Alby Buzz #22/#23 🎉 Happy New Year!

• 5 min read
Alby Buzz #22/#23 🎉 Happy New Year!


Hello, Alby Community!

As we embark on 2024, we're thrilled to bring you this double edition of our newsletter, coming again with updates from Alby, the latest news in the bitcoin and Nostr app ecosystems, and exciting developments you won't want to miss!

 What's happening in the bitcoin app ecosystem?

  • Satsforads allows you to get paid by advertisers. The difference is that you need to signup in order to receive sats and ads.
  • Cipherchat App is an encrypted private messenger that makes it easy to chat at the speed of lightning.
  • Geyser migrates to Nostr. 🌊 Every Geyser project now gets a unique Nostr identity (NPUB) - a big leap for the Open Creator Economy! 
  • Blixt Wallet received an update with Simple Taproot Channels support, a new Tor implementation for Android and support for new languages.
  • AcceptLN is a service that accepts payments on behalf of an email address notifies is owner.
  • Wallet of Satoshi has introduced their Point of Sale partner app.
  • Boltz released v.3.3.0 and is now compatible with Core Lightning.
  • Blockstream launches Aqua a wallet combining bitcoin and Liquid Network.
  • Pay and get paid via the lightning network with Liquid BTC in the Marina wallet.
  • Amboss introduces Ghost Adresses - lightning addresses for node runners.
  • Sulu solutions published a demo app to request weather data paid over lightning and the Alby extension. 
  • River introduced River Link, a way to send bitcoin to everybody without a wallet. That's a great way to onboard more people to bitcoin. Nostr Wallet Connect opens up such a way of gifting bitcoin for any wallet. 
  • Lightning Network+ introduced a new dashboard to streamline your experience in managing your node on LN+.
  • Mutiny teased support for Fedimint, a federated bitcoin custody approach. 

New additions to the Alby Discover page - your gateway to LN apps:

  • SatsMobi.com allows you to purchase bitcoin merchandise and gadgets with bitcoin.
  • BitcoinVoucherBot is a Telegram bot to purchase bitcoin and receive directly to your Alby lightning address.
  • 🎰 Casino games are entering lightning world with Plinko, Baccarat, Poker and more.
  • Looking for Genius or Soundcloud on Nostr? Try Stargazr and Stemstr! 🎵
  • Dmpling: A platform to monetize content with bitcoin and share with your audience. 🥟 
Discover apps

What's happening in the Nostr world?

  • Mapstr let's you find local businesses which accept BTC and add reviews to those businesses as a customer for which you can receive zaps. 🗺️ It is another map app powered by Nostr - check out also Yondar.me and Wherostr
  • Flockstr launched - it is the meetups & events platform.
  • Nostrmo is a Nostr client for Android, iOS, Windows and MacOS.
  • DTAN.XYZ is archives torrents over Nostr relays and publishes the files on the existing torrent network.
  • Yana is a lightweight open-source Nostr client on early release, with v0.12 they implemented decentralizing Gossips and launched the web app.
  • Denny, a nostr client for encrypted group chat launched.
  • Nuxstr published a starter template for building a Nostr client with the Nuxt Vue framework and Nostr Dev Kit (NDK).
  • Beagle a decentralized realtime Text/Audo/Video chat client for iOS, using Nostr relays for users to share information and moments by posts of text, image and video.
  • Formstr is a Google Forms alternative built on top of Nostr.

⚠️ Important notice - introduction of fees 🔖


Your Alby account is a bitcoin lightning wallet packed with awesome features: It works out of the box, comes with a lightning address and can be connected to dozens of bitcoin apps for free. To sustain and provide this service commercially, there are ongoing expenses that must be accounted for. That's why there will be a service fee for outgoing transactions introduced over the upcoming weeks, leading to exciting opportunities. Read more here.

Hackathon: Legends of Lightning Vol. 2 was a blast

237 makers competed with 69 projects to become the legend of lightning this year. The 10 week long tournament once again attracted ecosystem wide attention by combining side events from Tabconf, Bitcoin Indonesia Conference, Sats Conf and Adopting Bitcoin.

These are the top 3 winning projects:

  • Bitcoin Connect: Connect any bitcoin app with any bitcoin lightning wallet with a simple to integrate payment button. 
  • USDp by 101010: USD stable coin on lightning with minimized counterpart risk based on Discreet Log Contracts  
  • Resolvr: A peer-to-peer bounty marketplace 

Other awards go to: Splitsats (P2P Award), Kumuly Pocket (UX Award), Abbot (Education & Community Award), Minimaxis (BiFi Award).  
Congratulations to all participants. 👑

Bitcoin Connect - connect bitcoin wallets with apps

Bitcoin Connect allows you to seamlessly connect your bitcoin lightning wallet with any web application. Interactions like payments can happen natively in web apps and PWAs. Bitcoin Connect takes a big leap for non-custodial spending and bitcoin app development.

Read more

Get paid in bitcoin as a business with Zaprite and Alby

Zaprite offers professional invoicing and ecommerce services to small and medium-sized businesses. Combined with Alby users now enjoy seamless and lightning fast bitcoin payments. They even recently launched WooCommerce integration!

Read more

(ALBY ON MOBILE ) v3.6.0 ✨Rainbow Aurora over Icelandic Waterfall

New release of Alby Extension comes with Firefox Mobile support 📲, Boostagrams in transaction details 🚀new onboarding, fresh design and many new fixes! 🚀

New NWC connector that makes it possible to use the Alby Extension with any wallet that supports NWC. NWC makes it much easier to connect to nodes behind firewalls or private networks - like Umbrel, RaspiBlitz, etc. This is an alternative to unstable and slow Tor connections. Stay tuned for more news related to NWC.

Find short announcement and download links here.

Where to meet the Alby team

That's what buzzed us last time. For more, visit our website and follow us on X and Nostr: npub1getal6ykt05fsz5nqu4uld09nfj3y3qxmv8crys4aeut53unfvlqr80nfm.

🧡 We love your feedback!
Big or small, feature requests or bug reports, we read them all! You can help us out with it by:
🙌 visiting and submitting to the feedback board.
⭐ leaving a review of our Browser Extension at Chrome or Firefox.
👨‍💻 creating an issue or a pull request on our Github.
💬 joining Alby's Telegram, where our team and users hang out and chat.

Thanks for reading,
See you on the web!