André Loja

André Loja is a native Madeiran, father of four and serial entrepreneur who founded the FREE Madeira initiative. On the island he runs companies spanning real estate and a coworking space.

With support from the local government, FREE Madeira guides the archipelago’s Bitcoin strategy as part of an effort to diversify the island’s economy into a technology and digital hub.

He founded it with Bitcoin authors and podcasters who had moved to the island, among them Knut Svanholm and Daniel Prince, and it works as an advisory body to the regional government as well as a community: merchant onboarding, education in Portuguese, and a permanent Bitcoin space on the island.

Madeira cannot make bitcoin legal tender, being an autonomous region inside the European Union, so the strategy is the softer one: shops that accept it, residents who understand it, and a reputation that draws people who work in it. The regional president has appeared at Bitcoin conferences abroad to make that case in person.

Loja also brought Bitcoin Atlantis to the island, a conference that filled the capital and put Madeira on the itinerary of a movement that otherwise meets in Prague, Miami and Riga.