It’s Sunday, and sometimes we like to go into story mode on Sundays. Light reads for those of you who are interested in the journey behind the platform. Last time we covered the AirdropAlert origin story. Today we go back even further, to the Nijmegen Bitcoin scene of the early days, in my hometown.
Nobody talks about Nijmegen when they talk about early Bitcoin. Berlin had Room77, the bar where you could pay for beer in BTC. Arnhem, twenty minutes up the road, branded itself “Bitcoin City” in 2014. My hometown never got a nickname. Yet in the summer of 2014, three guys from the same Nijmegen poker scene independently launched Bitcoin fiat gateways within weeks of each other, without ever discussing it.
One of them built what became one of the biggest crypto brokers in Europe. One quietly stacked coins below $10 and disappeared into early retirement. And one made every execution mistake in the book, kept going anyway, and ended up founding the world’s first airdrop aggregator.
I’m the third guy. Here’s the story.
It Started at the Poker Table
To understand why Nijmegen produced three Bitcoin companies in one summer, you have to rewind to the poker scene of 2010 to 2012.
Online poker was huge in the Netherlands back then, and Nijmegen had a tight crew of serious grinders. We mostly competed against each other, online and at the local casino on the Waalkade. For big online buy-ins we would sometimes swap action, but that was the exception rather than the rule. The staking culture came later for me, in the poker house years when I started travelling. I turned pro in 2011 and ended up playing around five million hands over six years.
Poker players were early to Bitcoin everywhere in the world, and it’s no mystery why. We were already comfortable with variance. We already moved money across borders through online wallets and payment processors. We’d already been burned by frozen accounts and knew exactly how fragile the traditional banking rails were when your income didn’t fit in a neat box. When Bitcoin showed up, it didn’t feel like a weird internet experiment to us. It felt like a solution to problems we personally had.
So the pipeline from that poker scene into crypto wasn’t a coincidence. The Nijmegen Bitcoin wave was almost inevitable. The only question was what each of us would build.
The Nijmegen Bitcoin Summer of 2014
By 2014, buying Bitcoin was still genuinely hard for a normal person. Mt. Gox had just collapsed. Bitstamp was the most accessible serious exchange, but for the average Dutch guy, wiring money to an exchange in Slovenia felt like a big leap.
The gap was almost funny when you think about it. I was already deep enough in the ecosystem that I was paying for sushi deliveries in Bitcoin through Thuisbezorgd. Meanwhile, most people around me couldn’t even figure out how to buy a single coin. Spending it was easier than acquiring it. That gap is exactly what three of us set out to close, at the same time, without knowing it.
I co-founded bitcoinsworldwide.com. The model was simple: you paid us by bank wire or iDEAL, gave us your wallet address, and we sent you Bitcoin sourced from Bitstamp with a 5% markup. We even made an explainer video, because in 2014 people genuinely needed one. That video is the only proof the company ever existed, which tells you something about how it went.
That same summer, the founders of BTC Direct launched their gateway. Same city, same idea, same month. We never spoke about it beforehand.
And a third guy from our poker scene, one of the best players among us, launched his own fiat gateway that summer too. I won’t doxx him, so let’s call him John for now. John was several years younger than most of us, but honestly, we looked up to him. He was simply a smarter and better player.
Three gateways. One poker scene. One summer.
Execution Is Everything
Here’s where the arcs split, and where I get to laugh at myself.
Bitcoinsworldwide.com had, in retrospect, everything wrong except the idea. The domain was terrible. We built the site in English and positioned it as a global .com, while literally every single customer we ever had was Dutch and came from my personal network. I had zero experience with SEO or marketing, so growth was pure word of mouth. The site lived for maybe twelve to eighteen months and then quietly sunsetted.
BTC Direct did the opposite. They went btcdirect.eu, focused on the Netherlands first, and only later expanded to Belgium, Germany, and France. The local execution was nailed from day one: Dutch language, iDEAL front and center, built for the market they could actually reach. Over the years they grew into one of the biggest brokers in the Benelux, later launched the Blox app, and at one point sponsored both Ajax and NEC. They’re still around today, more than a decade later, which in crypto years makes them ancient.
