Blogs & Articles: SATO Is Lighting Up Mining with the Breez SDK 🔗 6 weeks ago

“Infrastructure” might not have the same dynamic ring to it as terms like “DevOps” or “Ethical Hacking,” but SATO’s bitcoin-infrastructure business is utterly captivating.

SATO is a full-service bitcoin company, covering the entire range of bitcoin activities from mining blocks all the way down to end-user services. They mine bitcoin with their own 20-megawatt hydroelectric plant in Quebec.

Here’s their latest trick: SATO’s newest product, Club Mining, is a mining-meets-social mobile app designed for Bitcoin enthusiasts that combines cloud mining and social media. And the glue that holds Club Mining together is the Breez SDK.

Club Mining Makes Mining Accessible and Fun

As Romain (the CEO), Damian (VP Technologies), and Simon (the Bitcoin Chief) tell it, Club Mining is a simple idea with two components. The first is cloud mining, which allows users to rent remote computing power to mine their own bitcoin. It lets users reap mining fees without worrying about constantly updating their hardware and fluctuating energy costs. Until the full cloud-mining service goes live any week now, SATO is giving out free sats from its mining farms.

The second component adds friends to the mix so that budding cloud miners can learn from each other and trade notes. That’s why the second component of Club Mining is a chat room based on Nostr. SATO gives each user a few sats to get started and a few more each day for active participation, which users can spend on posting and tipping each other. The message board includes both DMs as well as public channels, and the club mining wallet allows solo miners to stack their sats over Lightning cheaply and easily.

The combination of cloud mining and social media basically pays users for hanging out and learning more about bitcoin.

You can download the Club Mining app for iOS or Android

SATO’s Social Sats Are Powered by the Breez SDK

When devising Club Mining, SATO recognized immediately that it was a prime use case for Lightning. On-chain bitcoin couldn’t handle payments of just a few sats. Simon and Damian started developing some prototype solutions, but they soon realized that developing anything into a production release would require significant resources that SATO couldn’t invest. Therefore, this team of bitcoin mages started looking for ways to accelerate the development process.

SATO knew that whatever solution they chose had to be self-custodial. As a publicly traded company, SATO spends abundant time on reporting and compliance already. Getting registered as a bank and taking on the massive regulatory burden for the sake of sprinkling a few sats throughout their social network was not appealing.

When they found the Breez SDK, it ticked all the boxes: it came with an LSP to handle the liquidity and the freedom to migrate to a different LSP later. The Breez SDK also works on any device and can deal with thousands of users from day one.

Opting for the Breez SDK saved SATO’s developers considerable time and effort. According to Simon, “On the first day, we were able to send and receive. Damian made a basic app within a few hours.”

And with the Breez support docs, the SATO team was able to build their app without much help. “The first day of development was based only on the Breez documentation.” For more advanced functions, they sought help and found it. “You guys on the channel are really great,” Simon says, meaning the Breez team of SDK wizards.

SATO appreciated that the Breez SDK is free and open source. It’s important to them, first, because SATO is a bitcoin company serving bitcoiners, and we all agree that there’s no autonomy without transparency. If you can’t read the code, you’re at its mercy. The second reason is that SATO has integrated eCash as a last-mile technology because some of the transactions on the Club Mining chat are too small even for Lightning. They’re improvising with the SDK, building on it for their own purposes, and improvisation works much better with transparent code.

The Breez SDK delivered everything SATO needed to connect users to their new Club Mining project in a single package, and that package is flexible and transparent enough that they can adapt and adjust it as the project changes and grows.

The app and its mascot were designed by digital artist FAR.

The Breez SDK Fits All

Satimoto, the first SDK partner we profiled nearly a year ago, consists of one passionate, clever developer solving a specific problem in his immediate region. One guy, one use-case.

SATO, by contrast, is an established bitcoin infrastructure company that runs about 1/1000th of the entire network’s total hashrate. They provide a broad range of solutions and products from freshly minted, green-powered bitcoins all the way to a sat-powered social network for budding miners. Big team, comprehensive network powerhouse (literally).

The point is that the Breez SDK is flexible enough to fit any business, whatever the scale. A send call is a send call, and a receive call is a receive call, whatever the business. If the Breez SDK is the right choice for public companies and solo developers alike, it’s probably the right choice for your project too.

Get in touch to get started.

SATO Is Lighting Up Mining with the Breez SDK was originally published in Breez Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.