Lightning Addresses are a thing now!

Zebedee CTO André Neves has built a spec for lightning addresses.

For example, I can now receive payments not only at [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]), and [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]), but also at my own domain, [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]). There are many ways to set this up, from fully custodial (lntxbot and zebedee), to fully self-hosted (my fitti.io domain). There are also steps in between.

You can set up some DNS records and use fiatjaf's bridge server to use your own domain and node, but have the server handle the requests.

You can also use fiatjaf's satdress server and either self-host – using your own domain and node – or use someone else's instance (like ln.fitti.io). In the latter case, you use their domain, but your own node.

This builds on top of lnurl's lnurl-pay subprotocol, which makes it very easy to implement.

The amazing part about this is that it seamlessly opens up the ability for sats to flow between different platforms. You could use your Zebedee wallet to send [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) some sats because he retweeted you and you gained some followers. You could send sats to [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]), instead of having to go to strike.me/someone first, and generating an invoice. Like what "username" said in a Telegram group? [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) is already a thing, you can already send to that from lntxbot and LNbits!

I can easily see this gaining a lot of traction, especially since "Paying to static internet identifiers" (the sending part of this protocol) is part of the lnurl-rfc now, and Zebedee is immediately implementing it.

Let me actually demonstrate how trivial this is for services to implement.

Sending to [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]):

1. Look up https://example.org/.well-known/lnurlp/username
2. Pay to the lnurl-pay link you found in step 2

Receiving at [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]):

1. Serve your lnurl-pay link at https://example.org/.well-known/lnurlp/username

Since I already had lnurl-pay links set up on fitti.io via LNbits, it took me less than 10 minutes to read the spec and implement it.