BitWall — Winner of the 2013 Bitcoin Conference Hackathon

Congrats to BitWall, winner of the 2013 Bitcoin Hackathon. BitWall was engineered by (fellow Duke alum and former Visa employee) Nic Meliones and Ankur Nandwani (engineer at Lookout).

The idea was simple — a paywall for content (say, an online article or video) using Bitcoin as the underlying payment mechanism. Where the “Pay $0.05 to read this article” model didn’t previously make sense due to ~$0.20 base credit card fees, Bitcoin allows quick and crisp monetization. We think this is a major area where Bitcoin can help media content providers, especially on mobile where monetization is harder to achieve.

It was great to see the vast majority of teams at the Hackathon using the Coinbase API to get projects off the ground and working in just one day.

Congrats Nic and Ankur!