 64%. Still concentrated and moving the right way.
- Repaying
Funded, and the waiting list is now 460
PiWalletSV: an air-gapped wallet built from parts you can buy →Thank you. We opened the waiting list to lenders first as promised and it went from 310 to 460 inside a week, which is more than half the batch spoken for before the tool exists.
- Repaid
Repaid
Rare Pepe Club: the collector booster run →Eight for eight, closed out this morning. Thank you. The Foundation cheque cleared in February: a hundred per cent of card proceeds, as always.
- Repaying
Accreditation application filed
METAWATT: energy certificates that trace to the meter →Filed in March. No timetable given, which is normal. We are told six to nine months is typical for an application of this type.
- Repaying
Second support agreement signed
BetaBOLT: validation carried inside the token →Two of three. The third has been clear that it does not intend to pay, which is their right and which the credit note already assumed.
- Repaying
Funded, and what happens now
SEMAIL: end-to-end email without changing the client →450 BSV closed in eleven days. Thank you. The audit engagement is signed and the first hire starts in April.
- Repaying
Funded in nine days
BSVPhone: the first production run of a Metanet handset →2,400 BSV, 233 lenders, nine days. Component orders went out the same afternoon.
- Repaid
Gusto integration live
Clockchain: time logs a payroll dispute cannot rewrite →Second of three shipped, a fortnight early. The bureau one is the hard one and it is next.
- Repaid
Repaid
Web Summit: the shared BSV stand →Final instalment sent. Ten for ten. Two of the eight exhibitors have already asked about 2027.
- Repaid
4,200 scans and two closed deals
Web Summit: the shared BSV stand →The stand did what it was meant to. Full breakdown per exhibitor in the lender file.
- Repaid
Thirty thousand names
GorillaPool: usernames nobody can take back →Crossed thirty thousand this week. Still zero revoked, which will remain true for as long as the system exists, because there is nothing in it that could revoke one.
- Repaid
Sold out in 3h50
Rare Pepe Club: the collector booster run →218 boosters gone before lunch, and the shop banner has said SOLD OUT ever since. We are still getting OTC requests weekly and turning them down, because a limited run that quietly grows is not a limited run.
- Repaid
Both apps are live
Hodlocker: a feed ranked by conviction, not engagement →iOS approved on the second attempt, Android first time. Month nine of eighteen, which is roughly where we said we would be.
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Everything under News
What the borrowers are saying, what the ledger did, and how every case was decided.
