The Time2Build developer challenge just announced its 2025 winners. It was organized by Breez in collaboration with partners including Tether, Lightspark, Fulgur Ventures, Plan ₿ Network, PlebLab, Geyser, and Draper University. The initiative, which ran from October 7 to November 15, 2025 (with a merge period through December 16), focused on integrating self-custodial Lightning Network payments into existing open-source applications using the Breez SDK.
More than 50 developer communities worldwide participated, resulting in a range of plugins, tools, and integrations designed for long-term use rather than one-off demonstrations. The challenge emphasized practical Bitcoin functionality in areas such as merchant payments, social platforms, identity protocols, and Nostr-based applications.
Key trends observed across submissions included:
- Lightning as an interoperability layer — Developers frequently paired Lightning with protocols like Nostr and Cashu to enable value transfer between systems without altering native designs.
- Preference for plugins over deep integrations — Participants favored lightweight plugins for content management systems, forums, game engines, and creator tools. This approach allowed faster deployment, independent iteration, and reduced dependence on upstream maintainer approval.
The winners selected by a panel of judges, including Abubakar, Giacomo, Jeff, Kevin, Keyan, Lisa, Roy, and Subash. Prizes were paid in Bitcoin.
$3,500 Prize Winners
BTCPay Server plugin (Team: Aljaz) — The plugin enables Lightning payments on BTCPay Server, the open-source payment processor used by merchants globally, by leveraging the Breez SDK. It eliminates the need for operators to manage a full Lightning node, including channel liquidity, while maintaining self-custodial Bitcoin functionality.
Evento (Team: Brianna, Andre, and Aaliyah) — Lightning was added to Evento, a social events platform for community building. Users can tip participants, support hosts, send/receive sats, and interact with services like Bitrefill purchases directly in the app, enabling peer-to-peer value flow within events.
Portal (Team: Alessandro, Gianluca, Gabriele, and John) — The team integrated the Breez SDK into Portal, a protocol and mobile app for identity and payments. Lightning becomes a native protocol feature, allowing any application built on Portal to inherit send/receive Bitcoin capabilities.
Primal (Team: Daniel) — Lightning was incorporated into the Primal web client, a widely used Nostr application. The Breez SDK provides a self-custodial wallet experience, replacing a previous custodial onboarding process that required KYC and could fail due to location or email restrictions. Onboarding now requires no personal information and completes in approximately one minute.
$1,000 Prize Winners and Special Mentions
Additional $1,000 awards went to projects including:
Special prizes from Draper University and PlebLab recognized additional contributions in education gamification and Nostr-focused wallets. Winners of these special prices were:
- Lib de Satoshi & B4OS — A community platform that integrated Lightning to gamify education. Rewarded by DraperU.
- Sparkihonne — A Nostr-focused wallet experience blending identity, messaging, and payments. Rewarded by PlebLab.
Other notable non-winning submissions included Sabi Wallet, Backend for CDK mints, Jumble, Breez MCP Server – Docker Catalog, CoFi Lab, OpNode, and BitNGN.
The challenge demonstrated growing developer interest in embedding Bitcoin payments where users already engage, particularly through plugins and Lightning as a bridging layer. Organizers stated that future development will depend on continued builder participation in areas such as messaging apps, wallets, and new applications.
The Breez team shared their enthusiasm in a press release with Bitcoin Magazine, saying; “For us, the next steps are clear. The era of building has begun. Whether that means adding Bitcoin to messaging apps like Signal, integrating it into leading crypto wallets, or bringing Lightning into entirely new apps with use cases we’ve yet to dream up, we can’t wait to see what you do next. It’s time to build.”
