Developer Spotlight: Egge

components/MDXComponents.tsx

@@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ import { BlogNewsletterForm } from 'pliny/ui/NewsletterForm'
 
 import Image from './Image'
 import BrowserFrame from './BrowserFrame'
+import PhoneFrame from './PhoneFrame'
 import VideoPlayer from './VideoPlayer'
 import CustomLink from './Link'
 import DonateToGeneralFundForm from './DonateToGeneralFundForm'
@@ -35,6 +36,7 @@ export const Wrapper = ({ layout, content, ...rest }: MDXLayout) => {
 export const MDXComponents: ComponentMap = {
   Image,
   BrowserFrame,
+  PhoneFrame,
   VideoPlayer,
   TOCInline,
   a: CustomLink,

components/PhoneFrame.tsx

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
+import { ReactNode } from 'react'
+
+const PhoneFrame = ({ children }: { children: ReactNode }) => {
+  return (
+    <div className="mx-auto my-16 w-full max-w-sm">
+      <div className="rounded-[2.25rem] border-[3px] border-gray-800 bg-gray-800 p-[3px] shadow-2xl ring-1 ring-gray-900/10 dark:border-gray-700 dark:bg-gray-900 dark:ring-gray-100/10">
+        <div className="overflow-hidden rounded-[2rem] bg-black [&_img]:my-0">
+          {children}
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+  )
+}
+
+export default PhoneFrame

