Lynne Bairstow, Co-Founder of Build With Bitcoin, Base Layer Advisors, and Mita Tech Talks – Interview Series

Lynne Bairstow, Co-Founder of Build With Bitcoin, Base Layer Advisors, and Mita Tech Talks, is an entrepreneur, investor, and advisor with a career spanning traditional finance, venture capital, technology, and Bitcoin. After beginning her career on Wall Street at Merrill Lynch, she relocated to Mexico and became an active participant in the country’s technology ecosystem. She founded MITA Ventures in 2012, helping invest in and mentor early-stage technology companies across Mexico and Latin America with global growth potential, particularly in areas including artificial intelligence, blockchain, fintech, and connected technologies. Bairstow is also the founder of DeFiant Finance, an educational platform focused on Bitcoin and its potential implications for finance, economic empowerment, and decentralization, and has served as a startup mentor and angel investor across the region. Her work has increasingly concentrated on Bitcoin infrastructure and the companies being built around the protocol.

Build With Bitcoin is a podcast and advisory platform Bairstow launched with Israel Muñoz in 2024, featuring conversations with founders, investors, and technologists building businesses and infrastructure around Bitcoin. Base Layer Advisors is a Bitcoin-focused advisory firm that works with individuals, family offices, companies, startups, and venture capital investors on investment strategies and opportunities connected to the Bitcoin ecosystem. Mita TechTalks is an invite-only gathering in Punta Mita organized around the convergence of capital markets, Bitcoin, artificial intelligence, and energy, bringing together investors, wealth managers, executives, founders, and technology leaders to examine how these rapidly developing sectors are beginning to intersect.

You began your career in traditional finance at Merrill Lynch before moving to Mexico more than two decades ago and later founding MITA Ventures in 2012. How did that transition from Wall Street to the LatAm startup ecosystem shape your long-term conviction around Bitcoin as both a technology platform and a financial paradigm shift?

This had a huge impact on me. Had I stayed on Wall Street, I don’t think I would ever have understood the true potential of Bitcoin as a technology protocol. By the time I was introduced to Bitcoin in 2012, I had already been living in Mexico for several years, working in the Latam startup ecosystem, where fintech was solving some of the region’s biggest problems. That gave me a firsthand view of the volume of remittances, the friction and cost of sending money across borders, and the steep expense borne by the unbanked—who made up more than 50% of the population at the time. There was essentially no access to credit, credit cards were scarce, and that scarcity was itself a major friction point holding back e-commerce. So, by the time Bitcoin came into my life, I saw it as the missing link: a way to transfer value peer-to-peer without going through intermediary banks or financial institutions, which had been making cross-border commerce and any internet-based financial transactions in the region so much harder. It really shaped my thinking from that point forward.

Through Build With Bitcoin, you frequently discuss Bitcoin as infrastructure rather than simply a digital asset. What are some of the most overlooked real-world applications of Bitcoin that institutional investors and entrepreneurs still fail to fully appreciate?

I always think of Bitcoin first as a protocol and a technology, rather than as a digital asset, a security, or simply a store of value—although it’s very much that too. When I think about Bitcoin’s potential, I believe we can’t even begin to imagine all of the use cases it will unlock. One I’m especially excited about is its divisibility into such small fractions. That means payments for content, entertainment, sports, news—anything that can be digitized—can shift from a monthly subscription model to a true pay-per-consumption model. I believe subscription-based software and services can be completely transformed by Bitcoin, by streaming sats and paying only for what you actually consume. That will raise the quality of content, software, entertainment, and sports being delivered, because people will only keep consuming as long as they’re receiving value—and, this also has the potential to reduce an individual’s expenditures and improve their finances overall, by eliminating unused or wasted subscription models. That’s one huge opportunity. Another is agentic AI. As agents become more prevalent and we rely on them to transact on our behalf, Bitcoin becomes a natural payment rail for agents, more so than any other digital asset, because of the finality of its settlement. An agent will gravitate toward a protocol with immediate, final settlement rather than a blockchain where transactions can be rolled back or canceled—so I think agents will naturally select Bitcoin as the best available technology for executing their actions and initiatives. Those are just two examples. But once you really open your mind to it, the divisibility, finality, and openness of the Bitcoin protocol extend into countless opportunities for transferring value.

You have spent years mentoring founders across Latin America through programs like Google Launchpad for Startups. How does the innovation culture in LatAm differ from Silicon Valley when it comes to building Bitcoin-native or AI-driven companies?

