Introducing Alby Wallet API Community SDKs
Adding native payment functionalities to apps for a global user base adds another level of complexity. The Alby Wallet API is a standardized integration for instantly moving money between any applications and their users. Implementing this one API means connecting to a global payment network that is accessible to any customer or merchant. SDKs play a crucial role in adopting such a network.
Alby builds for Developers
That’s why we are happy to introduce a new category driven by our open source community: Alby API Community SDKs. These SDKs leverage the Alby wallet APIs and provide ready to use components for a variety of development environments. Developers can link any in-app action to a payment flow that enables their users to send, receive and store money. Completely new app mechanics and interactions are possible on lightning and bitcoin payment rails.
Apps can send and receive payments, get podcasting 2.0 details, create invoices, retrieve the user's incoming and outgoing payments, and make Lightning payments on behalf of users. Webhooks allow services to be instantly notified of user's incoming and outgoing payments and act upon them.
Alby already offers and maintains open source packages such as Alby JS SDK, a Typescript package and Alby PHP, a PHP library to integrate the Alby Wallet API and NWC.
The latest additions to the growing SDK family are PyAlby and AlbyKit.
PyAlby
PyAlby is a Python library of methods built by developer Felix. The main purpose of PyAlby is to provide a simple way to interact with the Alby API when using Python.
Currently it supports fetching the account summary, creating an invoice to receive a lightning payment and making a payment.
The first app leveraging the library is a Lightning-Mail-Faucet - an app to quickly pay invoices through e-mail. A great way to supply users with their first sats during a presentation. To check it out just send an invoice which is less than 210 sats to 2wd@f418.io.
On the roadmap of the PyAlby are support for the webhook API, asynchronous requests and OAuth2 as available in the JS SDK. Check it out and help Felix build out the library.
AlbyKit
AlbyKit, built by SparrowTek, is an implementation of the Alby Wallet API for Swift with support for sending and receiving payments, account info and transactions.
Boostz is the first app leveraging AlbyKit. It is a mobile wallet interface for Alby Accounts. After the release of the Alby PWA, BlueWallet and Zeus, that’s another option to use your Alby Account on mobile (see options here).
As part of the roadmap, AlbyKit is going to support NWC, the open protocol to connect lightning wallets to apps. That means users from any NWC-enabled wallet such as Mutiny, Umbrel, StartOS, Alby and more to come are able to link their wallets. Consequently, the addressable user base becomes a lot bigger for Boostz.
A companion for any developer built in the open
This growing developer community is a testimony to Alby’s developer friendly APIs and reliable wallet service but first and foremost to a growing interest in permissionless and global payments.
Quoting Felix, a community member working on PyAlby:
"Contributions are what make the open source community such an amazing place to learn, inspire, and create”.
That’s why we are building Alby in the open and dedicate our efforts in becoming your daily companion for bitcoin payments.
Join the community, learn from other projects in our community calls and visit your dedicated developer dashboard on getalby.com/developer.