Bringin x Striga — A bold tale of an immigrant risking it all to drive Bitcoin adoption in Europe
Prashanth C (PC), the founder of the company Bringin, the hottest, new Bitcoin startup in the European landscape is a unique individual with a tale to tell, making him the focus of this story. Hailing from a village in India (Devanahalli), PC’s Bitcoin tale starts back in 2019 when he left his job at a consumer internet startup in Bangalore, India to join a company building on Bitcoin, with fresh inspiration from the brilliant Mastering Bitcoin book. In his own words —
I was fortunate enough to find a company called Lastbit. At the time, I was looking for a backend engineering position and got to work hands on with not just Bitcoin, but additionally, Lightning way before it was as cool as it is today. I think Lightning is still the most pragmatic (or realistic) solution to scale Bitcoin.
At Lastbit, PC worked on the backend for Europe’s first ever consumer Lightning/Fiat interface where European consumers could sign up to buy/sell/spend Bitcoin (through the Lastbit Mastercard), over Lightning specifically. The idea was to build a proof of concept that Lightning was a payments network that could move funds between financial institutions in real time and settled somewhat instantly. To this extent, he worked on two separate backends, for two separate mobile applications — One that allowed users to buy/sell Bitcoin over Lightning and another that allowed users to spend Bitcoin over Lightning, through the Lastbit MasterCard — simply because the current financial system is fragmented and putting all these features together in a single application was nearly impossible without being a fully licensed fiat money institution.
Himself being an active user of these applications, found it the perfect tool to use Bitcoin in the real world, especially as an engineer that was getting paid in Bitcoin. His rationale for using Bitcoin was further compounded by the fact that when he moved to Europe to continue his journey with the Lastbit company (that had rebranded to Striga at this point), the Lastbit Cards application had to be shutdown given the change in regulatory requirements and moving money from India and/or spending his Bitcoin was a nightmare — Revolut/Wise/Traditional Banks would close his account as soon as he received money from the big name exchange venues in Europe. PC says —
It’s 2024 and is still unsafe to liquidate Bitcoin or off-ramp larger amounts. Banks and payment service providers do not understand that it is possible to have Bitcoin and fiat co-exist in the short term whilst managing the risks. I’ve built a tool to solve exactly this problem and if you’re one of the millions in Europe stuck in the divide between banks and Bitcoin, try bringin.xyz
The Striga company was effectively the Lastbit backend, which is the payments infrastructure that the Lastbit apps used for it’s buy/sell/custody/trading and card issuing features. There was absolutely no way to continue innovating without actually owning the stack and being compliant. Regulators had changed their stance and fiat institutions were growing increasingly uncomfortable with Bitcoin use cases.
Striga set out to solve this problem for itself by building the tools for custody, trading, banking and issuing that it needed itself, leaning into a brand new product line that quickly grew into the go-to tool for a large number of European crypto innovators, including PC, who is now the CEO of Bringin.
As a core team member of Striga, PC saw how he could use the same infrastructure he helped build to build his own consumer facing application and left Striga to start his journey as a founder. He’d boldly left his cushy job in Europe, move back to his village, built the first version of what would become Bringin, raise funds, hire a team and fight the uphill battle of getting a permit to reside in Europe yet again — This time as the broke founder of an early stage Bitcoin startup.
His merit and determination are truly commendable, where many would have given up, especially as a solo founder — PC was able to set up HQ in Europe early 2024, weather the bear market and move over to continue building Bringin, finally being able to onboard onto his own app.
At Striga we’re a proud partner of Bringin, powering the application behind the scenes, providing compliant Lightning infrastructure, custody/trading and banking infrastructure. It’s still very much early days for Bringin with just an MVP out, but with impressive usage stats within the Bitcoin community. His strong focus on solving compliant on/off ramps via Lightning for Europe in the MVP got him his first 500 users and is on his way to adding in a bunch of new tools such as the Bringin debit card, business onboarding and payment plugins for merchants to accept/manage their bitcoin treasury.
Get in touch with him at pc@bringin.xyz or try out Bringin yourself.
PC recommends the following Lightning wallets — Wallet of Satoshi and Phoenix Wallet — The former of which is a custodial wallet, meaning you don’t control the keys to your funds, but works as advertised with a manageable risk if you’re using small amounts and the latter of which gives you complete control over your funds but may require a bit more technical knowledge to get right at times.
