What does Bitcoin adoption look like at a conference about Bitcoin? Part of it is people on a stage explaining it. The rest is whether a visitor can actually pay for their coffee without the queue noticing.
BTC2B Group was at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026, held at the SugarFactory on 5 and 6 November, in both of those roles. Founder Ton Kunen spoke on two panels, and the group's payment infrastructure ran behind several counters on the floor. The second part is the one worth dwelling on.
On stage.
Ton took a seat on two Orange Stage panels. On Thursday it was "Bitcoin in the Background: Building Businesses That Stack", a Finance-track conversation moderated by Jordan Walker of the Bitcoin Business Network, alongside cryptoasset tax specialist José Antonio Bravo Mateu and Stefan Koelewijn of Heinen & Koelewijn. The subject was the unglamorous one BTC2B Group works in every day: what it takes to run an ordinary business on Bitcoin rather than around it.
On Friday it was "De geschiedenis van Bitcoin in Nederland", a Dutch-language panel with Patrick van der Meijde of Arnhem Bitcoin City, Koen Dil, and Niels van Groningen of Bitonic, the country's oldest Bitcoin broker. Tracing how Bitcoin took root in the Netherlands is a fitting place for a Dutch founder to sit, next to the people who were there for most of it.
Behind the counter.
BTC2B Group was not the conference's primary payment provider. That did not stop its infrastructure from doing the real work. Over the two days, Lightning Checkout facilitated more than 450 Bitcoin payments for BitcoinTaps, Noderunners Arcade's and several merchants on the floor, settling more than 6 million sats, around 0.06 BTC.
A conference is a harder test than a shop. The queues are short and impatient, the venue wifi is shared by thousands, and a crowd of Bitcoiners will notice the exact second a payment hangs. Four hundred and fifty payments that simply cleared, under those conditions, say more about the infrastructure than any number from a quiet month in a single store.
Between the panels there were the conversations, and they were the best part of the two days. We spoke with business owners thinking about starting to accept Bitcoin, researchers and with builders working on the same problem from a different angle. Those talks are harder to count than transactions, but they are often where the next one starts.
What the two days proved.
The panels and the payments answer the opening question from two directions. One is the conversation: how businesses adopt Bitcoin, and how the Netherlands got here. The other is the proof, 450 times over, that a customer can pay and walk away with their purchase while the merchant keeps the sats. BTC2B Group was not the name on the conference's payment sponsorship, and it processed those transactions anyway.
So, back to the question we opened with. At a Bitcoin conference the measure of adoption is not the panel titles or the keynote names. It is whether the person at the counter can pay and move on. Over two days that worked more than 450 times. The talking we enjoyed. The paying is what we build for.
