Newsletter

Alby Buzz: Connect Alby to Damus and Castamatic

• 3 min read
Alby Buzz: Connect Alby to Damus and Castamatic

Hello Alby Community!

Welcome to the 16th edition of Alby Buzz, where you find out about everything new at Alby, the lightning app ecosystem, and are the first to learn about what's coming next.

News from the bitcoin lightning app ecosystem

  • Umbrel released its new home server device. Did you know that you can connect Umbrel to Amethyst, Damus and Snort for #1tapzaps (i.e. one-click payments). Read more about it here.
  • Walletano a new lightning wallet is now live.
  • Scaling Lightning - A testing toolkit for the lightning network was announced.
  • Bitcoin Core v25.0 has been released with new features, various bug fixes and performance improvements.
  • Bitrefill launched login via lightning.
  • RaspiBlitz version 1.9.0 is out with a new Bitcoin Core, LND, Core Lightning, LNbits, JAM (JoinMarket WebUI), LNDg, CLN Watchtower client version & much more
  • New Core-Lightning 20.05 dropped with PSBTv2 support, new RPC methods such as listing closed channels, list runes and more
  • Blockstream refurbished the Core Lightning app for Umbrel with a new look and a more intuitive UI.
  • Mempool.space unveiled Mempool Accelerator, a tool to accelerate unconfirmed transactions by paying an additional fee off-band directly to the miners working with mempool.space
  • Voltage partners with Google Cloud to expand hosting providers and locations. customers can create Bitcoin and Lightning Nodes in Google Cloud at a variety of locations around the world.
  • Lightning Labs announced the newest version of Taproot Assets.
  • Bitkit simplified the onboarding process by abstracting reserve balance and receiving capacity limits away.
  • Not a news about but for apps. Jack Dorsey donated $10M to OpenSats for open source development.
  • Fedi released an alpha version of their client.
  • EttaWallet is a new non-custodial wallet worth checking out on GitHub

Meet new Nostr apps

  • Agora a microblogging app was released. It allows you to follow your favorite topics in the Nostr-verse.
  • Zappedit is a Reddit-style client for Nostr where you can follow topics (similar to subreddits), upzap and downzap notes.

Introducing Alby Wallet Webhooks for Developers

The Alby team added Webhooks to the Alby Wallet API. Webhooks allow services to be instantly notified of user's incoming and outgoing payments and act upon them. Podcasting services like Conshax that allow you to connect your Alby account will be able to provide an improved experience to analyze real-time payments.
ZapSplitter is a showcase and another app using Webhooks. It allows you to configure lightning splits for your Alby account. Whenever you receive a payment, you can forward a percentage of it to support your favorite bitcoin, lightning or Nostr developers and content creators. Do you want to start using Webhooks for your app?

Read more

#1tapzaps in Damus with Alby and Umbrel

Our new addition to the Nostr ecosystem, Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) is aiming at being the unifying standard for wallet-app connections. Built on the Nostr protocol and leveraging bitcoin’s lightning network, it will aid developers in their coding and integrations, and allow users to send and receive payments directly in apps with their preferred lightning wallet.

Alby is the first to bring this #1tapzap experience to Damus. Learn more about connecting your Alby account to Damus here. And if you run an Umbrel node, try out the Alby NWC app and pay directly from your own node. Learn more here

Accelerating Podcasting 2.0 with Castamatic

Alby brings bitcoin payments to any app. While it is great to use Alby with the browser extension for bitcoin apps on the web, its capabilities extend beyond that. Alby can be equally seamlessly utilized within the realm of mobile apps. Just plug-in your Alby account and enjoy a frictional app experience. Alby takes care that value is transferred instantly across borders for V4V payments, zapping, buying gift cards, receiving cashback, etc. thanks to the Alby Wallet SDK.
Now you can support your favourite podcaster on the go with Castamatic, a mobile podcast player for iOS.  

Read more

Where to meet the Alby team

  • BTCPrague, Prague, June 8-10.  Alby is supporting the hackday, is present with a booth at the expo and Bumi is talking about the Value4Value Economy on stage. Come by and visit us.

That's it from the hive this month. For more, visit our website and follow Alby on Twitter and Nostr*. We love your feedback! Big or small, feature requests or bug reports, we read them all! Please visit the feedback board to help us out.

*Our Nostr pubkey: npub1getal6ykt05fsz5nqu4uld09nfj3y3qxmv8crys4aeut53unfvlqr80nfm