Few companies have done more to make Bitcoin actually spendable than Bitrefill. Founded in Stockholm in 2014 by Sergej Kotliar and his cofounders, Bitrefill turned a deceptively simple idea, gift cards and mobile top-ups paid for in Bitcoin, into a global on-ramp into the real economy. Today the platform connects users in nearly every country with thousands of brands, from groceries and travel to gaming and telecom, all without a bank account in the loop.

What sets Bitrefill apart, and why it sits squarely inside the Fulgur thesis, is its early and aggressive embrace of the Lightning Network. Bitrefill was among the first major merchants to integrate Lightning, helped pioneer payment flows like submarine swaps and Lightning addresses, and has been a steady source of real transaction volume that strengthens the network for everyone else. It is infrastructure dressed as a consumer product.

The bigger vision is straightforward. Hundreds of millions of people now hold Bitcoin, but the gap between holding it and living on it is wide. Bitrefill closes that gap one purchase at a time, letting people pay rent through gift cards, refill phones in markets where banking rails are unreliable, and quietly route around legacy financial gatekeepers in places where that matters most.

We are proud to be partners with Bitrefill since 2019. The team has stayed obsessively focused on a hard, unglamorous problem: making Bitcoin useful in everyday life. That focus is exactly the kind of long-term execution Fulgur looks to back, and we believe the company's best chapters are still ahead.