The idea was identical. Their execution was ten times better. I’ve had years to think about whether that stings, and honestly, it doesn’t. I know those guys well from the poker days, and I’m a genuine cheerleader for what they built. If we’d teamed up, maybe it would have been bigger, maybe not. What I do know is that running a regulated Dutch fintech for twelve years would have meant a completely different life. No years of travel, no seventy-five countries, no seven continents, no Chiang Mai apartment where AirdropAlert was born in 2017. I wouldn’t trade my path for anything.
Our paths did cross again. In the early days of AirdropAlert, I visited the BTC Direct office in Nijmegen. Walking in there, I was genuinely impressed. The team, the office, the whole professional look of it — a real company, built in our hometown, from the same idea I’d fumbled a few years earlier. We talked about whether we could partner somehow, but at the time they had no referral system and didn’t do rewards or airdrops, so there wasn’t much to work with. No deal came out of it, but I left that office more convinced than ever that they’d executed the right way.
John’s gateway sunsetted too, by the way. But John didn’t need the company. John had been buying Bitcoin below $10.
The Best Trade I Never Meant to Make
This brings me to my favorite story from the whole era, and it involves John, a poker house in New Zealand, and a debt paid in Bitcoin.
In early 2015, I was spending the New Zealand summer running a poker house there. John was backpacking his way through Australia and New Zealand at the time, and he ended up crashing on my couch for two weeks.
One day, a poker buddy of ours sat down in a high-stakes PLO game with a $100k buy-in. As often happens at those stakes, he sold action. The house took 50% of him. I took 5%. John jumped in for 5% too.
He lost the whole buy-in in one all-in pot. The entire house felt that one. I was down $5k, John was down $5k, and the mood at dinner was exactly what you’d imagine.
Here’s the thing: John was mid-backpacking trip and didn’t have that kind of cash on him. So he asked if I could spot him the $5k to settle with our friend, and whether he could pay me back in a month when he got home. In Bitcoin.
I said sure. This was April 2015. Go look up the Bitcoin price in April 2015, I’ll wait.
A month later, $5k worth of Bitcoin landed in my wallet. It went straight into my hodl stack. I won’t pretend I never touched it, because that’s not how those years worked. Sometimes I converted a bit to trade altcoins, ICOs, or NFTs, and sometimes I took some out to fund the travel life. But the core of that stack sat there through every cycle, and I sold the final coins in August 2025, with Bitcoin trading around $110k.
I’ll let you run the math on what a $5k repayment from April 2015 turned into over a decade. Let’s just say it ranks among the best trades of my life, and it only happened because one friend lost a $100k pot and another friend was too broke to settle a poker debt in euros.
That, to me, is the whole Nijmegen Bitcoin story in a single anecdote. Poker and Bitcoin were never two separate worlds for us. The trust came from the tables. The debts were settled in coins. And the variance, as always, worked out in ways nobody at that dinner table could have predicted.
Chang Beers and a Declined $100k
John shows up one more time in this story, and it’s a good one.
In 2017, I was living in Chiang Mai, where AirdropAlert had just been born. John passed through town, and we did what we always did: a few dinners, some Chang beers, and crypto talk late into the night. Naturally, I told him to join the Oyster Pearl airdrop, our first major campaign.
He must have liked what he saw, because at some point he offered to invest $100k into AirdropAlert.
I declined. Not because of the number, but because I simply wasn’t looking for investors. The whole point of the platform was independence, and it still is.
So John did the next best thing. We had a donation wallet on the site back then, and he sent 0.5 ETH to it. From a $5k poker debt paid in Bitcoin, to a declined six-figure investment offer, to half an ETH in the tip jar. If that’s not the most 2017 friendship arc imaginable, I don’t know what is.
Final Words
Nijmegen never got the Bitcoin City branding. Arnhem took that one, fair enough. Still, pound for pound, I’d put the Nijmegen Bitcoin scene up against any early crypto hub in Europe.
Three fiat gateways in one summer, from one card game. A broker that still stands today as one of the biggest in the Benelux. An early stacker who bought below $10 and never needed to work again. And me, the guy who botched the execution, learned every lesson the hard way, and used those lessons to build AirdropAlert three years later.
The 2014 version of me, filming an explainer video to convince my friends’ parents that Bitcoin was safe to buy, would not believe where this all went. But he’d recognize the through-line, because it never changed: making crypto accessible to normal people, at whatever the ecosystem needed that year.
Not bad for a city nobody mentions.
Crypto class of '13, airdrop farmer since 2016. Avid trader and DeFi veteran. His market commentary has been featured by Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, and CNN.