data/blog/developer-spotlight-egge-coco.mdx

@@ -0,0 +1,248 @@
+---
+title: "Egge’s Bitcoin Journey: From Marketer to Cashu Maintainer"
+date: '2026-06-30'
+tags: ['bitcoin', 'ecash', 'spotlight']
+authors: ['tuma', 'ville']
+images: ['/static/images/spotlight/egge/featured.jpg', '/static/images/spotlight/egge/hero.jpg']
+draft: false
+summary: "Bitcoin took Egge off the predictable path, leading him towards a brilliant career in FOSS."
+pullQuotes:
+  - "I believe you cannot dive really deep into Bitcoin without it changing or affecting you in some way."
+  - "I am a freedom-loving open-source developer, a Bitcoiner, a husband, and most importantly, a father to an amazing little girl."
+  - "The PayPal experience was what pushed me to look deeper and take it seriously."
+  - "Before I stumbled upon Bitcoin, I was economically blind. Bitcoin changed the way I view the world,
+    my values, and a big part of my personality. I strongly believe it changed me for the better."
+  - "I dedicated my professional life to working on freedom technology."
+---
+
+It’s 2021, and Egge is a person like many others. He is following a predictable path:
+he went to school, studied marketing at university, and now works a normal day job in advertising,
+running around at the fast pace of one of Germany's highly productive cities.
+
+Fast-forward to today, Egge is one of the leading developers in the [Cashu]
+ecosystem, producing code used by multiple applications in the Bitcoin space.
+What happened during this time?
+
+> I am a freedom-loving open-source developer, a Bitcoiner, a husband, and most importantly,
+> a father to an amazing little girl.
+
+Egge grew up around technical people. His dad, an electrician and a real do-it-yourselfer,
+introduced him to gaming from a young age. As a PC gamer, Egge picked up many technical skills along the way,
+though he never touched code, save for a brief parenthesis during high school.
+
+His journey into development started when Egge wanted to modify the [Einundzwanzig]
+community Telegram bot to add useful features. He didn’t wait for someone else to do it. Instead,
+he rolled up his sleeves, bought an Udemy course on Python, and started exploring the world of coding.
+He hasn’t stopped learning and building since.
+
+Egge’s history with Bitcoin started differently than that of an average European.
+“Back in 2021, my PayPal account was banned.” PayPal was one of the most common methods,
+if not the only one, to get paid online. For someone living in the developed world,
+this may not seem like a big deal, but that’s not entirely true for the rest of the world.
+Companies like PayPal have the power to do real damage to individuals, and the worst part
+is that they don’t even have to justify their choices.
+
+> I quickly realized that the arbitrary decision of a single company could have a real impact
+> on my personal life. It was easy to imagine how much worse that kind of dependency must
+> be for people with fewer alternatives or less privilege.
+
+Although he recalls hearing about Bitcoin very early on, during one of his *World of Warcraft*
+gaming sessions, he invested neither time nor attention in it, missing his “chance at a pretty
+nice early retirement.” Even in 2020, his understanding was mostly limited to it being *magic internet money*.
+
+That PayPal misadventure, which some may consider a blessing, led him at last to take Bitcoin seriously,
+falling into the rabbit hole and joining the *Einundzwanzig* community, the largest and most active
+Germany-based Bitcoin community. Egge started to get involved and quickly became the co-host of its podcast.
+A member of the community was translating and recording influential Bitcoin posts into German.
+They asked Egge to record one, and by chance it was Alex Gladstein’s
+‘[Check Your Financial Privilege][essay-gladstein]’. That piece cemented his conviction even more.
+
+Gladstein’s essay, which was then developed into a book, talks about how unjust the current financial
+system is, how almost 90% of the world population lives under financial repression, and how Bitcoin gives
+hope to people outside of the financially privileged countries. That was exactly what Egge had personally
+lived through, even in one of those rich places that dismiss Bitcoin as “rat poison” or “a tool for criminals”.
+
+> I believe you cannot dive really deep into Bitcoin without it changing or affecting you in some way.
+
+That encounter set Egge on a new path. Many people feel their values shifting once they meet Bitcoin,
+and Egge was no exception: “Bitcoin changed the way I view the world, my values, and a big part
+of my personality. I strongly believe it changed me for the better.”
+
+He started developing software, steadily leaving behind an established career in marketing.
+He then left the city, the familiar landscape he grew up in, to discover the beauty of the countryside.
+“Where there used to be neighbors, malls, and cars, there are now forests, farmland, and tractors,” he says.
+A place where stronger human bonds take root, where his sense of community and companionship has grown manyfold.
+A place where, he is sure, his daughter will have a family that extends well beyond her bloodline.
+
+> We are all in this together. In FOSS, our work benefits one another, and our projects rely
+> not only on their maintainers, but on contributions of all kinds. That can mean code, but also testing,
+> feedback, design work, ‘marketing,’ writing, documentation, and so on.
+
+Working in free and open-source software (FOSS) has profound consequences. The work you do does
+not only benefit your project, but also the whole ecosystem around it: the projects you build
+on and the ones building on yours alike. It also comes with uncertainty. He recalls spending
+night after night working on his Bitcoin side projects, without ever seeing a dime.
+
+Egge has always been able to count on his wife. She stood beside him through the tough times,
+and through everything that came during his journey.
+
+> My wife is my biggest supporter. She was understanding when I worked nights back in the days when
+> I did not earn anything from my Bitcoin work, recorded podcast episodes with Einundzwanzig,
+> and even when I had to travel to El Salvador on our anniversary.
+
+[Npub.cash] was the venture that launched Egge’s FOSS career. That work began when
+he was looking for a way to transform a custodial wallet he and two fellow bitcoiners
+were building into a non-custodial application.
+
+Combining a local node on a user’s phone with [Lightning Address][ln-address]
+required linking the offline and online worlds. Egge found a solution in the Cashu protocol, which just
+“turned out to be the perfect bridge between those two worlds”.
+
+<BrowserFrame url="https://npub.cash">
+  <Image
+    src="/static/images/spotlight/egge/npub-cash.png"
+    darkSrc="/static/images/spotlight/egge/npub-cash.png"
+    alt="The npub.cash website"
+    width={2880}
+    height={1696}
+    className="w-full h-auto"
+  />
+</BrowserFrame>
+
+That same project also helped Egge obtain his first OpenSats grant, a success he recalls as
+one of the most important moments of his life, one of those occasions worth remembering.
