He entered through the exit, and the Secret Service thought he was a threat. While detained, he tried to orange-pill agents.
Jordi Montes was impatiently waiting for Donald Trump to take the stage when he heard his name called on the venue’s public address system.
Donald Trump was the most hyped talk at the conference, with crowds of people lining the streets and hallways to watch him speak, only to have to wait a gruelling hour for him to show up on stage. Many, in fact, speculated that it was Elon Musk who caused the delay after rumors swirled that his plane was headed for Nashville.
“I was thinking to myself, ‘How unprofessional for making us wait 15 minutes,’ when I heard a voice call out: Jordi Montes to the nearest exit,” he told The Defiant.
Startled at first, his initial reaction was to check his wallet, he said. It was still in his pocket, so he proceeded to check with those around him in case he was missing something.
“Ah, that’s me,” he replied, watching as his surroundings instinctually drew a circle. “Imagine Moses splitting the ocean,” he said, “that’s what it felt like.”
Montes is a former Lightning Labs developer who became involved in Bitcoin around 2018. He started working on the Lightning Network in 2020 and joined forces with Lightning Labs in 2021 before he began his current business, Fewsats.
Fewsats, which won the Wolf Incubator program in 2023, aims to monetize APIs through the Lightning Network, allowing users to monetize their files. He’s also built a very early-stage Polymarket look-alike called Chromatic Markets that lets users gamble on Trump’s election chances, but with Bitcoin.
Back at the conference, which drew crowds of 20,000 Bitcoiners in expectation of Trump but also Ordinals and Bitcoin Season 2, Montes approached the nearest police officers and identified himself.
He was ushered out of the arena and escorted to a phalanx of Secret Service agents in “typical suits,” who began asking him a barrage of questions.
“How did you get to the conference today? Did you walk or Uber? Where have you been inside the venue? Why did you come to the conference? Did you know Trump was speaking?”
Yes, they really asked that, he said, bursting with laughter.
Entering Through the Exit
But the questions didn’t offer many clues as to why he was getting grilled until agents showed Montes CCTV images that had captured the moments before he had gone into the main stage where Trump would be speaking.
Montes was on his way to grab a cup of coffee when he ran into a former Lightning Labs colleague whose name he did not share. He entered through a specific area of the venue and upon entering, realized his companion had not followed suit.
So, Montes did what most of us would do in that situation and turned back to find him. “That’s when I realized what had happened,” he told The Defiant.
On screen, officers saw Montes come out through the exit, pointing to his friend that they should meet at the next entrance. But instead of going through the actual entrance, Montes turned around and entered again through the exit, triggering alarm bells for the security detail stationed at the conference.
According to Montes, they grilled him on why he had entered through the exit. “I had just seen a group of people walk in through there and didn’t think much of it,” he explained.
A Passport and a Wad of Cash
After what he considers 30 minutes of questions, the Secret Service made him a one-way offer to head back to his hotel for further questioning. “They leaned in and asked me in that sort of way that said, ‘We can go back to yours to keep talking, or we can go back to yours’ to keep talking,” he explained.
On their way to the hotel, Montes laughingly explains, he attempted to orange-pill the agents. “What else am I going to do? I haven’t done anything wrong. I might as well try it out,” Montes said. A couple of them had never bought but they were openly receptive to it, it seemed.
According to Montes he “must have been very annoying” because he just kept positive and kept trying to engage.
Once back at his hotel, things got slightly dicey. The two agents who accompanied him went through his closet and drawers only to find them suspiciously empty – he had kept his clothes in his suitcase the whole time.
But the most shocking finding was when they opened the bedstand to find two things: a fat wad of undisclosed cash and his passport. “I always travel with cash, you never know when you’re going to need it,” he said, and notably, that’s when it just clicked for the officers that he had done nothing wrong.
“They kind of had this look on their face that sure things might have seemed odd, but I hadn’t done anything wrong,” he said. The officers left shortly after.
Jordi Montes To The Nearest Exit
Montes was left alone, trying to figure out what had just happened. Trump, who ended up headlining an hour late because of him, had already finished speaking. But his fame, short-lived during the moments prior to the former president’s speech, wasn’t going to end there.
Someone etched a Rune dubbed JORDI•MONTEZ•TO•NEAREST•EXITto immortalize the public service announcement. Others called him “the most non-compliant man in Bitcoin,” while others lauded his attempt to orange-pill secret service agents.
The man delayed Donald Trump’s speech at Bitcoin2024, causing the ire of the MAGA crowd present, but etching his name forever in Bitcoin’s cultural zeitgeist.
