For hundreds of millions of users, Telegram is not just a messenger; it is the primary social and information layer of daily life. Button Wallet, founded in 2017 by Alexandr Safonov, Kirill Kuznetcov, and Nick Kozlov, asked an obvious but mostly unanswered question: why should users leave that environment to interact with bitcoin and other digital assets at all?

The answer is a Telegram-native multi-crypto wallet bot that lets users buy, hold, send, and exchange assets without ever installing another app. Operations happen inside chats, with familiar Telegram UX patterns wrapping a serious cryptographic backend. The friction collapse is dramatic: a user goes from never having owned bitcoin to holding sats in seconds, all inside a conversation thread.

Our Fulgur thesis is that bitcoin distribution at global scale will not happen through standalone wallets alone. It will happen by embedding bitcoin into the messaging surfaces where people already live. Button Wallet, headquartered in San Francisco with deep roots in the Russian-speaking developer community, was an early bet on this conviction and helped pioneer the chat-as-wallet pattern that has since become a major theme.

The market vision is global and culturally specific at the same time. In emerging markets, where Telegram penetration is enormous and trust in legacy financial rails is low, a wallet that lives inside a familiar chat app can become a meaningful entry point to sound money. Lightning integrations and bot-native UX further reduce barriers for users who have never opened a centralized exchange.

We partnered with Alexandr, Kirill, and Nick in 2019 because they identified a distribution opportunity that most wallet teams missed entirely, and they built a product capable of capitalizing on it. Button Wallet is part of the Fulgur thesis that the most valuable consumer Bitcoin products will meet users inside the apps they already love.