+“It felt like receiving an accolade. I was at Bitcoin Zitadelle when I got the email,
+and I immediately had to tell everyone around me.”
+
+
+Funding is the hard part for any FOSS developer trying to support their own work.
+FOSS is difficult to monetize by definition, and users often take contributors’ effort for granted.
+OpenSats made it possible for Egge to finally provide for his family through his work.
+
+That victory wasn’t just financial:
+
+> OpenSats helped me realize that my work matters. That appreciation and acknowledgement
+> were incredibly important in helping me fight my imposter syndrome and take the leap of
+> faith into full-time FOSS work.
+
+<Image
+  src="/static/images/spotlight/egge/conf.jpg"
+  darkSrc="/static/images/spotlight/egge/conf.jpg"
+  alt="Egge at Bitcoin Zitadelle"
+  width={1920}
+  height={1280}
+  className="w-full h-auto"
+/>
+
+Egge soon found himself entangled in the dynamics of working in the open: building upon other people’s work,
+finding gaps and issues, and providing solutions.
+
+His service relied heavily on the TypeScript implementation of the Cashu protocol, [`cashu-ts`][cashu-ts].
+Egge’s experience as a user translated directly into better code, for him and for the entire ecosystem
+building on it. He quickly spotted gaps and issues in the library and fixed them at the source;
+no strange workarounds needed to make things work.
+
+The broader Cashu protocol benefited from Egge’s work too: new specifications were merged,
+such as [NUT-17], which defines a way for mints
+and applications to talk to each other through a single communication channel.
+His role in the ecosystem grew large enough that [Gandlaf],
+the original architect of `cashu-ts`, and [Calle],
+the mind behind Cashu, asked him to become maintainer of the library.
+
+Egge had worked on both sides of the line, as a production user first and as an SDK maintainer
+later. When asked to resurrect a beloved Cashu wallet, [eNuts], he quickly understood that even if
+`cashu-ts` was a solid toolkit for Cashu operations, building a complete application around it still
+required deep domain knowledge.
+
+<PhoneFrame>
+  <Image
+    src="/static/images/spotlight/egge/enuts-light.png"
+    alt="The eNuts iOS wallet"
+    width={1206}
+    height={2622}
+    sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 384px"
+    className="w-full h-auto"
+  />
+</PhoneFrame>
+
+Working on eNuts meant rewriting most of the logic from scratch.
+The wallet hadn’t been updated for a long time, and was incompatible with the rapidly changing Cashu ecosystem.
+A tremendous effort for Egge, who decided to make sure that other developers wouldn’t have to go
+through the same battle by abstracting away much of the complexity into a library.
+The benefits of FOSS at work, again.
+
+That library, [Coco], soon became the main focus for Egge,
+who recently managed to publish the first production-ready release, a milestone for the TypeScript developer
+ecosystem around Cashu, and for him personally. Developers can now integrate a fully functional Cashu wallet
+in any application with just a few lines of code, expanding the reach of the ecosystem by building on
+Egge’s shoulders. He hopes Coco will lower the entry barrier for developers who want to add Cashu to their apps.
+
+<BrowserFrame url="https://cashubtc.github.io/coco">
+  <Image
+    src="/static/images/spotlight/egge/coco-light.png"
+    darkSrc="/static/images/spotlight/egge/coco-dark.png"
+    alt="Coco main page"
+    width={2880}
+    height={1696}
+    className="w-full h-auto"
+  />
+</BrowserFrame>
+
+His focus now is making Coco the best possible library to build on Cashu. To do so, he needs feedback from contributors,
+testers, and adopters: “Coco is still young. While most of its primitives have already been battle-tested,
+the library itself has not yet been tested as widely in real-world applications.”
+
+Even more so, when working in a rapidly changing environment, like Cashu: “Staying close to the
+cutting edge while also improving the sturdiness and ergonomics of a library is difficult.” Any help is appreciated:
+“If you are a developer and find some time to play around with Coco, I would really appreciate any feedback.”
+
+Despite his success and recent grant renewal, uncertainty still keeps Egge up at night.
+“Working in Bitcoin, especially on a grant basis, comes with the challenge of staying relevant and renewing your
+support regularly”, he notes.
+
+During the most difficult times, he is able to find his strength in the hope to build a better world for his daughter,
+who he lovingly calls his “amazing little girl”. He believes “the technology we are building as an industry
+will improve the lives of many people around the world”.
+
+But change doesn’t happen by itself. It needs people investing their time into building those technologies
+that, in Egge’s eyes, will make the future brighter. Bitcoin needs more people working on it.
+“Not only developers, but people in many different areas. There is so much work to be done across so many different fields.”
+
+Eric Hughes said it plainly in *A Cypherpunk's Manifesto*: “[Cypherpunks write code][cypherpunks-write-code]”.
+However, writing code is not the only thing that can help Bitcoin thrive.
+It needs educators, marketers, designers, and all the talented people out there.
+Egge’s journey is a good reminder that anyone can have a real chance and a real impact in this space.
+“I would encourage anyone who wants to give it a try to do it”, he ends.
+
+---
+
+*Egge has been an OpenSats grantee since [June 2024][fifth-wave-nostr],
+with his grant renewed in [December 2024][tenth-wave-nostr], and [December 2025][sixteenth-wave-bitcoin].
+"OpenSats has, of course, made a lot of this possible. Without funding,
+I would not have been able to do what I do. But the impact goes
+far beyond funding," he says, "I do not think I would be able to stand as
+confidently on a stage and talk about my work without that support."*
+
+*If you want to support Egge, feedback on Coco is the most important thing
+right now. The library is still young, and it needs to be tested in real-world
+applications. Our support for Egge's work was made possible thanks
+to your generous donations to [our funds][funds]. For
+comments, corrections, or suggestions about our Spotlight series, please reach
+out to [spotlight@opensats.org](mailto:spotlight@opensats.org).*
+
+[Cashu]: /projects/cashu
+[Einundzwanzig]: https://einundzwanzig.space/
+[essay-gladstein]: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/check-your-financial-privilege
+[Npub.cash]: /blog/advancements-in-ecash#npubcash
+[ln-address]: /topics/lightning-address
+[cashu-ts]: https://cashu-ts.dev/
+[NUT-17]: https://github.com/cashubtc/nuts/blob/main/17.md
+[Gandlaf]: https://github.com/gandlafbtc
+[Calle]: /blog/cashu-calle-receives-lts-grant
+[enuts]: https://enuts.cash/
+[Coco]: https://github.com/cashubtc/coco
+[cypherpunks-write-code]: /newsletter/2026-Q1#cypherpunks-write-code
+[fifth-wave-nostr]: /blog/nostr-grants-july-2024#npubcash
+[tenth-wave-nostr]: /blog/10th-wave-of-nostr-grants
+[sixteenth-wave-bitcoin]: /blog/sixteenth-wave-of-bitcoin-grants#cashu-ts-and-coco
+[funds]: /funds