It differs a great deal, starting with the limited resources typically available to Latam startup founders. That’s a sharp contrast to Silicon Valley, where larger amounts of funding and deep talent pools are far more accessible. As a result, a Latam founder tends to build leaner and focus on reaching profitability faster, rather than following the “growth at all costs” mantra that has historically driven Silicon Valley founders. I see a similar mindset in Bitcoin-native companies. For a founder who works in Bitcoin technologies or holds Bitcoin on their balance sheet, the real opportunity cost of every dollar is Bitcoin itself. Given the asset’s tremendous growth over four-year cycles and beyond, any expenditure—a marketing buy, a new hire, another subscription—gets measured against a simple question: would I be better off holding this in Bitcoin instead? That’s where the mentality of a Latam startup founder and a Bitcoin-native founder converge: both are value-oriented and focused on achieving profitability. As for AI-driven companies, this is such a new frontier—really only taking shape effectively since early this year, 2026—where it’s become entirely possible to build a company without a strong technical stack, using AI to develop the technology and then having it reviewed by a CTO rather than needing a full team of engineers. And AI capabilities keep improving, increasingly rivaling the output of founders building in the traditional way. So – I’d separate Bitcoin-native companies from AI-driven companies as two distinct categories, though I believe AI will need to be incorporated into every company going forward—if not as part of the core business model, then at least as a testing layer to ensure the technology is secure, stable, and able to deliver on what the company promises.

At Base Layer Advisors, you connect investors with Bitcoin-focused venture opportunities. What qualities separate the Bitcoin startups that are simply riding hype cycles from the ones building durable long-term infrastructure?

Honestly, I don’t see many Bitcoin startups riding hype cycles. The one exception might be the category of Bitcoin treasury companies, but I wouldn’t really call those Bitcoin companies—they were using Bitcoin as a treasury asset to issue more securities, which makes them more of a financial instrument or financial company than a true Bitcoin company. There’s a real distinction between companies building Bitcoin infrastructure and tools, expanding open-source capabilities, and companies that simply hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet—those are entirely different models. I don’t see the infrastructure builders riding a hype cycle, because, as I mentioned previously, holding Bitcoin on your balance sheet puts every founder in a mindset where the opportunity cost of any expenditure is what you’re giving up by not storing that value in Bitcoin long term. That tends to make them less cyclical and less reactive to short-term demand. That said, I do think the treasury companies got excessively frothy—people invested without a clear plan for how those companies would keep funding themselves if Bitcoin’s price fell, which it did, or if capital markets’ appetite for treasury companies diminished, which it also did. So, I’d separate those two categories entirely. On the infrastructure side, I see tremendous venture opportunities. Those companies tend to raise funding early in their life cycle and then need less venture capital as they grow, because they reach profitability earlier and tend to be more fiscally conservative about raising capital.

You often speak about the convergence of Bitcoin, AI, and energy systems. Why do you believe these three sectors are becoming increasingly interconnected, and what opportunities could emerge from that convergence over the next decade?

I believe these three—Bitcoin, AI, and energy—are really at the forefront of driving innovation for the next century. Bitcoin is the new capital markets and financial system: because of the peer-to-peer nature of the protocol, its 24/7/365 availability, and its divisibility, I believe virtually any asset can eventually be transferred over the Bitcoin protocol. There are clearly limits to how many transactions the base layer can process, but secondary layers are emerging to handle that volume. AI, meanwhile, will obviously be the driver of innovation and efficiency across many industries, and AI agents will naturally gravitate toward Bitcoin as a settlement option because of its finality and its divisibility into very small amounts. Energy is what powers both of those technologies. We’ve already started changing the narrative around energy—there are valid concerns about carbon emissions, but energy itself isn’t bad; what matters is the type of energy being produced and how it drives human flourishing. Humanity has improved over the centuries in direct proportion to the energy available to it, and I think we got a bit twisted in our thinking when we started treating all energy as ‘bad’ rather than asking what type of energy we should be using and how to curtail the negative impacts of certain kinds of energy production. Bitcoin mining was actually one of the first technologies to pull carbon emissions out of the air, by using methane as an energy source for mining rather than letting it vent or flare. That helped open people’s minds to how you can create demand for energy and fund new energy infrastructure while actually reducing emissions. As AI’s energy needs became dominant, we started seeing AI and high-performance compute centers capturing energy projects that had originally been built for Bitcoin mining, and now we’re seeing real convergence between the two. So, energy drives both AI and Bitcoin, and I think AI and Bitcoin together are fundamental to the future of technology and growth.

