The Market Answered Back

This is overdue.

Every company has a legal founding date. It also has a moment when it becomes itself.

For Conduit, that moment was February 2026.

Since then, we have moved from experimentation and prototypes to production software being used by real merchants. The team changed. The way we build changed. And, over the last 30 days, the product finally escaped the lab.

The Store Should Belong to the Merchant

Most online stores are rented rooms.

The platform controls the address, the traffic, the checkout, the customer relationship, and ultimately whether the merchant is allowed to keep operating.

Conduit separates the store from the platform.

A merchant can publish once, appear wherever buyers already are, transact directly, and carry their identity and commercial relationships across an open network. No application gets to own the market.

Bitcoin makes direct internet-native settlement possible. Nostr makes identity and distribution portable. AI makes the cost and speed of building the missing infrastructure radically different than it was even a year ago.

We realized what had become possible, and that we had to build a real company around it.

We Rebuilt for This Moment

We did not bolt AI onto an old software process. We rebuilt our technical team around people willing to work AI-native from end to end.

Product decisions become structured work in Linear. Linear, GitHub, previews, browser tests, and automated review agents operate as one connected system. Agents inspect implementations, challenge assumptions, test edge cases, and help harden releases. Humans remain responsible for product judgment, architecture, security, and taste.

The same connective tissue is spreading through company operations.

The point is not that we “use AI.” Everyone says that now. The point is that we can learn, decide, build, review, and ship at a speed that would have required a much larger organization under the old model.

That changed Conduit from an experiment into a production company.

The Builders

Dylan was an early engineer at Polymarket, helping lead its product and engineering organization from a tiny team into a unicorn. At Conduit, he established the production foundation everything else now builds upon. Now he stays ahead of the team and works on the automation machine itself, always asking: how can we work faster and smarter with agents?

James brings more than 14 years of experience building full-stack products, high-volume commerce systems, and Bitcoin and Lightning payment flows. He is turning the rough edges of real-world commerce into a product merchants can actually use.

D3vv3 is an open-source engineer focused on sovereign infrastructure, identity, privacy, and access management. He is building the connective tissue that lets commerce move safely across an open network. He's also got a great taste for slick UIs.

...and I've been building alongside them: shaping the product, architecture, company operating system, and shipping features wherever useful.

30 Days Ago, Staci Lit the Fuse

Then Staci joined us.

Staci started the Bitcoin Army (which has grown to more than 9,000 members) and built Bitcoin Nova into a formidable media and education platform.

In less than 4 weeks, she's helped us assemble a private Signal group of more than 50 merchant beta testers. During this time Conduit has experienced over 1,000 distinct product sessions.

These are not names sitting on a waitlist.

They're creating stores. Listing products. Transacting. Asking questions. Finding friction. Telling us what is confusing, what is missing, and what suddenly feels possible.

The beta has already exposed merchant publishing reliability as our clearest immediate bottleneck (not a problem you'd expect in traditional e-commerce, but we're in a new world of distributed systems).

...And that is exactly what this early stage is meant to do repeatedly:

• A merchant encounters a problem
• Staci captures the context
• We turn it into a product decision or repair
• The team builds
• Our agents review and test
• A new version goes back into merchants’ hands.

We're turning community interest into observable behavior, folding feedback into our engineering roadmap, and hardening the product before we widen access.

The Market Is Already Bigger Than Conduit

An open market cannot become another branded cul-de-sac.

I have helped spearhead the Open Markets Foundation, but its model is intentionally flat: Conduit participates alongside other independent builders and projects working on shared specifications, tools, and infrastructure for open commerce.

The point is compatibility without control. Apps can specialize without becoming incompatible. Merchants can reach new buyers without rebuilding their businesses inside every new platform.

The wider ecosystem already spans hundreds of merchants, thousands of products, and dozens of clients. Conduit gets stronger as that ecosystem gets stronger, just like every participant contributing to and building on the shared rails.

We are documenting the people building it through the Open Markets Podcast, where merchants, developers, and users talk plainly about what open commerce looks like in practice. A few of these episodes have already appeared in the top ranks of Fountain (most recent at #3 as I type this).

The community is taking interest.

[Edit note September 2, 2026: I revised this section shortly after publication to describe the relationship more accurately. I've helped spearhead the Open Markets Foundation, but Conduit participates in it alongside other independent contributors. It is a flat collaboration who's beginnings predate the existence of Conduit thanks to people like my podcast cohost and the teams at Plebeian Market and Shopstr. This is not a program Conduit runs for the ecosystem... we all run it together, and I want to make that clear in our messaging.]

Chicago: Where the Screen Meets the Street

Our next forcing function is V4V Chicago.

We are turning the Conduit booth into a working Bitcoin bodega, with products from the network available through Conduit Market.

Not a conference-table demo. Real goods. Real stores. Real payments. Real people encountering and using the product.

Bound by Purpose. Building for Profitability.

Conduit is a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation.

We put the mission in the charter.

Conduit exists to make commerce more open, reliable, and resistant to censorship. That means giving merchants better alternatives to closed platforms and middlemen that control access to their customers.

This is not decoration. It is the reason the company exists.

We also expect Conduit to be profitable. The mission requires durability, and the pent-up demand is real: merchants are tired of renting their audience, surrendering their relationships, and asking permission to stay in business.

We intend to make money by making the open market work through better tools, useful merchant services, trusted discovery, and smoother commerce, not by charging rent for the right to exist.

The Problems Worth Solving Next

The questions in front of us are no longer theoretical:

• How do we make open commerce smoother than traditional e-commerce?
• How do we introduce people to a genuinely new world through experiences that still feel familiar?
• How do we grow the network without recreating the gatekeepers it was designed to replace?
• How do we bundle merchant services on an open substrate in ways that are useful, profitable, and faithful to our ethos?

For a long time, an open market on the internet felt almost nostalgic. Something people had quietly given up hoping for. We're here to show this is now a sustainable ecosystem.

Conduit became itself in February. In August, the market answered back. Looking forward to keeping you all updated more frequently.

Cheers,
Eric FJ - Conduit CEO