Newsletter

Alby Buzz: Nostr Wallet Connect

May 1, 2023 • 3 min read

Hello Alby Community!

Welcome to the 15th 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

Strom is an open source application that allows charge point owners to accept lightning payments for charging sessions.
LNBits released a Software as a Service version. You can pay by the hour for a LNBits instance running on their servers.
Polar released a new version to support the latest node implementations.
BTC Pay Server received a new plugin. LN Prism allows to automatically split sats (post-settlement)
Awesome LDK shows a curated list of LDK projects and resources.
Lightspark published Lightspark Connect a platform to book a lightning node online.
Zeus announced Olympus an own Lightning Service Provider
Bitcoin Scratchcards is a new app to play free scratch card games and win some sats.

News from the Nostr app ecosystem

Wavlake built Wayman, an open-source music player built on Nostr.
Filestr a Nostr file explorer was launched.
Highlighter, allows to create notes on Nostr, that others users can share or zap.
That's just a development update. But we haven't covered the project yet. Mostro, a P2P bitcoin marketplace on Nostr, shared their progress.
If you are looking to build an application as well check out Dorahacks' Hack-Nostr-On which goes until May, 20.

Nostr Hack & Design announced the winners

If you missed the reward ceremony, check out the video here.
Winners of the Build track are:

Nosta: A helper to set up a Nostr profile
Colighter: A real-time web annotation collab
Nygma: Social recovery of your Nostr private key using Shamir Secret Sharing.

Winners of the Design track are:

Zapster: A music discovery and earning platform for musicians
Nostr Web UI: An open-source UI design for Nostr web clients
Goodstr UI: A place to sell digital goods

Congrats to all the participants of the Nostr Hack & Design hackathon. 🥳
Alby was a proud supporter of this hackathon.

Introducing Nostr Wallet Connect

Nowadays, integrating bitcoin lightning wallets with apps is tedious work for developers, especially due to the wide variety of interfaces that these wallets offer.

Nostr Wallet Connect allows users to import their existing wallets into apps. Developers can offer one-click or even automated bitcoin payments with just a few lines of code.

Native Zapping in Amethyst

Amethyst implemented Nostr Wallet Connect to allow users to easily connect their Alby account and send zaps on Nostr with one click. Leaving the app and opening a wallet app to send a payment is history. Check out the video in the original blog post or download the app yourself.

Lighting Bridge implements WebLN

Lighting Bridge allows swapping altcoins to bitcoin using the Alby Browser Extension. Lighting Bridge's implementation of WebLN eases the process for users considerably. Minimum transaction amounts are $1 USD. Users can execute swaps within a few minutes as Lightning Bridge promises to be significantly faster than other swap services.

BTCPrague, Prague, June 8-10. Alby is supporting the hackday and is present with a booth at the expo. 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