Alby Buzz: Better tools for builders and PeerTubers

Hello Alby Community!

Welcome to the 19th edition of Alby Buzz, where you find out about everything new at Alby, the bitcoin and Nostr app ecosystem, and are the first to learn about what's coming next.

• Blockstream has released Core Lightning v23.08 with many improvements for users and developers and some experimental features. But better read the blog post yourself.
• LND has published a release candidate for version 0.17.0 with Simple Taproot Channels
• LightningLabs released a new set of developer tools bringing together the L402 protocol for Langchain.
• Scaling Lightning, a testing toolkit for the lightning network, released its initial project roadmap.
• Joltz announced their bitcoin rewards API which can be used to reward certain behavior of users like completing onboarding processes.
• ZapLocker allows users to receive payments to a lightning address (including zaps) without the need to set up a server or a lightning node.
• Zaprite's platform got an upgrade. Users can now create payments for individual products or link Unchained and Strike accounts. 🐝 Will Alby's Wallet API follow suit?
• The Nodeless payment processing platform is now open source under the MIT license.
• FlashSats is a new LSP (Lightning Service Provider) service dedicated to simplifying and streamlining the channel purchasing experience for lightning node runners.
• The Human Rights Foundation and Voltage partnered to help dissidents and NGOs accept Bitcoin donations with easy-to-maintain BTCPay Server instances. 💡 Did you know that you can also use your Alby account to connect to BTCPay Server? This is how.
• StackerNews removed the need for an account. Users can now zap posts & comments as anon.

What's happening in Nostraland?

• If you can't decide which Nostr app to use, have a look at this list with a matrix of features.
• Favvy and Nostree are really nice looking LinkTree-like apps on Nostr.
• Granary fetches and converts data between Nostr, social networks,  ActivityPub, RSS and many more apps and protocols.
• Nostr writer helps you to publish to Nostr directly from the Obsidian markdown editor.

This represents just a glimpse of the recent developments in the bitcoin ecosystem and Nostr apps this month. So exciting to witness such an active builder community.

A propos builder community! We're here to talk about something fresh we've shipped.

Building on bitcoin, such as accepting payments from your own users or letting users send payments to each other can feel like climbing endless mountain ranges. Once you climb the first summit, you’ll already see the next higher one. As if understanding bitcoin was not enough of a rabbit hole.

So we set out to create a portal that helps you:

• Get an overview of available components
• Get started at your own pace
• Learn which components fit together and are needed for your app

You can now use bitcoin on PeerTube, an open-source video streaming platform. The lightning plugin makes Value 4 Value easy for all PeerTube admins to use. Furthermore, users can easily login with their Alby account or donate with bitcoin on enabled PeerTube instances.

Ai4ALL, was a hackathon set to revolutionize how we use Bitcoin to democratize AI access. Running remotely from July 1st - Aug 1st this event was hosted on the BOLT.FUN and Replit platforms.

A mind blowing number of 173 makers participated in the hackathon and submitted 44 projects. That’s a huge success and a great achievement of the organizers.

Developers used bitcoin to give agents and LLMs the ability to perform economic actions. They coordinated economic incentives around building and running AI models at scale with bitcoin payments or introduced bitcoin to create tools without giving up the user’s privacy. Curious about the winners and what bitcoin lightning tools they used?

PS: Get ready for BOLT.FUN's next hackathon: Nostrasia, starting October 3rd!

Where to meet the Alby team

• Meet Jakub at the Baltic Honeybadger Conference in Riga on September 2-3.
• Or meet the whole team in our Alby Community Calls on September 7 and 21 at 15:00 UTC: https://communitycall.getalby.com/

That's what buzzed us this month. For more, visit our website and follow Alby on Twitter 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!