Cash App Is Giving Away $100K in Free Bitcoin at Invest Fest — But the Real Story Is How Two Childhood Friends Built the Stage It's Happening On

Cash App is bringing $100,000 in free Bitcoin to Invest Fest 2026, running August 7–9 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. Pull up to the booth, and you can unlock free Bitcoin on the spot — no crypto experience needed, Cash App's team walks you through claiming it, saving it, or spending it directly with participating Square sellers in the marketplace.

That's the headline. Here's what actually built the room it's happening in.

THE PART WORTH GETTING RIGHT

Troy Millings and Rashad Bilal met in junior high school in New York. Millings grew up in the South Bronx, spent 16 years as a public-school teacher in the NYC Department of Education and later New Rochelle. Bilal grew up inside his family's wealth management firm, working his way from summer intern to partner by 2014. Neither one set out to build the world's largest financial literacy festival. Millings was just trying to teach his summer-school kids something the curriculum skipped — how money actually works — and realized his best friend had spent his whole career doing exactly that for adults who never got the lesson either.

They started Earn Your Leisure as a podcast in 2019, aimed squarely at a gap they both saw: financial education wasn't reaching Black audiences, from teenagers to doctors and lawyers. It found an audience fast — and not just at home. “People were listening in South Africa, people were listening in Kuwait, people were listening in Tokyo,” Millings said. “This is a message that translates across the globe.”

Even the name carries weight most people don't clock on first read. “Earn Your Leisure” started as Bilal's Instagram hashtag back when hashtags still meant something. Millings explained it plainly: people saw the vacations, the cars, the nice parties, and assumed it came easy. What they never saw was Bilal waking up at 4 a.m. chasing a basketball career, or studying ten days straight for his Series 7 exam. They never saw Millings working three jobs on Saturdays just to pay for college. “Everything that we have, it wasn't much, but it still felt that way — it was earned,” Millings said. “We earned the time it took to do those things.”

That podcast is now averaging 3 million downloads a month. And in 2021, the two turned it into something bigger: a festival that merges entertainment and financial education, because as Millings put it, “you gotta put the medicine in the candy.” InvestFest went from roughly 4,000 attendees that first year to a projected 40,000–50,000 this August, with a lineup that's included Magic Johnson, Steve Harvey, Tyler Perry, 50 Cent, and Robert F. Smith — brought on stage specifically to talk business, not celebrity.

WHY THIS ACTUALLY MATTERS BEYOND THE HYPE

Two friends noticed that the people teaching financial literacy in this country didn't look like the people who needed it most, and built an entire ecosystem to close that gap themselves — a podcast, a bestselling book, a curriculum, and now a festival expecting 40,000-plus people this year alone. Cash App handing out real Bitcoin at the door, with zero barrier to entry, is exactly the kind of hands-on financial access Millings and Bilal built this whole stage to make normal.

Pull up. Get your Bitcoin. Support the 400-plus small businesses in the marketplace while you're there. And if you can't make it to Atlanta, Prodigal Breaking News will be covering Invest Fest all week — founder spotlights, speaker breakdowns, and real-time updates from the floor. Bookmark ProdigalBreakingNews.com and follow along.

Stay awake. Stay informed. Stay Prodigal.