Flash - A Payment Gateway built on NWC

Flash, a payment gateway application, provides easy to implement subscription payments or paywalls and earns its fair share without ever intermediating the payment between the publisher or online retailer and their consumers - a groundbreaking innovation built on NWC.

The Problem With Today's Payment Gateways

Payment gateways today typically intercept payments between the online retailer or publisher and their consumers to charge a share of the payment volume as their way to earn revenue. However, by intermediating the payment flow, they engage in money transmission services which come with regulatory risk and increased operational cost to perform identity verification and reporting duties. Most of the bitcoin and fiat gateways today are forced to follow this pattern due to missing technical alternatives. 

Until now, bitcoin payment gateways lack a subscription feature

Subscription payments, even though highly demanded by businesses, is one feature that only fiat based gateways could offer to their business clients. In a push-based payment network like bitcoin a consumer would need to actively execute the payment according to a defined schedule. There has been no way for the payment gateway provider to pull the payment proactively from the consumer's balance so far. 

Flash - a payment gateway built on NWC

Flash leverages NWC to overcome these challenges. NWC, is an open protocol enabling direct wallet to wallet payments orchestrated by apps. Now Flash is able to extend its set of features around paywalls, payment links and analytics to offer subscription plans without intermediating the payment flow in an elegant way. Customers connect their preferred wallet to receive the payments from customers using Bitcoin Connect, a standard web component with an optimized UI for wallet connections and payment flows. 

Bitcoin based subscription payments. 

Flash allows platform providers or publishers to accept recurring and automated payments from their community of users directly to their own wallet. Users can create custom subscription plans with various charging schedules (e.g. weekly or monthly) to create steady and reliable income.

To unlock a subscription-based paywall consumers can use one of the currently NWC-enabled wallets such as Alby, Mutiny, StartOS or Umbrel.

Geyser integrated Flash's plugin to offer their users subscriptions and regularly support campaigns:

Revenue sharing model with reduced regulatory risk

Users of NWC enabled wallets are able to connect apps and manage existing connections. Technically speaking the app obtains a connection string from the consumer with the permission to access his wallet according to user-defined access rights. In this regard NWC is extremely flexible. Apps may request to send or receive payments, list the balance and the transaction history. At the same time the user is always in control by setting time- or budget based allowances and access permissions. An article by Bitcoin Magazine outlines further use cases. 

Build feature rich payment apps quickly

Imagine you need to build a whole wallet backend yourself to offer bitcoin payment gateway and acceptance services. The cost for regulatory compliance as a money service business comes on top. Hence, NWC lets you cut costs, act faster and allows you to come up with innovative features like subscriptions. Why not take the role of a conductor and orchestrate payments between wallets according to your own use case?

If you want to power your app with bitcoin payments or need help with your Alby account, reach out anytime. We are here to assist and create the future of payments with you.