Your upcoming Mita Tech Talks event will bring together executives, investors, and technologists to discuss the future of capital. What kinds of conversations are you hoping to spark that are not currently happening at larger mainstream tech or crypto conferences?

Mita TechTalks is deliberately designed as a small conference, because our goal is for everyone who attends—speakers, sponsors, and attendees alike—to walk away with actionable knowledge. The audience for Mita TechTalks 2026 is capital allocators: people from family offices, privately held corporations, and high-net-worth individuals who can make financial decisions more nimbly than large institutions, putting them among the first to act on opportunities in Bitcoin, AI, and energy. The talks themselves are brief and high-level, just enough to give you a sense of what each expert does and to spark conversation, but the time between talks is generous, so participants have real opportunities to speak with the speakers directly, get to know them, and ask questions. We also devote a full afternoon to breakout workshops—one on energy opportunities, one on AI, one for startup founders covering tax and inheritance planning, and one on holding Bitcoin itself. That last one is still a point of confusion for many institutions—even a family office or small corporation needs a plan for holding Bitcoin securely and ensuring it can be passed on to other shareholders or family members, so continuity of ownership is built in from the start. These are hands-on workshops, held at a private, secure venue—the villas make for an incredible setting to ask questions directly of experts you might not otherwise have access to. It’s a unique opportunity to combine high-level conversations about the future and its potential with practical knowledge you can take home and actually apply.

Having lived and invested in Mexico for over 20 years, how do you view Bitcoin’s role in regions where currency volatility, remittance friction, and limited financial access remain ongoing challenges?

As I mentioned earlier, being immersed in the Mexican financial system when I first arrived gave me the opportunity to see potential in Bitcoin that I never would have seen had I stayed on Wall Street. It really opened my eyes to the friction around remittances, the size of the unbanked population, and how limited credit card access was at the time—even among wealthier, middle-class people. It’s better now, 15 years later, but back then it was very limited, and I saw firsthand how Bitcoin could open up frictionless cross-border movement of capital. I think many people still aren’t aware of the Bitcoin protocol rails that let you move money with so much less friction than traditional banking, and there’s tremendous opportunity to reduce fees across all of these cross-border use cases.

Mexico has been fairly privileged in that its economy has been strong, especially over the last few years—many people don’t realize the peso has actually strengthened against the U.S. dollar. But in regions like Argentina and Venezuela, which have suffered crippling inflation, Bitcoin has clearly become a store of value people gravitate toward, and acceptance and awareness have come much more easily there. Even in Mexico, despite a strong currency, that history of inflation is baked into the cultural memory—if you haven’t lived through it yourself, your parents or grandparents did—along with a certain distrust of government. So, there’s an inherently better understanding of Bitcoin’s potential, both as a store of value and as a way to move assets peer-to-peer. Extend that pattern from Mexico and Latin America to the African continent and other regions, and you see global opportunity. I’d say the Global South, broadly, may have a different perspective on Bitcoin than the Global North does—and I think the real value opportunity is probably greater there.

Question 8: Many people still frame Bitcoin primarily as “digital gold.” From your perspective, how important will the broader application layer around Bitcoin become in determining its long-term impact on finance and technology?

Answer: There are two sides to this coin, so to speak. Bitcoin needs to keep growing its total asset value to be taken seriously, and that’s the benefit of adoption by mainstream banks and Wall Street ETFs—though from that vantage point, those investors will necessarily view it as digital gold, as an investment. But I think the store-of-value and medium-of-exchange use cases go hand in hand, and they’ll grow together—you can’t really have one without the other. For Bitcoin to be adopted as a medium of exchange, it first has to be trusted to hold and increase its value, and its fixed supply of 21 million gives it an edge even over gold, along with the portability of digital gold. From a technology standpoint, we need to do a better job building tools and apps that make Bitcoin easier to interact with. It’s still fairly clunky to use certain Bitcoin wallets—which I prefer to call Bitcoin signing devices—and striking the balance between removing complexity and preserving security is genuinely difficult. That leaves a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs to solve for usability. That said, the Bitcoin base layer itself is very solid, even though it can only finalize a limited number of transactions in any ten-minute window (or, ‘block). The layers built on top of it, though, offer nearly unlimited opportunity—tokenization of securities, issuing stablecoins, moving assets at scale through the Lightning Network or emerging technologies like Ark. There’s enormous room to remake the finance system, and I think it needs remaking, to improve efficiency, widen access, and reduce friction. I worked on Wall Street 20 years ago, and honestly, not much has changed—it’s still pretty archaic that you can only trade securities during certain hours. Change is coming, but it’s been slow, and I think a lot of that pressure is being driven by the innovation happening around the Bitcoin protocol.

