We Get Paid in Sats: A Year of Bitcoin Salaries in Sri Lanka

“Bitcoin isn’t something we buy anymore. It’s something we earn. Something we live.”
— CMNisal

🧱 From Fiat Fragility to Bitcoin Finality — A Journey Three Years in the Making

The idea of paying salaries in Bitcoin wasn’t born in a bull market. It began quietly, locally, and without headlines — three years ago.

Back then, we weren’t yet “CeylonCash.” We were just a small team of Bitcoiners experimenting with Lightning wallets, personal multisig, and a conviction that money could be better.

In fact, our shift was noticed as early as 2022, when a community survey highlighted us as the first company in Sri Lanka to actively explore Bitcoin salary payments. No VC funding. No press. Just conviction and code.

“It wasn’t official. It was just the way we preferred to live:
earn Bitcoin, hold Bitcoin, spend Bitcoin.”
— CMNisal

Fast forward to today, and we’ve formalized it all:

• Full-time team members get paid in Bitcoin, via Lightning
• Interns start with pegged LKR-compensation, settled in sats
• We’ve built an internal financial stack — Bitcoin Deepa — to manage disbursements, Lightning routing, and multisig payroll security

We went from a small test in a bear market to the only Bitcoin-native company in the country running a multisig payroll with full-time staff holding their keys.

We didn’t just adopt Bitcoin — we committed to it, in real life, in real payrolls.

🔧 Our Bitcoin Stack — Self-Sovereignty in Code

To make this sustainable, we built Bitcoin Deepa — our operational layer, node infrastructure, and wallet system that handles salaries, payments, and day-to-day Lightning activity.

Here’s what we run under the hood:

🧠 The Bitcoin Deepa Node

• Full Bitcoin Core + LND stack, self-hosted
• Liquidity-balanced public channels, internal loop channels for routing
• Integrated with LNBits modules for accounting and event-based logic

🔐 TapSigner-Based Multisig Treasury

At CeylonCash, our treasury doesn’t live on someone’s laptop — or in the cloud. It lives in the pockets of our team.

Every permanent employee holds a TapSigner — a secure, NFC-enabled hardware card by Coinkite that functions as their individual signing key. These cards participate in a Taproot-enabled multisig policy, distributing control of the organization’s funds in a way that’s secure, simple, and radically trust-minimized.

• 🔐 TapSigner cards make signing seamless and portable — just tap to approve a transaction
• 🛡️ MuSig2-style setup preserves privacy and minimizes on-chain footprint
• 🪙 No single point of failure. No corporate custody. No exec override.
• 🧑‍💼 Every full-time team member is a keyholder, not just an employee

“We didn’t want ‘permissionless’ just in marketing.
We wanted it in our treasury.”
— CMNisal

This isn’t just multisig — this is co-ownership, backed by cryptography.

🧰 LNBits + Telegram: Our Salary Engine

• LNBits tracks account balances and Lightning flows
• @BitcoinDeepaBot (Telegram) initiates salary disbursements
• Staff interact with payroll directly, without any third party or backend HR logic

“People think Lightning is too hard. We made it easier than banking. Easier than payroll software.”
— CMNisal

🧾 Sats as a Salary Standard

We don’t pay “crypto salaries.” We don’t send USD-pegged stablecoins. We pay Bitcoin, over Lightning, settled from our own node, and pegged to satoshis.

Why peg to sats? Because we believe Bitcoin is the base money of the future, and the earlier we train ourselves to think in it, the better.

But to bridge the present, we guarantee LKR-value payouts at the time of disbursement. Interns currently earn 50,000~100,000/month in sats — an amount that’s locked in fiat, settled in Bitcoin.

We track all of this transparently via LNBits dashboards that every employee can audit.

🧲 Lightning in Daily Life — The Circular Flow

It didn’t stop at salaries.
We wanted our team to live on Bitcoin — so we built tools that made that seamless, simple, and satisfying.

Every employee receives a Bitcoin Deepa NFC Bolt Card, linked directly to their personal LNBits wallet. These cards allow tap-to-pay sats for food, transport, peer-to-peer gifts, and more. No passwords, no PINs — just Lightning at the speed of life.

But we didn’t stop there.

🔸 Bolt Cards are NFC-ready and Lightning-native
🔸 LNURL-Withdraw + LNURL-POS flows power real-world purchases
🔸 Loans and micro-credits can be requested right through the card and Telegram bot
🔸 Vendors across Colombo are being onboarded using Bitcoin Deepa + QR-compatible POS kits

To unify the system, we gave every bot user a Bitcoin identity:

you@bitcoindeepa.com — usable inside any Bitcoin LN Wallet, linked to Lightning flows
e.g., nisal@bitcoindeepa.com

This innovation unlocked private, peer-to-peer payments and tips across our community.

Special thanks to Mike G from the Bitcoin dev community, who helped enable this identity bridge between Lightning and Telegram. This wasn’t just a feature — it was a bridge between people, money, and messaging.

“Circular economies aren’t made by mandates.
They emerge when sats become more useful than rupees.”

The result? A small but thriving Bitcoin circular economy in the heart of Ceylon.

🔁 Privacy, Sovereignty, and Purpose

In legacy systems, salary data is private — until it isn’t. In our system, privacy is programmable.

Every employee gets:

• A unique LNBits instance
• Privately routed Lightning transactions
• Zero third-party involvement or surveillance
• Their own seed, key, and node interface — not a wallet app controlled by a third-party

We also built internal documentation on:

• Seed backup procedures
• Lightning, UTXO management
• Dust attack mitigation
• Key recovery protocols

We didn’t just build a payroll system. We built a Bitcoin lifestyle, grounded in sovereignty.

“If your salary depends on someone else’s custody, it’s not sovereignty. It’s just fintech.”
— CMNisal

📈 Scaling the Ethos

Twelve months in, the question isn’t “can this work?”
It already does.

The question now is: how far can we take this?

We’re now preparing to:

• 🔓 Open-source a “Bitcoin Salary Stack” for other teams to use
• 🤝 Onboard other companies to the same payroll model via Bitcoin Deepa
• 🎓 Train contributors in sovereign finance — from multisig ops to Lightning liquidity
• 🧪 Launch a Bitcoin circular economy incubator in Sri Lanka for builders
• 🌍 Partner with Bitcoin-native employers globally to hire and pay in sats

Because we’ve proven that you don’t need permission, funding, or fiat to do this.
You just need conviction — and code.

🧡 Final Words from the Pearl of Satoshi

“We didn’t build this because we had to.
We built this because we believe in a world where you don’t beg for money — you earn it in a money that can’t be devalued, censored, or inflated.”

Bitcoin isn’t the future here. It’s already our present.

And if you’re still waiting for permission to go full Bitcoin?
You’re already behind.

We Are CeylonCash

We don’t get paid in fiat.
We get paid in sats.

#BitcoinDeepa #CeylonCash #BitcoinSriLanka #SatsStandard #MultisigOps #TaprootTeam #LightningPayroll #LiveOnBitcoin #PearlOfSatoshi