Club Orange: Social App to Payments App

Club Orange, founded by CEO Matteo Pellegrini, is the largest bitcoin-only social network in the world, counting more than 20,000 members across 71 countries.

You find a meetup on the map, show up, and send sats to the organizer. You spot a merchant in the in-app directory, walk in, and pay in bitcoin. You send sats to any member standing near you, or to bitcoiners anywhere with geo-zapping, the feature behind 96% of the app's transactions. It's basically a bitcoin onboarding machine disguised as a social network.

But putting bitcoin in every member's hands, the thing that makes Club Orange work, was also the hardest part to scale.

Around 80-90% of Club Orange members had never made a single Lightning transaction. As Matteo puts it, "you cannot grow a bitcoin social network by teaching 10,000 non-technical people to download a wallet, open a channel, and run a node." So in 2025 Club Orange launched a custodial wallet, holding members' bitcoin to keep onboarding simple enough that anyone could join.

But that choice had a ceiling built in. Holding other people's bitcoin across 71 countries meant that compliance, the regulatory jigsaw puzzle, and the burden of using a custodian limited transfers.

The obvious fix of leaving users in control of their funds reintroduced exactly the friction Club Orange was built to avoid. They really needed every member to control their own funds, but with zero learning curve and no intermediaries. That's exactly what the Breez SDK delivered.

The Club Orange team rebuilt its wallet with the Breez SDK. The migration was automatic: balances carried over, transaction history remained intact, sending and receiving worked exactly as before. Every member now holds their own keys, the platform no longer holds anyone's bitcoin, and the custody-induced transfer limits evaporated.

The integration took only a week or two. The Breez SDK absorbed everything that had previously made instant, non-custodial bitcoin hard to scale. Channels and liquidity faded into the background, users could hold their own funds, and the regulatory burden went on a starvation diet. That freed the team to go back to what Club Orange actually is: the social and location features that bring bitcoiners, event organizers, and merchants together, with the bitcoin handled underneath.

The wallet had already proved the demand, generating more than 6.6 million transactions in its first year. Then came the part that's supposed to be hard: moving the entire community off custody. Tens of thousands of people came away holding their own keys, most without ever realizing it. That's what the Breez SDK can give any app: instant, non-custodial bitcoin, at scale.