Through both Build With Bitcoin and your speaking engagements, you regularly engage with founders building “freedom technologies.” What does that term mean to you today, especially in a world increasingly shaped by AI and centralized digital platforms?

As a venture capitalist, I never really dealt with open-source technologies, or “freedom technologies,” so I was quite unfamiliar with them before I started working more deeply in Bitcoin innovation. Bitcoin itself is an open-source project, and most of the technologies built around it start out the same way. At first, I had a hard time wrapping my mind around how something could be open-source and still be profitable—but there is definitely a path to that, and I think being open-source actually strengthens a project. One of the things I learned early on, through working with the Human Rights Foundation on a technology I thought could serve them well, is that open source was essential from their perspective: they needed tools that could be reviewed and verified, with no central point of control. I think open-source and freedom technologies are becoming increasingly important, because as AI comes to dominate, we’re seeing more surveillance and more control exerted by central authorities and governments. Freedom technologies are how individuals maintain their sovereignty, which I believe is essential. And protecting your privacy doesn’t mean you’re hiding something. Privacy shouldn’t be a crime; it should be a right, and we have the right to protect our private information. But, to me, it feels like everything increasingly has to be disclosed or tracked. Recently there has been a lot of conversation around how the AI systems in Flock traffic cameras are also using facial recognition and tracking a much wider array of our movements. I think we’re going to be fighting an ongoing battle against the constant tracking of our every move, and that’s exactly why open-source freedom technologies—ones with no central point of authority that can be controlled—are going to become essential tools for anyone who wants to retain their sovereignty as an individual.

You have had a front-row seat to multiple waves of technological change, from traditional finance to venture capital to Bitcoin innovation. Looking ahead, what developments in Bitcoin infrastructure or AI-driven financial systems are you personally most excited about over the next five years?

It’s honestly felt like a step up at each stage of my career. Traditional finance was incredibly exciting when I first entered the workforce, and years later, moving into venture capital let me watch companies emerge right at the start of massive shifts in cloud infrastructure—startups no longer needed to be massive to compete, thanks to smaller, networked technologies. Now, with Bitcoin, it feels like another step up from there. I believe we have the opportunity to truly democratize access to opportunity, and that’s what Bitcoin enables.

As a technology, it invites peer-to-peer transfer of value without requiring a large stake at the table or the right relationships to participate in the growth. It’s an asset that grew from the ground up—developers and individuals first—and it’s only now, 15 years in, being adopted by institutions and serious financial companies. Securitization is part of that, and while some people are concerned about it, I think it’s a necessary step. What strikes me is that Bitcoin is the only asset I’m aware of that started with individuals and grew into institutions, rather than the other way around. That creates opportunities for far more people to participate in wealth building and exchange value directly, without needing an intermediary.

This is where it intersects with AI: if central bank digital currencies gain ground, if centralized authorities gain more control over our finances, and if all assets become digital, everything becomes trackable. Bitcoin gives you the ability to separate from that centralized system and hold your wealth independently, rather than risk having it controlled or seized by an authority that disagrees with something you think or say. That’s where I believe Bitcoin gives us the ability to retain independence and freedom of thought in a world that’s likely to become increasingly controlled by central authorities.

On top of that, there’s the shift I mentioned earlier toward paying only for value received. This will be a significant change—we’ve historically paid for the whole of something, whether it’s software or a car, even if we only use part of it. Imagine paying only for the miles you actually drive, or only for the football games you watch instead of the whole season, or only for the ten minutes of a movie you watched before deciding you didn’t like it. I think all of these use cases, including content and entertainment, will necessarily rise in quality, because people will no longer pay for poor quality—they’ll pay only for what they actually want to consume. Quality is subjective, of course, but hopefully that shift ultimately elevates how we, as humans, choose to spend our time and attention.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who are interested to learn more or advised to visit the Build With Bitcoin podcast or Base Layer Advisors.